The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

Without having recourse to the imposing ceremonies of the wand of Hermes,
or to the obscure formulae of an unfathomable mysticism, a mesmeriser in our
own day will, by means of a few passes, disturb the organic faculties of a
subject, inculcate the knowledge of a foreign language, transport him to a fardistant
country, or into secret places, make him guess the thoughts of those
absent, read in closed letters, etc. . . . The antre of the modern sybil is a
modest-looking room, the tripod has made room for a small round table, a hat,
a plate, a piece of furniture of the most vulgar kind; only the latter is even
superior to the oracle of antiquity [how does M. Chabas know], inasmuch as
the latter only spoke, [ And what of the “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” the
words that “the fingers of a man’s hand,” whose body and arm remained
invisible, wrote on the walls of Belshazzar’s palace (Daniel. v.) What of the
writings of Simon the Magician, and the magic characters on the walls and in
the air of the crypts of Initiation, without mentioning the tables of stone on
which the finger of God wrote the commandments Between the writing of one
God and other Gods the difference, if any, lies only in their respective natures;
and if the tree is to be known by its fruits, then preference would have to be
given always to the Pagan Gods. It is the immortal “To be or not to be.” Either
all of them are - or at any rate, may be - true, or all are surely pious frauds and
the result of credulity.] while the oracle of our day writes its answers. At the
command of the medium the spirits of the dead descend to make the furniture
creak, and the authors of bygone centuries deliver to us works written by them
beyond the grave. Human credulity has no narrower limits today than it had at
the dawn of historical times . . . . As teratology is an essential part of general
physiology now, so the pretended Occult Sciences occupy in the annals of
humanity a place which is not without its importance, and deserve for more
than one reason the attention of the philosopher and the historian. [ Papyrus
Magique. p.186.]
Selecting the two Champollions, Lenormand, Bunsen, Victomte de Rougé, and several other
Egyptologists to serve as our witnesses, let us see what they say of Egyptian Magic and
Sorcery. They may get out of the difficulty by accounting for each “superstitious belief” and
practice by attributing them to a chronic psychological and physiological derangement, and to
collective hysteria, if they like; still facts are there, staring us in the face, from the hundreds of
these mysterious papyri, exhumed after a rest of four, five, and more thousands of years,
with their magical containments and evidence of antediluvian Magic.
A small library, found in Thebes, has furnished fragments of every kind of ancient literature,
many of which are dated, and several of which have thus been assigned to the accepted age
of Moses. Books or manuscripts on ethics, history, religion and medicine, calendars and
(Page 244) registers, poems and novels—everything—may be had in that precious collection;
and old legends - traditions of long forgotten ages (please to remark this: legends recorded
during the Mosaic period)—are already referred to therein as belonging to an immense
antiquity, to the period of the dynasties of Gods and Giants. Their chief contents, however,
are formulae of exorcisms against black Magic, and funeral rituals: true breviaries, or the
vade mecum of every pilgrim-traveller in eternity. These funeral texts are generally written in
hieratic characters. At the head of the papyrus is invariably placed a series of scenes,
showing the defunct appearing before a host of Deities successively, who have to examine
him. Then comes the judgement of the Soul, while the third act begins with the launching of
that Soul into the divine light. Such papyri are often forty feet long. [ See Maspero’s Guide to
the Bulah Museum, among others.]
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