Ellora Cave photo from the 1864 edition of James Ferguson’s The Rock-cut Temples of India. The first edition was published in 1843 soon after the photos were taken.
From Emma Hardinge Britten:
Page 382:
Page 547:
Page 600:
From Marc Demarest:
Page 628:
Page 629:
These quotes are from the Kindle edition of 760 pages and page numbers are different from those of the 458 page printed book.
Two books published in 2008 in England are the best biographical sources I found so far:
The Letters of Noel Coward – Google Books
Noel Coward In His Own Words – Google Books
This is the 42nd post in two years about astro profiles in the BofL Lessons. This is less than a quarter of the total but includes the ones most relevant to readers today, still famous enough that books and videos about them are readily available online. History of the Adepts will now revert to posting about recent books. The Typhon Press alone published four new titles between 2020 and 2024: Seven Years Among the Spirits by William Hayden (2020, first published 1857), Confessions of a Medium by William Chapman (2020, first published 1882), Fortune Tellers and Their Dupes by William Harcus, (2024, first published 1857), and The Amber City by Arthur Edward Baines and Thomas Vetch (2024, first published 1889). The Hayden and Harcus works originally appeared as periodical articles and the Typhon editions are the first to appear as printed books.
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Alice-Faye is the only biography from a scholarly press.
An informative fan website is here.
Packing and moving chores will take all my time and energy through spring, so I posted the Aries, Taurus and Gemini entries today. Since Cancerian Tesla was already shared, next up will be Leo Amelia Earhart.
The most acclaimed recent biography is Joe Posnanski’s The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, 2019.
He was featured in a documentary from The American Experience on PBS in 2000.
Here is one more Piscean featured in the Lessons, profiled in history.com.
Encouraging news about interest in this blog: January 2025 was the first month ever to reach over a thousand views. They came from 157 readers in 18 countries.
His accomplishments are memorialized at this historic site
Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, Santa Rosa, CA
and explained in this praise for his role as a botanist
The tall young man in the upper right of the class photo is Elbert Benjamine, son of Will Benjamine and grandson of Elbert Benjamine, born Benjamin Parker Williams. Elbert Senior and Will parted abruptly during WW2 following the death of Elizabeth Benjamine, and Will founded a short-lived rival group with his wife Ann. Twins Norman and Zilla, youngest children born after Elbert and Grace were divorced, kept the Williams surname and stayed in southern California, as did Elbert’s first wife Grace, mother of his five children, who died in 1986 at the age of 103. Their oldest son Ben Williams remained in Iowa as best I can discern from records, perhaps because next in line to help his mother run a chicken farm when his parents divorced in 1909. Apologies for the lack of citations, but my subscriptions to ancestry.com and newspapers.org have expired so I cannot retrieve them.
excerpted from Marc Demarest’s opening pages
Marc writes with clarity and conciseness that I envy and try to emulate. Here he “cuts to the chase” explaining the historical uniqueness of Ghost Land, whose Spiritualist author was the inventor of much of what we now call occultism and Theosophy. The practice of writing occult fiction and calling it genuine history did not start with Britten and Blavatsky; Freemasons and Rosicrucians did this centuries before Spiritualists and Theosophists added to the confusion. Britten’s emphatic repudiation of Theosophy in the 1890s was not a disavowal of the 1870s alliance between Spiritualists and Theosophists, but a protest against what Theosophy became in the 1880s. Demarest explains her motive for a turf war between Spiritualist Adepts and Theosophical Mahatmas, claiming credit where due and counteracting Theosophical disinformation: Ghost Land does so in print, some number of years or months (depending on how one counts) before any public description of a Great White Brotherhood by Theosophists (HPB’s claims notwithstanding.) For the rest of 2025 there will be one blog post per month from the astrological profiles in the BOL Lessons, followed by another about two weeks later that excerpts Ghost Land. This alternation might illuminate the connections between 19th century British occultism and that of the 20th century in California.
As the Sun enters Aquarius today, here is one of the most famous Aquarians of his time, born 11:38 pm, 2/11/1847 in Milan, Ohio. Edison was associated with Alexander Wilder and Helena Blavatsky when he joined the Theosophical Society in April 1878. By the end of 1877 William and Emma Hardinge Britten had left for Australia and in late 1878 Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott departed for India, but possibly Edison continued to be acquainted with Wilder who stayed in the New York area.
A series of monthly Ghost Land excerpts with commentary will appear through 2026; for 2025 there are nine more astrological profiles of important people to share from the BOL Lessons. Changes may be made in this 2025 schedule, but here is the plan: Piscean Luther Burbank, Arian Harry Houdini, Taurean Alice Faye, Geminian Abdul Baha, Leo Amelia Earhart, Virgoan Jesse James, Libran Mohandas Gandhi, Scorpio Billy Sunday, Sagittarian Noel Coward. (Cancerian Nikola Tesla was the first one featured, Aquarian Edison the second.) The BOL Lessons have much to say about Decanates and aspects, Moon and ascendant positions of the same historical figures, so categorizing them by sun signs is only one of many ways to look at their charts.
In March 1937, World Astrology featured an article by Elbert, Nikola Tesla and the Death Ray that goes into more detail.
The entire March 1937 issue is available at IAPSOP here.
PS– There is a lot of noise, online and in print, and with a recent documentary, about Tesla’s Death Ray and his own mysterious death. Here is a credible account from the Science History Institute Museum in Philadelphia, now closed for renovations but due to reopen soon.
Destroyed by the Eaton fire in Altadena this week:
From the website of the Altadena Historical Society.
top photo, Theosophical Library Center on Lake Avenue bottom photo, TS headquarters on Mariposa Street
My first experience with writing for publication occurred in September 1981 with Sunrise Magazine on my first visit to Altadena. I returned repeatedly through the 1980s and contributed regularly to Sunrise on international occult history topics. In 1995 my research interests became US local history/genealogy focused as I started work on what became Edgar Cayce in Context (1998) and continued in that direction with Pell Mellers, Carolina Genesis, and Letters to the Sage.
The Eaton fire is not the first disastrous incident in southern California involving a Theosophical publisher I knew. Another periodical for which I wrote in the 80s was The Eclectic Theosophist, edited by Emmett Small who owned Point Loma Publications, a small specialty press. After his passing, their entire book and archival inventory was destroyed by fire in October 2007 in San Diego County. The event was called the Witch Fire. Here is Marc Demarest’s post about the implications of the devastating fire in Altadena that destroyed both the TS library and their nearby headquarters, which was also home to the staff. So much to think and talk about re historic preservation as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century.
