Gods, Monads and Atoms
9 minutes • 1798 words
Some years ago we remarked that:
The Esoteric Doctrine may well be called … the “Thread Doctrine”. Like Sûtrâtmâ [in Vedânta]1050, it passes through and strings together all the ancient philosophical religious systems, and reconciles and explains them.1051
Ours not only reconciles the conflicting systems, but checks the discoveries of modern exact Science. It shows some of them to be correct, since they corroborate in the Ancient Records.
Science is ultra-materialistic in our days. But it finds, in one sense, its justification.
Nature behaves ever esoterically.
It can only be judged by the profane through her appearance. That appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane.
On the other hand, the Naturalists refuse to blend Physics with Metaphysics, the Body with its informing Soul and Spirit.
They prefer to ignore the latter. A minority strive to enlarge the domain of Physical Science by trespassing on the forbidden grounds of Metaphysics, so distasteful to some Materialists.
All their wonderful discoveries will go for nothing, and remain for ever headless bodies, unless they lift the veil of Matter and strain their eyes to see beyond.
One of such “degrading” beliefs—degrading in the opinion of the all-denying Sceptic—is found in the idea that Kosmos, besides its objective planetary inhabitants, its humanities in other inhabited worlds, is full of invisible, intelligent Existences.
The so-called Arch-Angels, Angels and Spirits, of the West, copies of their prototypes, the Dhyân Chohans, the Devas and Pitris, of the East, are not real Beings, but fictions.
On this point, materialistic Science is inexorable.
To support its position, it upsets its own axiomatic law of uniformity and of continuity in the laws of Nature, and all the logical sequence of analogies in the evolution of Being.
The masses of the profane are asked, and are made to believe that the accumulated testimony of History—which shows even the “Atheists” of old, such men as Epicurus and Democritus, as believers in Gods—is false; and that Philosophers like Socrates and Plato, asserting such existences, were mistaken enthusiasts and fools. If we hold our opinions merely on historical grounds, on the authority of legions of the most eminent Sages, Neo-Platonists, and Mystics in all ages, from Pythagoras down to the eminent Scientists and Professors of the present century, who, if they reject “Gods,” believe in “Spirits,” are we to consider such authorities to be as weak-minded and foolish as any Roman Catholic peasant, who believes in and prays to his once human Saint, or the Archangel St. Michael?
But is there no difference between the belief of the peasant and that of the Western heirs of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists of the Middle Ages?
Is it the Van Helmonts, the Khunraths, the Paracelsuses and Agrippas, from Roger Bacon down to St. Germain, who were all blind enthusiasts, hysteriacs or cheats, or is it the handful of modern Sceptics—the “leaders of thought”—who are struck with the cecity of negation?
The latter is the case, we opine.
It would indeed be a miracle, quite an abnormal fact in the realm of probabilities and logic, were that handful of negators to be the sole custodians of truth, while the million-strong hosts of believers in Gods, Angels, and Spirits—in Europe and America alone—namely, Greek and Latin Christians, Theosophists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., should be no better than deluded fanatics and hallucinated mediums, and [pg 671]often no higher than the victims of deceivers and impostors!
However varying in their external presentations and dogmas, beliefs in the Hosts of invisible Intelligences of various grades have all the same foundation.
Truth and error are mixed in all. The exact extent, depth, breadth, and length of the mysteries of Nature are to be found only in Eastern Esoteric Science. So vast and so profound are these that scarcely even a few, a very few of the highest Initiates—those whose very existence is known but to a small number of Adepts—are capable of assimilating the knowledge.
Yet it is all there, and one by one facts and processes in Nature’s workshops are permitted to find their way into exact Science, while mysterious help is given to rare individuals in unravelling its arcana.
It is at the close of great Cycles, in connection with racial development, that such events generally take place. We are at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Âryan Kali Yuga; and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic Science will receive a death-blow.
Without throwing any discredit upon time-honoured beliefs, in any direction, we are forced to draw a marked line between blind faith, evolved by theologies, and knowledge due to the independent researches of long generations of Adepts; between, in short, faith and Philosophy.
There have been, in all ages, undeniably learned and good men who, having been reared in sectarian beliefs, died in their crystallized convictions.
For Protestants, the garden of Eden is the primeval point of departure in the drama of Humanity, and the solemn tragedy on the summit of Calvary is the prelude to the hoped-for Millennium.
For Roman Catholics, Satan is at the foundation of Kosmos, Christ in its centre, and Antichrist at its apex. For both, the Hierarchy of Being begins and ends within the narrow frames of their respective theologies: one self-created personal God, and an empyrean ringing with the Hallelujas of created Angels; the rest, false Gods, Satan and fiends.
