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but ever active life—giver, is to expand and shed; that of the Universal Material Principle to gather in and fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when separate, they become consciousness and life when brought together." If this is not sound, orthodox Kabalistic and "Hermetic Philosophy" to which Mrs. Kingsford confesses she feels herself "especially attracted," then Eliphas Levi has written his theistic "dogmas and Ritual of High Magic" in vain? Let the Fellows of the "London Lodge" open his Vol. I; and see what this great master of Christian Esoteric Doctrine says on the subject, on pages 123-26 et seq, and then draw their conclusions. Mr. Sinnett's language is that of every occultist, who refuses to substitute his own personal fancy for the accepted theories of the ancient Hermetic Philosophy.*[1]
Now, from an examination of Mr. Maitland's citations with the original, with special reference to the passages italicised, it will appear that what Mr. Sinnett does say is not that the Eternal Something does "consist" of the two principles named, but that the latter are the two force-emanating poles engendered by Parabrahman, considered the animating motion of the Universe (Purusha), in itself, the exhaustless fountain of
- ↑ * I would draw the attention of Mrs. Kingsford, Mr. Maitland, and the other Members of the London Lodge to that whole chapter in the work cited, and ask them to compare its grossly materialistic language with the explanation offered on the same subject by Mr. Sinnett. If Eliphas Levi's "number of gnosis ...this "Adam, the human tetragrammaton resumed in the mysterious jod, the image of the Kabalistic phallus ...the insertion of the verticle phallus in the horizontal cteis forming the stauros of the gnostics, or the philosophical cross of the Masons, in the mysterious language of the Talmudic Kabalists"—as he calls it—can be preferred to the chaste images offered by the Eastern Esotericism, it is only by those who are unable to divorce their thoughts from an anthropomorphic God and his material progeny, the Adam of the Old Testament. Withal, the idea and substance, if not the language, are identical; for Elphas Levi expounding the true Hermetic Philosophy, in the course language of the Jewish Seers and for the benefits of a Christian born public says neither more nor less than what was given to, and written by, Mr. Sinnett in the far more philosophical phraseology of "Esoteric Buddhism."—H. P. Blavatsky.