Books by Randolph (1863), Chintamon (1874), Grimke (1900), and Astley (1913) are linked through fifty years of literary history to the same small organization. The History of the Adepts book series is now renamed as Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor to make the description more informative about how these four books are related. (The blog title is unchanged.) Randolph’s and Chintamon’s books predated the 1884 formation of the HBL; Astley’s was published after the organization collapsed in Colorado in 1909 and Benjamin Williams was invited by some of its leaders to author a new set of lessons that would be published by a new organization in California, the Brotherhood of Light. Grimke is the central figure in the series timeline, whose chronology connects with all the others in various ways: philosophical, political, spiritual, and personal.
from the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
The complete edition of Ghost Land includes the first publication in book form of Volume Two, set in the 1880s and 90s but featuring experiences the author Britten had in the 1850s and 60s in the US as “Mrs. Hardinge.” She has become allied with Thomas H. Burgoyne and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor by the time the second volume appears. He resides in the Monterey Bay region from 1886 through 1889, then is found in Mendocino County by 1891 as a ranch owner. This illuminates the California connections between Ghost Land and The Light of Egypt.
This Santa Cruz County tourism website provides photos and information about the stretch of coast described in Volume Two of Ghost Land. Britten had not been in California in years by this point but Burgoyne had lived there for several years and was enthralled by the scenery, as was Elbert Benjamine years later.
Tallulah’s book was a big success when published in 1952. As the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives she campaigned for FDR in the 1930s and 40s. She campaigned on behalf of Harry Truman in 1948 and she would go on to endorse Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson in subsequent elections. Here is a photograph taken with Harry and Bess Truman in 1948, from the Truman Library.
Since Art Magic was published in 2011, there have been many signs of increasing interest in the life and works of Emma Hardinge Britten from publishers, but few from authors and editors. Here is the timeline of reprints of Ghost Land with no new editorial content, presumably inspired by the first reappearance of Art Magic in a century. In each case the hardcover price precedes that of the paperback:
2014, $49.95, $31.95; 2016, $39.95, $28.95; 2018, $39.57, $30.27; 2019, $30.95, $24.95; 2022, $39.95, $28.95.
None offers any new research; the reprints were attributed to Emma as editor in 2018 and to William Britten as author in 2016, 2019, and 2022. No evidence of William’s authorship has ever been presented yet the majority of recent reprints spread this misinformation. All the previous editions and source materials are available free of charge at the publisher’s IAPSOP website.
Not since Art Magic was published in 2011 has a new book felt so meaningful for the purposes of this blog. Marc was sole editor of Art Magic, but Ghost Land has been as rewarding a collaboration for me as Letters to the Sage was with Patrick Bowen and Ronnie Pontiac in 2016 and 2018. It is now available as a Kindle e book ($9.99) and an Amazon paperback ($16.99).
Throughout 2024 most of the natal charts from the Brotherhood of Light Lessons shared in this blog have been of US political and literary figures, with a few involving foreign world leaders. Most of the remaining BOL charts of people who are still well-known are those of entertainment celebrities. Here is a Capricornian for the Winter Solstice.
Here is the only scholarly biography of Ayres, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2012 and still available on their website.
These are the views this blog has received over the last five years. (Initially I thought these numbers were from twelve years, but they did not start counting until the end of 2019.)
This is a repost from October 2016, shared now as a followup to the new book on Lily Dale. NOTE– signing up to prx is free and gives you access to all of Helen Borten’s A Sense of Place episodes along with many other fun public radio documentaries.
IAPSOP.com has announced the sixth release of the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC), the online archive of esoteric texts which has noisw grown to more than 6700 titles. There are also more than fifty new or expanded periodicals holdings, thanks to the labors of Marc Demarest, John P. Deveney, and John B. Buescher at the Marion Skidmore Library in Lily Dale, New York, headquarters of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC). Although I have yet to visit Lily Dale, reading the IAPSOP news was a trip down memory lane for me thanks to an excellent two part public radio documentary for which I was interviewed in late 1998. Part of Helen Borten’s series A Sense of Place, Madame Blavatsky and the Colonel (link to part one) made considerable use of my interview (link to part two) along with voice actor portrayals of Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott and associates in their own words. The environment in which the two met in 1874, a Spiritualist gathering in rural Vermont, inspired Borten to visit Lily Dale in western New York state, one of the few surviving enclaves for Spiritualists. Students of esoteric history have much to be grateful for with this upgrade, thanks to the generosity of Lily Dale in sharing its rare collections with the public, and the labors of the IAPSOP archival team. My appreciation for Ms. Borten’s documentary and my inclusion therein was renewed by this reminder of Lily Dale’s ongoing significance as home of the world’s largest Spiritualist library.
My Amazon review of this 2024 book from Cornell University press has now gone live so I will share it here:
Authors who remain totally subjective with praise or totally objective with condemnation invalidate their credibility with propaganda and polemics. Having always struggled to be objective in criticism and subjective in appreciation, I salute this as a masterpiece of honest self-critical inquiry among coauthors always questioning themselves and one another.
PS– Best to add this as an unobtrusive end of year explanation rather than a beginning of year declaration. Henceforth when I refer to a new book, I will refer readers to the publisher’s website; when I refer to an old book I will refer them to IAPSOP or Google Books. No more links to Youtube and Amazon where misinformation and disinformation reign supreme and AI bots hijack all searches with “what you are looking for might be something we robots think you OUGHT to be looking for.” Even with all the Hollywood movie stars in Elbert’s astro database, there are always books about them to cite and original publisher websites or independent databases to link to.
The first natal chart to be published in the Brotherhood of Light books is that of Thomas H. Burgoyne, followed by that of his astrological co-author Sarah Stanley Grimke.
His last appearance in the historical record was in 1891, but in 1892 he married Genevieve Stebbins as Norman Astley. A Saint Louis news story from that year shows her to be famous but controversial as she attains national fame. She is called “Mrs. Stebbins” and no husband is named, but by this point her decades long collaboration with Astley was underway.
