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708 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
physical systems, still they do not fail to perceive the movements and
note the behaviour of meteors and comets. They record the periodical
advents of those wanderers and "flaming messengers," and prophesy,
in consequence, earthquakes, meteoric showers, the apparition of certain
stars, comets, etc. Are they, then, soothsayers after all No;
they are learned Astronomers.
Why, then, should Occultists and Astrologers, as learned as these
Astronomers, be disbelieved when they prophesy the return of some
cyclic event on the same mathematical principles "Why should the
claim that they hiow this return be ridiculed Their forefathers and
predecessors, having recorded the recurrence of such events in their
time and day, throughout a period embracing hundreds of thousands
of years,
the conjunction of the same constellations must necessarih'
produce, if not quite the same, at any rate similar, effects. Are the
prophecies to be derided, because of the claim made for hundreds of
thousands of years of observation, and for millions of years for the
human Races In its turn, Modern Science is laughed at by those
who hold to Biblical chronology, for its far more modest geological and
anthropological figures. Thus Karma adjusts even human laughter,
at the mutual expense of sects, learned societies, and individuals.
Yet in the prognostication of such future events, at any rate, all foretold
on the authority of cyclic recurrences, no psychic phenomenon is
involved. It is neither prevision, nor prophecy ; any more than is the
signalling of a comet or star, several years before its appearance. It
is simply knowledge, and mathematically correct computations, which
enable the Wise Men of the East to foretell, for instance, that England
is on the eve of such or another catastrophe; that France is nearing
such a point of her Cycle; and that Europe in general is threatened
with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm, to which her own Cycle
of racial Karma has led her. Our view of the reliability of the information
depends, of course, on our acceptation or rejection of the claim
for a tremendous period of historical observation. Eastern Initiates
maintain that they have preserved records of racial development and
of events of universal import ever since the beginning of the Fourth
Race—their knowledge of events preceding that epoch being traditional.
Moreover, those who believe in Seership and in Occult Powers
will have no difficulty in crediting the general character, at least, of
the information given, even if it be traditional, once the tradition is
checked and corrected by clairvoyance and Esoteric Knowledge.
But