fire, the subtile from the gross. . . . What I had to say about the operation of the sun is completed" (Smaragdine Tablet).[1]
Professor Max Müller sees in this Mandala "at last, something like a theogony, though full of contradictions."[2] The alchemists, kabalists, and students of mystic philosophy will find therein a perfectly defined system of Evolution in the Cosmogony of a people who lived a score of thousands of years before our era. They will find in it, moreover, a perfect identity of thought and even doctrine with the Hermetic philosophy, and also that of Pythagoras and Plato.
In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form—a supposition clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindu philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher's tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of "the Unknowable;" the Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved—or, as the word means, unwombed or born—except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life is from a spiritual potency above the whole.
Fakirs.—Religious devotees in East India. They are generally attached to Brahmanical pagodas and follow the laws of Manu. A strictly religious fakir will go absolutely naked, with the exception of a small piece of linen called dhoti, around his loins. They wear their hair long, and it serves them as a pocket, as they stick in it various objects—such as a pipe, a small flute called vagudah, the sounds of which throw the serpents into a cataleptic torpor, and sometimes their bamboo-stick (about one foot long) with the seven mystical knots on it. This magical stick, or rather rod, the fakir receives from his guru on the day of his initiation, together with the three mantrams, which are communicated to him "mouth to ear." No fakir will be seen without this powerful adjunct of his calling. It is, as they all claim, the divining rod, the cause of every occult phenomenon produced by them.[3] The Brahmanical fakir is entire-
- ↑ As the perfect identity of the philosophical and religious doctrines of antiquity will be fully treated upon in subsequent chapters, we limit our explanations for the present.
- ↑ "Rig-Veda-Anhita," p. 234.
- ↑ Philostratus assures us that the Brahmins were able, in his time, to perform the most wonderful cures by merely pronouncing certain magical words. "The Indian Brahmans carry a staff and a ring, by means of which they are able to do almost anything." Origenes states the same ("Contra Celsum"). But if a strong mesmeric fluid—say projected from the eye, and without any other contact—is not added, no magical words would be efficacious.