By 1897, in addition to managing Genevieve’s New York School of Expression and her lectures and demonstrations across the country, he was managing their investments in timber, farming, and gold mining. This story reports a successful gold strike in North Carolina.
What Jeffers as a known or likely acquaintance of the Astleys, the Sinclairs, the Londons, the Steinbecks, the Benjamines, and the Steffenses reveals to us is the magical atmosphere of the Monterey Bay region attracting people from around the nation after the first world war.
Here is one British Sagittarian who became an honorary US citizen, bestowed by John F. Kennedy in 1963. He was the son of an American mother Jennie Jerome and a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
On 11/27/2021 this was posted in reference to the first decanate of Sagittarius which includes the November 29 birthdays of Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May. Subsequently I noticed that Louisa’s full natal chart had been published in a different volume, so am reposting and adding that below the original post.
From Course 10-1, The Last Eighteen Decanates Analyzed:
SAGITTARIUS—1st Decanate. The Harp of Seven Strings—LYRA—such a harp as David played upon to soothe the spirit of King Saul, pictures the Jupiter decanate of Sagittarius. The constellated instrument portrays the soul which places itself “In Tune with the Infinite,” and becomes responsive to the thoughts radiated by the Cosmic Mind.
Those born under this influence, when true to themselves, are the most religious of all and are capable of attaining Cosmic Consciousness. But their religion need not be tinctured with orthodoxy, and is often most expressed through their kinship with Nature and their love and sympathy for all living creatures. They live at their best, and accomplish most, when they constantly feel the abiding presence of the Cosmic Intelligence and place implicit trust in Its guidance. They then feel impressed to fill a definite mission, and if they follow the dictates of the “Inner Voice” they seldom err in judgment. But either in matters of spiritual progress or in mere worldly affairs, they must rely upon their own judgment, for when they take the advice of others they most signally fail.
Comment by KPJ: Bronson and Louisa share the same birthday, November 29, 1799 and 1832 respectively. They died two days apart in 1888.
William Blake, poet and painter, author of Books of Prophecy and designer of illustrations to The Book of Job, was born with his Individuality here. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, whose research led him independently to the theory of evolution so ably expounded by Darwin, and who was famous as a naturalist, and who embraced the cause of spiritualism in spite of the ridicule of his contemporary scientists, was born with his Mentality in this decanate. And Abraham Lincoln, man of destiny, deeply religious and the instrument through whom human slavery was abolished in America, was born with his Personality under this section of the sky. It is the decanate of DEVOTION. (Volume 10-1, Chapter Two)
Louisa’s natal chart was published in Course Twenty The Next Life, following Chapter Six:
Shared well in advance of his birthday, another post about American writers before the focus will shift to international sources in 2025. Although Twain is known mainly for fiction, his nonfiction books are among my favorites, especially the first and last: The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Christian Science (1907.)
This 1994 chapter includes what I now recognize as misinformation, based on other researchers and superseded by subsequent research. Corrections are below the chapter.
Theon’s natal chart can be found on this website:
https://astrologify.com/people/max-theon/
As the Sun enters Scorpio I share this profile of the most mysterious Scorpio native encountered in decades of historical investigation.
These are the three appendices included in the original 1913 edition of The Quest of the Spirit. This concludes the 2024 series of excerpts from books by early ancestors of the BOL Lessons. Henceforth the blog updates will be mostly about 20thc individuals relevant to the Lessons shared on their birth dates– upcoming in November, Max Theon and Mark Twain. Having already featured Elbert Benjamine, I have no more December births to feature. But January includes birth dates for George Ivanovich Gurdjieff as well as Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and Marie Sinclair Countess of Caithness whose birthdates were previous undetermined.
APPENDIX I- A CASE OF SPIRIT IDENTITY
Only a brief outline of the main and necessary facts are here given to show that a theory of self- deception, hallucination, telepathy, or fraud upon the part of others will not explain the facts of the case; each of these being rendered impossible by the peculiar circumstances of the two sides of the case.
One night, after a day’s hard study, I was trying to go to sleep, but found sleep impossible, when suddenly, the distinct form of a woman appeared before me. She stood between my bed and the window, and I remember that I could dimly see through the figure. I was not at all afraid.
The apparition spoke in a faint but distinct voice- gave me her name, date of her death; together with the name and address of an unknown stranger whom she stated to be her son. Here she related a certain circumstance in her life; then asked me to write to hereon and convey this information; adding, that for reasons, which I would know later, it was import for us to know each other.
Acting on the spur of the moment I got out of bed and made a note of the facts, promising to write to the son. Not until I had completed the memoranda did the figure speak again. Turning half round, it said: “Thank you, my friend,” then the vision disappeared. Now, if I was really asleep before, I was certainly very wide awake when the figure vanished. To say that I regarded the whole thing as a hallucination is scarcely true. I tried to persuade myself that it was a dream- but there was the writing with the names, etc. I had heard of strange tricks performed by somnambulists, and finally, felt that that must be the explanation. I put the thing out of my mind. The idea of writing what I considered nonsense to a fictitious stranger appeared to be the height of absurdity.
Nearly two years passed by, and the entire circumstance was completely forgotten, when again I had a dream- this time a real one. Upon retiring, I had fallen asleep at once. The same woman again appeared in my dream. This time there was no communication whatever- nothing but a look of profound sorrow. A feeling of remorse came over me. I remembered my former promise; but somehow I felt myself incapable of asking questions. I awoke feeling heartily ashamed of myself. Again, of course, consoling myself with the thought that it was only a dream.
Nevertheless, I could not, do what I would, rid myself of the haunting look of that sorrowful face. I determined to write to the address given to me previously. I did, and quite contrary to my expectation received an answer in due course. Now for the first time I was really astounded.
A thorough investigation followed. Every detail of the first vision was confirmed. But a still greater wonder was to follow. I found that it was no trivial affair but one of the last importance to me, which became, and still is, a dominating influence in my life.
Now for the other side of the story which to me, in view of my own experience, appeared the most remarkable: About the same time that the first vision appeared to me, a gentleman residing nearly two thousand miles from where I was staying, received a communication through the mediumship of a woman-friend of unusual psychic gifts. Only her immediate friends were aware of her abnormal power. This communication, purporting to come from his mother, who had been dead many years, stated that before many days he would receive a letter from a stranger who would ask rtain uestions and state certain things that would convince him of her identity. It is important here to say that he was very sceptical in spiritual matters. Weeks passed away. No letter was received. So he merely looked upon it as one of the “misses” of mediumship.
