Page 81 (part 3)

God is light and Satan is the necessary darkness or shadow to set it off, without which pure light would be invisible and incomprehensible.* "For the initiates," says Eliphas Levi, "the devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil." They (the Initiates) represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan -- or Nature: whence the horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian "goat of the Witches' Sabbath." With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten that the goat was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape-goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on earth -- the Fall into generation. Only the Jews have long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non-initiated) ridiculous hero, selected from the drama of life in the great mysteries enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians never knew it. Eliphas Levi seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and metaphors, but succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes written by pious Roman Catholic demonologists under the approbation and auspices of Rome, in this nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman Catholic, the devil or Satan is a reality ; the drama enacted in the sidereal light according to the seer of Patmos -- who desired, perhaps, to improve upon the narrative in the "Book of Enoch" -- is as real, and as historical a fact as any other allegory and symbolical event in the Bible. But the Initiates give an explanation [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * To quote in this relation Mr. Laing in his admirable work "Modern Science and Modern Thought" ( p . 222, 3 rd Ed. ): "From this dilemma (existence of evil in the world) there is no escape, unless we give up altogether the idea of an anthropomorphic deity, and adopt frankly the Scientific idea of a First Cause, inscrutable and past finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace, but of whose real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect, or faintly discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and evil a necessary condition of existence ." Were Science to know "the real essence," instead of knowing nothing of it, the faint suspicion would turn into the certitude of the existence of such a law , and the knowledge that this law is connected with Karma. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 511 AKASA, THE "MYSTERIUM MAGNUM." which differs from that given by Eliphas Levi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome. Thus, the true and uncompromising Kabalists admit that, for all purposes of Science and philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that the great magic agent called by the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin -- the Martinists -- astral light, by the mediaeval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists AEther, the reflection of Akasa -- is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics have succeeded in transforming the universal soul and Pleroma, the vehicle of Light and the receptacle of all the forms, a force spread throughout the whole Universe, with its direct and indirect effects, into Satan and his works, is no news to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above-mentioned profane even the secrets hinted at by Eliphas Levi without adequate explanation; for the latter's policy of veiled revelations could only lead to further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism, a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences of Eliphas Levi, as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the Alchemists? "Lucifer, the Astral Light . . . . is an intermediate force existing in all creation, it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic intoxication which has rendered his generation a slave to this fatal light . . . every sexual passion that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that light which seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death, Folly. Hallucinations, visions, ecstasies are all forms of a very dangerous excitation due to this interior phosphorus (?) . Thus light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the intelligent use of which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the contrary, dissolves and annihilates. Thus man is called upon to assume a sovereign empire over that (astral) light and conquer thereby his immortality, and is threatened at the same time with being intoxicated, absorbed, and eternally destroyed by it. This light, therefore, inasmuch as it is devouring, revengeful, and fatal, would thus really be hell-fire, the serpent of the legend; the tormented errors of which it is full, the tears and the gnashing of teeth of the abortive beings it devours, the phantom of life that escapes them, and seems to mock and insult their agony, all this would be the devil or Satan indeed." ( Histoire de la Magie, p. 197). There is no wrong statement in all this; nothing save a superabundance of ill-applied metaphors, as in the application of Adam -- a myth -- to the illustration of the astral effects. Akasa -- the astral light* -- can be defined in a few words; it is the universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, the "Mysterium Magnum" from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- *Akasa is not the Ether of Science, as some Orientalists translate it. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 512 THE SECRET DOCTRINE fills all the infinite Space; is Space itself , in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh principles.* But as the finite in the Infinite, as regards manifestation, this light must have its shadowy side -- as already remarked. And as the infinite can never be manifested, hence the finite world has to be satisfied with the shadow alone , which its actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and force to activity . Hence, while it is the universal Cause in its unmanifested unity and infinity, the Astral light becomes, with regard to Mankind, simply the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It is not its bright denizens --- whether they are called Spirits of Light or Darkness -- that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the unavoidable action and reaction in the great magic agent.