Theo-Philosophy proceeds on broader lines. From the very beginning of æons—in time and space in our Round and Globe—the mysteries of Nature (at any rate, those which it is lawful for our Races to know) were recorded by the pupils of those same, now invisible, “Heavenly Men,” in geometrical figures and symbols. The keys thereto passed from one generation of “Wise Men” to another.
Some of the symbols thus passed from the East to the West, brought from the Orient by Pythagoras, who was not the inventor of his famous “Triangle.”
The latter figure, along with the square and circle, are more eloquent and scientific descriptions of the order of the evolution of the Universe, spiritual and psychic, as well as physical, than volumes of descriptive Cosmogonies and revealed “Geneses.”
The 10 Points inscribed within that “Pythagorean Triangle” are worth all the theogonies and angelologies ever emanated from the theological brain.
For he who interprets these seventeen points (the seven Mathematical Points hidden)—on their very face, and in the order given—will find in them the uninterrupted series of the genealogies from the first Heavenly to Terrestrial Man.
As they give the order of Beings, so they reveal the order in which were evolved the Kosmos, our Earth, and the primordial Elements by which the latter was generated.
Begotten in the invisible “Depths,” and in the Womb of the same “Mother” as its fellow-globes—he who masters the mysteries of our own Earth will have mastered those of all others.
Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown to be inseparably connected with both Philosophy and Modern Science.
The Gods and Monads of the Ancients—from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz—and the Atoms of the present materialistic schools (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with Spirit.
In the Occult Sciences they can be studied separately, but they can never be mastered unless they are viewed in their mutual correlations during their life-cycle, and as a Universal Unity during Pralayas.
La Pluche shows sincerity, but gives a poor idea of his philosophical capacities, when declaring his personal views on the Monad or the Mathematical Point. He says:
A point is enough to put all the schools in the world in a combustion. But what need has man to know that point, since the creation of such a small being is beyond his power?
À fortiori, philosophy acts against probability when, from that point which absorbs and disconcerts all her meditations, she presumes to pass on to the generation of the world.
Philosophy, however, could never have formed its conception of a logical, universal, and absolute Deity, if it had had no Mathematical Point within the Circle upon which to base its speculations.
It is only the manifested Point, lost to our senses after its pregenetic appearance in the infinitude and incognizability of the Circle, that makes a reconciliation between Philosophy and Theology possible—on condition that the latter should abandon its crude materialistic dogmas.
And it is because Christian theology has so unwisely rejected the Pythagorean Monad and geometrical figures, that it has evolved its self-created human and personal God, the monstrous Head whence flow in two streams the dogmas of Salvation and Damnation.
This is so true, that even those clergymen who are Masons, and who would be Philosophers, have, in their arbitrary interpretations, fathered upon the Ancient Sages the queer idea that:
The Monad represented [with them] the throne of the Omnipotent Deity, placed in the centre of the empyrean to indicate T.G.A.O.T.U. [read the “Great Architect of the Universe”].1052
A curious explanation this, more Masonic than strictly Pythagorean.
Nor did the “Hierogram within a Circle, or equilateral Triangle,” ever mean “the exemplification of the unity of the divine Essence”; for this was exemplified by the plane of the boundless Circle.
What it really meant was the triune coëqual Nature of the first differentiated Substance, or the con-substantiality of the (manifested) Spirit, Matter and the Universe—their “Son”—which proceeds from the Point, the real, Esoteric Logos, or Pythagorean Monad.
The Greek Monas signifies “Unity” in its primary sense.
Those unable to seize the difference between the Monad—the Universal Unit—and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the ever-hidden and the revealed Logos, or the Word, ought never to meddle with Philosophy, let alone with the Esoteric Sciences.
It is needless to remind the educated reader of Kant’s Thesis to demonstrate his second Antinomy.1053 Those who have read and understood it will see clearly the line we draw between the absolutely ideal Universe and the invisible though manifested Kosmos.
Our Gods and Monads are not the Elements of extension itself, but only those of the invisible Reality which is the basis of the manifested Kosmos. Neither Esoteric Philosophy, nor Kant, to say nothing of Leibnitz, would ever admit that extension can be composed of simple or unextended parts.
But theologian-philosophers will not grasp this. The Circle and the Point—the latter retiring into and merging with the former, after having emanated the first three Points and connected them with lines, thus forming the first noumenal basis of the Second Triangle in the Manifested World—have [pg 674]ever been an insuperable obstacle to theological flights into dogmatic empyreans.