About a year and a half afterwards another communication was received through the same source, saying: “Be patient; wait; I shall succeed.” However, he paid no attention to this. After five or six months further delay, the unlooked-for letter arrived. I need not add that it was mine.
The promise of two years before was fulfilled. The explanations on both sides being compared left no room for doubt in any sensible mind. Only the most confirmed sceptic, who would refuse any testimony against his prejudice, could remain unconvinced.
APPENDIX II-NOTES UPON MAN’S PSYCHICAL CONSTITUTION
N.B.-The following paragraphs have been culled from many lengthy notes and “communications” received through what has been called “automatic writing.” They are here given for what they may be worth as suggestions to other “investigators.”
The Aura.
The Aura of a person is a purely psychical form of atmosphere seen or felt only by sensitive temperaments. It surrounds all forms from mineral to man. Much that we call instinct in animals is nothing but a sensing of the feelings, passing as currents in the mental strata of their race. Many times, wild animals have been observed to become suddenly suspicious, nervous, alarmed, when such warnings as scent, sound, or wind were out of the question. Transmitted by some subtle invisible current, a sense of danger was awakened, their sphere of consciousnesss received the race alarm which aroused the inherited racial instinct, or memory.
Man, to a greater extent than he is aware of, is influenced by this sensitive atmosphere. To the eye of a seer, it is varied in extent and changeable in colour.
The planet, apart from the atmosphere of gas, has also a mental envelope, a psychical atmosphere within the gaseous, and this must not be mistaken for the universal ether of space. Finally, the solar system has its own peculiar, psychical aura, so that planetary intercommunication is at least among the possibilities of the future.
Man may be likened unto a musical instrument in bis psychical constitution, and the sensitiveness of his auric sphere. He may range, according to race, from the conch, and wooden tom-tom of the savage, to the most exquisite cremona-violin, while the consciousness within the auric sphere rises from the Tasmanian Black to a Buddha, or a Jesus of Nazareth. There is, therefore, a wonderful difference in kind in the transmission and reception of thought- waves, which like light-waves in the ether, travel in their own medium. These thought- waves, producing sensation in the auric-sphere, have to be transmuted into conscious ideas; and an idea entirely foreign to our consciousness will pass without recognition, or at best, be wholly mistranslated.
One human instrument will only respond to another in harmony, or sympathy with it, and in whatever sense this sympathy, or harmony is, will be the terms in which the idea will be expressed.
To revert to our analogy, every human-being is in accord with some tone, or semi-tone of a musical- scale. Minds corresponding to B flat will receive no message from G sharp; though there are some minds, almost neutral in their sphere of sensitiveness, who respond more or less to anything.
These currents are transmitted in the psychical atmosphere of the planet. The spheres of human consciousness are but so many wireless-stations for sending or receiving messages. Each station is limited to messages of a certain kind and grade from similar stations.
We are now approaching the mystery of the frequent confusion in thought transference. According to its quality of refinement, and its complex relations with the psychic form of consciousness, and the aurio-sphere, the human brain has every degree of receptive quality, from a clear-receiving of the thought to its reception in broken rays. As light is split up by a prism of glass, so such ramifications are lost in the thought of the individual.
All musical-instruments can be attuned to respond perfectly to each other, so by training, two sympathetic persons can become so responsively attuned as to. receive and transmit thought clearly, consciously, and without error. To investigate this is the great work for the psychologists of the future.
APPENDIX III-THE GROUND OF NATURE
A critical friend, to whom this work was submitted before going to press, suggested that the writer should further elaborate what he means by the “Ground of Nature,” and illustrate that meaning by some familiar analogy. This suggestion appealed to others less critical.
By the Ground of Nature, we mean, of course, the whole invisible psychical basis of spiritual activity and material phenomena- the world-spirit, ocean of life which, ever in flux and change, ebb and flow, is, at the same time, ever becoming richer in content. Illustrative of this, we find a striking analogy to this cosmic ground in the oceans of the earth we inhabit. We can go back in the imagination to a period in geological time when the hot seas were first precipitated upon the steaming planet- before the first form of life & before the first strata of the aqueous rocks were laid down- and can note that the waters thus formed were fresh waters unimpregnated with their present saline content.
Slowly, as the primitive crust of the earth was eroded and deposited by the waters- strata after strata, the salts of the decomposed rocks impregnated the water with their quality. The ocean, at first, became brackish: gradually increasing in their salinity in and richness until the present day. Life, likewise, at first, was simple in form, and probably limited in extent. There appears to be a perfect parallel between the increasing salinity and richness of the ocean and the increasing diversity and richness of its organised life. Generation succeeded to generation through unknown millions of years. Organic life became constantly more complex, divergent, and higher in form, as the ocean became more saline. The content of the planet grew in richness until life ran riot with infinite variety. And man, that final instrument of the Spirit, burst through the barrier and added self-consciousness to intelligence and instinct. Now, we are to note that the first primitive form we can trace, the Eozoon, was impossible before the waters were formed. The giant mosses, ferns, and reptiles of the coal measures, impossible until ages of erosion of the primitive rooks had formed a suitable soil in which to flourish. The earth, in fact, increased in vital riches from age to age, as the waters of the ocean grew more saline by the continuous decomposition of the rocks, and the soil more fertile by the decomposition of its own organic life. We can use this illustration to form an imperfect but intelligible image of the psychical ground– the primeval ocean of Nature. We are dealing with the ground in our own time after inconceivable eons of preparation; after the movement of life bas become inconceivably rich in possibility. We would be worse than fools, we would be insane to imagine a beginning as a something evolving from nothing; but we can profitably go back in imagination to a conceivable period or process in which the elements of the ground were simple and the possibilities limited to simple forms of expression. System after system of solar energy, and planetary struggle arose to light and beauty, and passed away leaving their primitive achievements to live and blush un-seen by any self- conscious forms of life. But there was no waste. Each form of life added to the riches of the psychic ground. Every form evolved- though it perished and sank back into the earth again-did not really die. The experience was not lost. The form attained sank back again as a formless poteniality, adding to the richness of the ocean of life as the perishing rooks add to the chemical richness of the sea; as the decomposing bodies of organic life add to the richness of the soil.
