The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

priests that does not contain some interesting information for the modern students of
Occultism.
All that is, of course, derided Magic, the outcome of primitive knowledge and of revelation,
though it was practised in such ungodly ways by the Atlantean Sorceres that it has since
become necessary for the subsequent Race to draw a thick veil over the practices which
were used to obtain so-called magical effects on the psychic and on the physical planes. In
the letter no one in our century will believe the statements, with the exception of the Roman
Catholics, and these will give the acts a satanic origin. Nevertheless, Magic is so mixed up
with the history of the world, that if the latter is ever to be written it has to rely upon the
discoveries of Archaeology, Egyptology, and hieratic writings and inscriptions; if it insists that
they must be free from that “superstition of the ages” it will never see the light. One can well
imagine the embarrassing position in which serious Egyptologists, Assyriologists, savants
and academicians find themselves. Forced to translate and interpret the old papyri and the
archaic inscriptions on stelae and Babylonian cylinders, they find themselves compelled from
first to last to face the distasteful, and to them repulsive, subject of Magic, with its
incantations and paraphernalia. Here they find sober and grave narratives from the pens of
learned scribes, made up under the direct supervision of Chaldaean or Egyptian
Hierophants, the most learned among the Philosophers of antiquity. These statements were
written at the solemn hour of the death and burial of Pharaohs, High Priests, and other
mighty ones of the land of Chemi; their purpose was the introduction of the newly-born,
Osirified Soul before the awful tribunal of the “Great Judge” in the region of Amenti—there
where a lie was said to outweigh the greatest crimes. Were the Scribes and Hierophants,
Pharaohs, and King—Priests all fools or frauds to have either believed in, or tried to make
others believe in, such “cock-and-bull stories” as are found in the most respectable papyri
Yet there is no help for it.
Romances - But True - (Page 257) Corroborated by Plato and Herodotus, by Manetho and
Syncellus, as by all the greatest and most trustworthy authors and philosophers who wrote
upon the subject, those papyri note down—as seriously as they note any history, or any fact
well known and accepted as to need no commentary—whole royal dynasties of Manes, to
wit, of shadows and phantoms (astral bodies), and such feats of magic skill and such Occult
phenomena, that the most credulous Occultist of our own times would hesitate to believe
them to be true.
The orientalists have found a plank of salvation, while yet publishing and delivering the
papyri to the criticism of literary Sadducees: they generally call them “romances of the days
of Pharaoh So-and-So.” The idea is ingenious, if not absolutely fair.
SECTION XXVIII
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