Page 89 (part 2)

For "the seven Souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. . . . Seven Souls or principles in man were identified by our British Druids . . . . . The Rabbins also ran the number of souls up to seven; so, likewise, do the Karens of India. . . ." And then, the author tabulates the two teachings -- the Esoteric and the Egyptian, -- and shows that the latter had the same series and in the same order. Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) souls, as (1) The Soul of Blood -- the formative ; (2) The Soul of Breath -- "that breathes "; (3) The Shade or Covering Soul -- "that envelopes "; (4) The Soul of Perception -- "that perceives ;" (5) The Soul of Pubescence "that procreates "; (6) The Intellectual Soul -- "that reproduces intellectually "; and (7) The Spiritual Soul -- "that is perpetuated permanently. " From the exoteric and physiological standpoint this may be very correct; it becomes less so from the esoteric point of view. To maintain this, does not at all mean that the "Esoteric Buddhists" resolve men into a number of elementary Spirits, as Mr. G. Massey, in the same lecture, accuses them of maintaining. No "Esoteric Buddhist" has ever been guilty of any such absurdity. Nor has it been ever imagined that these shadows "become spiritual beings in another world," or "seven potential spirits or elementaries of another life." What is maintained is simply that every time the immortal Ego incarnates it becomes, as a total, a com- [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * This is a great mistake made in the Esoteric enumeration. Manas is the fifth, not the fourth; and Manas corresponds precisely with Seb, the Egyptian fifth principle, for that portion of Manas, which follows the two higher principles, is the ancestral soul, indeed, the bright, immortal thread of the higher Ego, to which clings the Spiritual aroma of all the lives or births. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 633 THE "PRINCIPLES" IN THE EGYPTIAN METAPHYSICS. pound unit of Matter and Spirit, which together act on seven different planes of being and consciousness. Elsewhere, Mr. G. Massey adds: -- "The seven souls (our "Principles") are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. The moon god, Taht-Esmun, or the later sun god, expressed the seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls (we say "principles") . . . . The seven stars in the hand of Christ in the Revelation, have the same significance," etc. And a still greater one, as these stars represent also the seven keys of the Seven Churches or the S ODALIAN M YSTERIES, cabalistically. However, we will not stop to discuss, but add that other Egyptologists have also found out that the septenary constitution of man was a cardinal doctrine with the old Egyptians. In a series of remarkable articles in the "Sphinx" (Munich) Herr Franz Lambert gives incontrovertible proof of his conclusions from the "Book of the Dead" and other Egyptian records. For details the reader must be referred to the articles themselves, but the following diagram, summing up the author's conclusions, is demonstrative evidence of the identity of Egyptian psychology with the septenary division in "Esoteric Buddhism." On the left hand side the Kabalistic names of the corresponding human principles are placed, and on the right the hieroglyphic names with their renderings as in the diagram of F. Lambert. [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * There seems a confusion -- lasting for many centuries -- in the minds of Western Kabalists. They call Ruach (Spirit) what we call Kama -rupa; whereas, with us Ruach would be the "Spiritual Soul" Buddhi, and Nephesh the 4th principle, the Vital, Animal Soul. Eliphas Levi falls into the same error. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 634 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. This is a very fair representation of the number of the "principles" of Occultism, but much confused; and this is what we call the 7 principles in man, and what Mr. Massey calls "Souls," giving the same name to the Ego or the Monad which reincarnates and resurrects, so to speak, at each rebirth, as the Egyptians did, namely -- "the Renewed." But how can Ruach (Spirit) be lodged in Kama-rupa? What does Bohme, the Prince of all the mediaeval Seers, say? "We find Seven especial properties in nature whereby this only Mother works all things" (which he calls -- fire, light, sound (the upper three) and desire, bitterness, anguish, and substantiality, thus analysing the lower in his own mystic way) . . . "whatever the six forms are spiritually, that the seventh, the body (or substantiality), is essentially." These are the seven forms of the Mother of all Beings from whence all that is in this world is generated,* and again in Aurora xxiv. p. 27 (quoted in Natural Genesis ) -- "The Creator hath in the body of this world generated himself as it were creaturely in his qualifying Fountain Spirits, and all the stars are . . . God's powers, and the whole body of the world consisteth in the seven qualifying or Fountain Spirits." This is rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine. . . But how can we agree with Mr. G. Massey when he states that -- "The Seven Races of men that have been sublimated and made Planetary (?) by Esoteric Buddhism,** may be met with in the Bundahish as (1) the earth-men; (2) water-men; (3) breast-eared men; (4) breast-eyed men; (5) one-legged men; (6) bat-winged men; (7) men with tails." . . . Each of these descriptions, allegorical and even perverted in their later form -- is, nevertheless, an echo of the Secret Doctrine teaching. They all refer to the pre-Human evolution of the water-men "terrible and bad" by unaided Nature through millions of years, as previously described. But we deny point blank the assertion made that "these were never real races," and point to the Archaic Stanzas for our answer. It is easy to infer and to say that our "instructors have mistaken these shadows of the Past, for things human and spiritual"; but that "they are neither, and never were either," it is less easy to prove. The assertion must ever remain on a par with the Darwinian claim that man and the ape had a common pithecoid ancestor. What the Lecturer takes for a "mode of expression" and nothing more, in the Egyptian Ritual, we take as having quite another and an important meaning. Here is one instance.