The ocean of life, like the oceans of earth, is in ceaseless motion- action and reaction- ebb and flow- with this difference- the ocean of life reaches a higher point in matter with every tide. Something new is created, some advance is made, something comes into being which never existed before, because the life-force itself is growing richer in content with every moment of time. In a chapter devoted to the same subject, Edward Douglas Fawcett, in his valuable work, The Individual and Reality, writes:
We need not ask whether a cosmic plan or design was Immanent in the Ground. We have agreed to discard the conceptions of ‘unconscious purpose.’ ‘Purpose,’ ‘plan,’ ‘ scheme,’ ‘ design’- these imply a conscious individual, a being who is aware of desires and aversions and can remember, expect, deliberate and choose. On the other band, there is no call to suppose that the Ground was ever mere chaos, an abyss of confused differences whence, if chance so decreed, a preposterous Nature and fantastic individuals might arise. System is itself as primeval as the Ground. We have laid stress on the important part played by struggle. But the fecundity of struggle presupposes this system- a germinal system which is to change into a Nature and individuals in most respects differing from itself. This germinal system may have issued from a former one and so on. The universe in the Time- process is always becoming what it was not. Huxley said of ‘ protoplasm,’ that it is continually dying in order that it may live. This is, also, our own lot. The conscious person is always ceasing to be what he has become. This, too, on the great scale, is the lot- the ‘contradictory’ life of the universe. The supposal, even on idealistic lines, of a primeval chaos is gratuitous. The Ground while sub- conscious, was yet a psychical whole. It was the source of that very strife which sired Nature. “We do not speak of a primeval ‘design’ for we must not speak of the Ground as possessing that which presupposes individual life, for individual life belongs to a relatively late stage of becoming. But ‘design’ even if we allow only for the activities of men and animals, is certainly an important phase of reality now. The Ground, then, is the remote source even of design. Its fecundity was such that it had to pass into this form of activity at last.”
The biologists’ natural selection is familiar to all [System here means Tendency] of us. It may be viewed as continuing that strife which began with time. It has scourged man with scorpions. And even among the higher animals it involves a system of terrorism from the beginning to the end, as a famous explorer tells. [Sir Samuel Baker] It shows no partiality towards what we call the nobler forms of life. It fixed grim instincts, and renders destructive activities, which make for suffering, pleasant. The butcher-bird is encouraged to impale mice, etc. alive on thorns; parasites multiply and torment creatures superior to themselves. Men not yet touched with sympathy, and inheriting ancestral proclivities once of use in the struggle for life, show cruel dispositions which are genuine natural gifts. A passion for cruelty characterises certain communities. This need not surprise any one who accepts the metaphysics offered here. It was no moral power which ordained the process in which individuals arise. The passport to a place in reality, is- just to succeed! . . . We return now to the topic of a finite God or gods. There was no design, properly so-called, immanent in the Ground. But world-histories without number may have been their course before the present evolution era, and, more especially, the story of this minor solar system began. And Individuals, motioning to a finite god or gods may have been the fruit of such histories. A being or beings of this sort may have helped to produce our part of reality and may be continuing to modify it now. We must allow, at least, that the hypothesis must be considered.
The Quest of the Spirit
by a Pilgrim of the Way
Edited by Genevieve Stebbins
This public domain book was first published in London in 1913 by Henry Glaisher and company and in New York by Edgar Werner. “A Pilgrim of the Way” (now known to be Norman Astley) was named as the author, his wife Genevieve Stebbins as the editor. This is the first reprint.
EDITORIAL NOTE
The manuscript, of which this booklet is an epitome, was placed in my hands to prepare for the press, by one whose friendship I have enjoyed for many years.
What is here presented is less than a fourth part of the whole, but omits nothing that is vital to an understanding of the Author’s comprehensive philosophy of life and action. Much that has been omitted would to-day be superfluous, as the contentions and teachings on the subjects discussed have already become demonstrated facts in science, or are accepted as probable by eminent philosophical thinkers.
Throughout, the style of the Author has been strictly preserved, and, as the conclusions reached are also the deepest convictions of my soul, in editing the work, I feel that it is the expression of my own thought and aspiration, though voiced by another “pilgrim of the way.”
GENEVIEVE STEBBINS
PREFACE
THE basic ideas in the writer’s mind, and the key therefore to the whole trend of his thought, maybe briefly summarised thus:
must not take the place of facts in laying a foundation of thought. Abstraction piled upon Abstraction forever remains Abstraction. No matter how elaborate, fascinating, and logical the structure, it is only a castle in the air, an unsubstantial bubble of the brain. The pathway to reality does not lie through its portals.
So much for the writer’s part! For the reader, we hope he may escape the illusions of all metaphysical fog, and in voyaging into the unknown, ever keep a good breadth of clear cold water, and the healthy glint of the deep blue sea between himself and the God-forsaken wilderness of “Devil’s Island.” [Alchemy of Thought, L. P. Jacks.]
Published in 1896 by Astro-Philosophical Publications of Denver, Celestial Dynamics was attributed to Zanoni as the author, but the title page identifies him as the author of The Light of Egypt and The Language of the Stars. “T.H.B.” adds an editorial comment in the earlier book but not the sequel.
This is the first of a series of fifteen lessons which get progressively more technical as we proceed. Only the first three will be shared as blog posts. The first lesson is shared here as a text document, but the second and lessons include astrological symbols best viewed as images of scanned pages. The full text is available at Iapsop.com.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STARS, LESSON I. PLANETARY INFLUENCES.
That there are immutable laws in nature no man of common sense will deny. Principles are laws. Equally self-evident must be the fact that such natural law is administered through some agency, and that such agencies or instruments, obeying the attractive and repulsive forces dominating them, can only transmit their powers and fulfill the behests of creative and evolutionary law, by means of the sympathies and antipathies, which we find constituting the basis of all life, growth, death and decay. So it is with everything which has so far been submitted to the keen investigation of the human mind; the attraction of a sun for its planets, for instance; of a mother to her offspring; or of a man toward his help-mate—woman—are based upon the same eternal principle. They constitute the unchangeable analogies of nature, which we can neither ignore nor dispute.
