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636 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
to the greatest discoveries. He has been for some time overshadowing"
"the original protyle," and he has come to the conclusion that "he
who grasps the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest
mysteries of creation."
Protyle, as the great Chemist explains:
. . . is a word analogous to protoplasm, to express the idea of the original
primal matter existing before the evolution of the chemical elements. The word I
have ventured to use for this purpose is compounded of tt/jo (earlier
than) and vXrj
(the stuff of which things are made). The word is scarcely a new coinage, for 600
years ago Roger Bacon wrote in his Arte Chyniiae, "The elements are made out of
vXi] and every element is converted into the nature of another element."
The knowledge of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old
magician* by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on
Magic and Alchemy, and had a key to the real meaning of their
language. But see what Mr. Crookes says of Protyle, next neighbour
to the unconscious Mulaprakriti of the Occultists:
Let us start at the moment when the first element came into existence.
Before
this time, matter, as we know it, was not. It is equally impossible to conceive of
matter without energy, as of energy without matter; from one point of view both
are convertible terms. Before the birth of atoms, all those forms of energy, which
become evident when matter acts upon matter, could not have existedt—they were
locked up in the protyle as latent potentialities only.
Coincident with the creation
of atoms, all those attributes and properties, which form the means of discriminating
one chemical element from another, start into existence fully endowed with
energy.
With every respect due to
the great knowledge of the lecturer, the
Occultist would put it otherwise. He would say that no Atom is ever
"created," for the Atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One
Atom— "the Atom of Atoms"—viewed during Manvantara as the Jagad-
Yoni, the material causative womb of the World. Pradhana, unmodified
Matter—that which is the first form of Prakriti, or material, visible,
* Thus, what the writer of the present work said ten years ago in Isis Unveiled was, it seems,
prophetic. These are the words: "Many of these mystics, by following what they were taught by
some treatises, secretly preserved from one generation to another, achieved discoveries which would
not be despised even in our modem days of exact sciences. Roger Bacon, the friar, was laughed at
as a quack, and is now generally numbered among 'pretenders' to magic art; but his discoveries
were nevertheless accepted, and are now used by those who ridicule him the most. Roger Bacon
belonged by right, if not by fact, to that Brotherhood which includes all those who study the Occult
Sciences. l,iving in the thirteenth century, almost a contemporary, therefore, of Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas, his discoveries—such as gunpowder and optical glasses, and his mechanical
achievements—were considered by everyone as so many miracles. He was accu.sed of having made a
compact with the Evil One." (Vol. I, pp. 64, 65.)
t Just so; "those forms of energy . . . which become evident . . ."in the laboratory of the
Chemist and Physicist; but there ate other forms of energy wedded to other forms of matter, which
are supersensuous, yet are known to the Adepts.
J Presidential Address, p. 16.