Therefore, in this brief attempt to elucidate the nature and source of planetary influence, we are compelled, for want of space, to assume without further argument, that the sun, moon and planets are no exception to the general order of nature; but that they have a force, power and influence, each peculiar to itself, upon each other upon our earth and everything existing thereon. The fact that the tides of the ocean are ever obedient to the attractions of the moon in her orbit; that the gorgeous Helianthus, on the contrary, ever turns its golden head toward the sun, are but single straws that catch the student’s eye to indicate the trend of the great current of life. The stars and planets are the instruments by which the seven creative principles manifest themselves. They influence externally by their attractive sympathies and repulsive antipathies the cosmic life forces, which, in the realm of spirit, are controlled by their celestial rulers. By this we mean that the various physical orbs called planets, etc., act as so many magnetic centers. They are magnetic by solar induction, the sun itself being positively electric, and this mighty electrical force acts upon the physical planet precisely as an electric current acts upon a piece of soft iron.
The sum total of those powers, then, which are termed planetary influences is contained within the potentiality of the solar ray. But when so emitted as a cosmic force, the action of this solar ray upon the human organism and its material destiny is neutral. To become potential in special directions it is necessary to become refracted into active attributes. This is precisely the ministerial office of the planets. They each receive and absorb some one principle of the solar light and reflect such energy upon other bodies under a different polarity. This energy so transmitted is the planetary influence, whose laws and results constitute the language and science of the stars. That sound, motion, force and color have a distinct relationship is an admitted fact of science. The different intensity of the various vibrations produced by the mutual interaction of the planets of our solar system are productive of different colors, all of which are resolvable into each other in their natural order, and all ultimately into the pure white light from which they originally sprang. This is seen in the grandest of all solar spectrums, the rainbow. There are seven colors, three primary and four complementary, corresponding to the seven creative principles and the musical scale.
So likewise there are seven planetary forces known to astrologers as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Saturn absorbs the attribute which expresses itself as coldness, hence isolation and reserve. It is the blue ray in action. Jupiter absorbs the attribute expressive of generous warmth, hence a sanguine cheerfulness, which corresponds to the purple ray. Mars absorbs an energy, the polar opposite of Saturn, which expresses itself as fiery, aggressive; hence destruction, which is the red ray. The Sun retains and transmits an electrical, commanding force, which expresses dignity and self-reliance; it is the orange ray. Venus absorbs the attribute which expresses itself as love and ideality- this corresponds to the yellow ray. Mercury absorbs the attribute which expresses itself as mental energy; hence restlessness and invention, and is the violet ray. The Moon absorbs our earth’s influx, which is purely negative in its action, and corresponds to the green ray. These are the seven, and when these are complete in their mental actions upon the human organism, termed planetary for convenience or designation, and nature desires to continue her musical play, she ascends to a higher octave. Only two bodies are at present either visible or influential; they are as high as human evolution in the present cycle has reached. These orbs are Uranus and Neptune. The former the octave expression of Mercury and the latter of Venus. Further details will be given in succeeding lessons.
This is the twelfth and final lesson from the series which began with the Cancer lesson shared earlier this year. At the conclusion I will share this one comment based on my narrow expertise as an author whose only book in the 21stc was about the Civil War experiences of ancestors in a small area.
Sarah’s lessons are a valuable record of how the Civil War influenced the spiritual literature of the rest of the 19th century in America.
LESSON VIII.
THE AIRY TRIPLICITY.
♊ ♎ ♒
♊, OR CARRYING ARMS.
The signs of the Airy Triplicity have especial reference to motion. ♊, more especially, or directly, is concerned with projecting, hurling, etc.; ♎ with balancing, maintaining equilibrium between opposites; ♒ with floating and undulating, as represented by the action of air upon the surface of the water, producing waves.
♊ implies, first, a grasping of the hands, or combining forces (Gemini), the effects of knowledge gained so far on his journey; second, an impulsive force from the will, directed to the muscles of the shoulders and arms, by means of which the object is hurled through the air. Therefore I can be no warrior and hurl my lance until I understand the meaning of these twins and how to train and use them effectually.
First, I discern that these twins are not two of the same kind, but they are opposites, or counterparts, and fit together like two hemispheres of one sphere. The one is right, the other left; the one positive, the other negative.
Ancient mythology allegorized one, the right half, the positive, as Castor, a star of the first magnitude, the Immortal, while the other, the left, the negative, was Pollux, the lesser star in brilliancy, the Mortal; and thus they expressed the fact that it is the positive, active force of the soul which, reaching out, attains immortality; i. e., there must be action before there could be reaction. But, again, as the action itself must have its reaction in order to complete its orbit, as the positive pole of the battery is nothing without its negative pole, just so the immortal Castor is represented in the myth as one-half of the time foregoing his privilege among the Celestials in order to pass the other half of the time with his brother, who was mortal, yet whom he so dearly loved; or, in other words, they were polar opposites, which mutually implied each other, and were utterly meaningless and unthinkable apart.
(And one quite noticeable fact of twins is that, even while of the same sex physically, in temperament and disposition one is more positive, the other more negative. Usually this difference is very marked.)
In regard to the hands, I observe that, while the right is positive to the left, yet the different parts of each hand are relatively positive and negative to each other, Thus the knuckles are positive in relation to the palm, the nails positive in relation to the balls of the fingers, etc. The elbows are aggressive, while the muscles of the inner arm are indrawing and caressive.
The hands are the great avenues of the sense of touch. The hands are the means by which we grasp at treasures, reach out for that which we wish to attain, manipulate, formulate materials about us in order to provide for the necessities, comforts and luxuries of physical life.
And from these two, following the law of correspondences, I discern the esoteric meaning of the hands, and from thence the application of bearing arms. The right hand has been educated almost to the exclusion of the left (or female) in our present generation. Otherwise it would be self-evident to us that sensation is not completely obtained only through the right, and when we examine anything critically we instinctively use both hands. Our right hand gives us more the external, intellectual, positive qualities of an object, the left the interior, intuitional, negative qualities; and thus the first great use of the hands is to teach polar opposites, the Twins. All the infinite variety of weapons or arms the warrior can ever have to deal with can be classed under these two words — Polar Opposites. Every force throughout the boundless universe has its pole, or Divine center, which embraces the positive and negative attributes in one, and in order to correspond to that pole all life is evolved in pairs — twins, male and female. Whenever they appear to be separated it is only in seeming, and because the external eye is blinded to the shadow of illusions.
Again, just as we have neglected the education of the left hand, just so have we lost, through this neglect, that inner consciousness of the esoteric meaning of the thousands of exoteric, or physical, uses with which we daily employ our hands. Our treasures are accumulated only for this world, regardless of the swift-coming subjective state, upon whose borders we may this very instant be drifting.
This, then, is the lesson for the warrior. The arms of warfare are polar opposites. Bearing arms is learning their esoteric uses.
Right here, for the warrior, must come his great renunciation. He must come to care for the external only for the sake of the interior. He must “renounce luxury and be chaste.” But chastity is by no means celibacy nor asceticism. For the true soul love is in very truth the purest chastity.
The word chaste is here, however, used in its true and larger sense. Polar opposites is only another word for sex; hence the word chaste applies to every word and ought.
Let the warrior, then, cleanse his hands and remember that the blessings of the Lord are promised to one who “hath clean hands and a pure heart.”
The force which binds polar opposites together, the point of equilibrium where the two are one, is love, and from love is evolved life, while truth may be defined as knowledge, or understanding, of the relation of polar opposites. The warrior must first comprehend truth, and truth must be in him and he in the truth before he can possibly know anything whatever of life and of love. But he must renounce the things of sense and seeming in order to say: u Oh, Truth! Thy Kingdom Come.”
But it directly follows the fact of the uneducated left hand, and the consequent non-comprehension of polar opposites, that mankind to-day can have no conception whatever of the Law of Unity, or the love by which the two polar opposites are one. And thus the world has utterly lost the esoteric meaning of the love which exists exoterically between man and woman. Marriage is only a name and a form, a legal, conventional and mechanical union, and the empty symbol no longer teaches the spiritual reality.[i] With the Divine element of love lost to our sight, atheism and materialism at once follow. The days of true chivalry are the days of true religious growth.
Man cannot know God without knowing love, for God is love, and if the exoteric symbol of love does not lead to an insight to spiritual truth, to an actual knowledge of truth (which is also God), then that exoteric symbol is the grossest unchastity, and leads to perdition and damnation.
But the warrior, having put aside, or renounced, all the showy and glittering weapons of sense and seeming, arming himself only with truth, as symbolized in his lance, with its two ends, and, balancing this trusty lance in his hands, he discerns the sublime truth of the Twins (II), and knows that somewhere in the vast universe there exists a missing half, from whom his soul, in reality, never has been and never can be separated.
LESSON V.
THE EARTHY TRIPLICITY.
♉ ♍ ♑
THE EARTHY TRIPLICITY.
♉, OR LISTENING.
The signs of the Earthy Triplicity express the crisis, or fixed point, wherein the shadows seem to come to a crust and harden. They are illusions, reaching their ultimate. And this Earthy Triplicity follows the fiery, just as ashes follow fire, or, as geology tells us, our Earth has resulted from a ball of fire, and all the solids now visible from molten liquids. To the warrior, this Earthy Triplicity (triangle) is the battlefield, a field of three equal sides. Its first side he takes possession of and holds as soon as he comprehends the sounds proceeding from it. He must listen for its strains of martial music, its distant rumbling of artillery and the tramp, tramp of marching troops, its shouts of victory and courage, its groans of anguish, defeat and retreat.
Having learned to watch, he must now learn to listen. The ear must be trained as well as the eye. In order to have both sides of the contradictories we must know the results of things seen, hence must hear the effects through vibration, or motion. Thus listening is essential.
But Taurus ♉ is the sign of the neck and throat as well as the ear, and this is so because of the subtle connection between the ear, neck and throat. In a former analysis I saw the relation of ear to voice (of which the throat is but the instrument), and now, as I listen to the sounds from the battlefield, I discern the relation of ear to neck.
At the first sound of martial music the steed arches his neck, and none the less, as its strains inspire the warrior, does his neck respond to the sounds, drawing up the head and stiffening the entire vertebral column. He pants for prowess, renown, praise, promotion and unending fame and honors. But the true warrior, who from the sentry’s watch-tower discerned the shadows to be delusions, now listens for the bugle-call, the clear note which, cleaving the awful din and confusion of the battlefield, gives out the key-note according to which the discordant sounds are evolved into a majestic symphony. As long as the warrior fights for fame of self and to hear all men speak well of him, instead of striking the keynote he only strikes its exact contradictory.
Therefore, if I am to be a true warrior I must renounce praise and learn true humility. Not only must I renounce praise, but must even rejoice when all men speak evil of me. If I am cast down when I am reviled and persecuted, then I have not yet learned humility. To be cut to the quick by censure is as far from humility as to be stiff-necked with praise; for so long as blame crushes me, just so long will praise elate me. Therefore, in order to renounce praise I must also renounce blame.
The point of equilibrium between, or indifference to, either praise or blame is the only point I can strike which will give out the true vibration which enables me to detect the key-note.
This is a hard lesson, and one I can never learn until mine eyes have seen the unreality of the shadows, until I have sacrificed to the Divinity within and obtained its responses; or, in other words, if I have not fully and comprehensively encompassed the first syllogism, or triplicity, I cannot intelligently and courageously step upon the next rung of the ladder in my watch-tower. But if I have realized the war-cry of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, then, in proportion as I realize humility, renouncing alike praise and blame, in just that proportion I shall now be able to see that my war-cry is also my key-note. I now have my key, which is two-sided, one from the first syllogism and the other from the second, Watching and Listening. This is a marvelous key, which unlocks both ways. Turned one way it reveals color symphonies; the other gives out sound harmonies, and as I become skillful in turning this key the visible will be the notes of a musical composition, which my soul at once reads into sound while the audible vibrations round out into forms and colors. But the visible and the audible united form the Orange Ray of my Seven-Point-Star, and the spiritual quality corresponding to orange is the understanding, and when I am armed with this ray-ment of true understanding, then the bow of prismatic colors and the octave of chromatic sounds will interpret to my soul that larger octave of the heavens called the Zodiac, or Wheel of Life. Upon the steps and half-steps of this Zodiacal octave the Sun, Moon and planets go on, giving out now strong major chords, now plaintive minor vibrations, both of which the rightly attuned soul translates into higher symphonies of the purposes and laws of the Infinite Mind, grand oratorios of “Creation” and “Messiah.”
When this spirit of understanding is mine, then these vibrations, struck by the swiftly revolving orbs on the Zodiacal octave, will as surely reach my external ear as they now do my external eye, and my soul will as surely recognize a primary chord from the larger octave as now from the smaller, for the intervals of one correspond exactly to the intervals of the other. All these intervals are expressed by numbers, but as long as numbers represent only dollars and cents, or the shadows exchangeable for money, the results or returns only looked for on the material plane, just so long will the “music of the spheres” remain an unmeaning myth to my soul.
We must ever remember that the effects must correspond to the plane of the cause. Esoteric wisdom cannot be utilized in exoteric gains (the law of contradictory opposites would soon take the place of affinity opposites) and rise in the scale of progress. Harmony is the law of progression. The contest of the ages is upon us.
Both the Earlier Theosophical Society (1875-1878) and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor claimed Egyptian wisdom as a source of spiritual authority. But more than just promoting ancient Egyptian lore, or Hermeticism, or Sufism, all of which proliferated in Egypt at different times centuries apart– they claimed to know actual real Egyptians in the early 1870s.
No birth date can be confirmed in genealogical or bibliographic databases for ‘Abduh, but FindaGrave reports that Afghani’s tomb give a birth date of January 9, 1838.
In the practical application of “Celestial Dynamics” the primary principles of Astronomy and Astrology must be fully understood, and as no really reliable practical Manual at a reasonable price has ever been issued in America upon this subject, combined with the fact that owing to the United States postal and revenue laws, European works are almost inaccessible to American readers, who cannot afford to pay prohibitive prices. It is to be hoped that these facts alone are a sufficient apology, if any be needed, for the appearance of a work in this, the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, professing to deal seriously with the rules and elementary principles of Ancient Astrology. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in the present work that can be called original, more than is embraced perhaps in the style and method of presentment, because the matter subjected to the reader’s notice is but the Alphabet of that Science of the Stars which gave to Chaldea its grandeur and to Egypt its wisdom. An Alphabet of Celestial knowledge which is coeval with the history of man and whose origin is lost within the depths of prehistoric time. The writer’s chief effort has been to present the subject to the young student in the simplest form possible,and to convey to his mind the technical details of an exceedingly interesting study in a pleasing manner, free from all the unseemly personalities so frequently found in astrological authors. At the same time the subject is treated in a thoroughly practical manner to enable the student to realize the extent of his undertaking. It is vast, and requires a mind that is equally great for its full realization. At the same time it will, when once mastered, amply repay him for the time and effort devoted to its acquirement. Each subject has been rendered as brief and concise as possible, and all imaginary rules and considerations, no matter upon what authority they rest, from Claudius Ptolemy to the present day, have been ignored. The lover of truth, and the Scientific investigator has little use for “The part of Fortune,” or, “Dragon’s head and tail.” They want facts, and these facts mixed with as little theory as possible. With this we close, remembering the words of a well known critic, “The Preface is an Author’s opportunity to unload his egotistical cant.”
The Author.
In 2025 this blog will feature serialized excerpts from The Language of the Stars (1892) and Celestial Dynamics (1896) by which time he is living not as Burgoyne but as Norman Astley. In 2024 I will finish the Tour Through the Zodiac series with weekly entries on Taurus and Gemini. KPJ
LESSON IV.
THE FIERY TRIPLICITY.
♈ ♌ ♐
♐, OR JUDGING.
As the victims have been slaughtered and consumed by the flames, the warrior must carefully collect together the ashes, or remnants, into the Sacred Urn of Pure-Heart, and then, placing them before the bar of conscience, await the responses.
These responses are judgments, proceeding from the Divinity within. If the offerings have been good and acceptable, and the rites properly observed, then the replies will surely be auspicious. But if the two former duties have not been properly performed, then am I guilty of the most awful sacrilege in approaching the Divinity profanely.
According to my own actions am I judged; my own conscience is the arbiter. This judge must give the decisions according to the manner in which the sentinel and the sacrificial priest have performed their tasks, for the judgment follows as inevitably as when, having placed two sides of an equilateral triangle together at the proper angle, the third side is the response, depending upon the other two.
Again, this response is the third note in the primary chord. If I have struck the first two, there is only one other which possibly can complete the chord.
Again, this response is the conclusion, or third term, in the perfect syllogism. The sentinel upon the watch-tower, having properly performed his duty, states the major premise; the sacrifice, with its implied suffering, gives out the minor note or premise; the Oracle speaks out the conclusion. Although the conclusion of a syllogism is its third term, yet it expresses the mystery of the trinity, for it is a trinity, and at the same time an organic unity. It combines the major and minor premises into a higher unity, which differs from either of them, just as the molecule of water combines two dissimilar elements into a unity differing from its component parts, and also as H and O combine with a lightning flash of soul which accompanies the combining together of the two premises of a syllogism into their higher unity, and is an intuitive spark from the altar of Divinity.
This altar is my Hearth ♐ of Pure- Heart. Unless this Urn is sufficiently purified by properly accepting (not rejecting) the experiences of life, it cannot receive the ashes of the sacrifice and impart to them the Divine Spark which makes them over into a living, organic unity, on a higher plane than they were before, nor raise in power and might the ashes of actions sown in weakness and watered with tears of suffering. This expresses the mystery of the re-birth, whereby the physical body is raised to the plane of spiritual body while yet in the possession of the physical.
This is that which constitutes the spiritual plane upon which one is born. There is a Divine correspondence, and the latent possibilities of the soul have the corresponding possibilities in the brain, which can be brought forth to usefulness while in the physical body. Bringing about the harmony between the two constitutes re-birth.
There is only one way of being re-born, just as there is only one way to be born into the physical, and this one way is revealed through the fiery syllogism (triplicity), the major premise of which is Truth Realized from the Sentry’s Watch-tower, the minor premise of which is Love Actualized by the Sacrifice of Burnt Offerings, the conclusion of which is Life Immortalized, or lifted from the plane of Time to Eternity. This conclusion is the Immaculate Conception of the re-birth, which is conscious son-ship with the Father.
Truth realized frees from every illusion of sense and casts out every error and all diseases. Truth realized is liberty, for from or by the power born of Knowledge you can be free.
Love actualized, or practiced, recognizes the Divine origin of every soul, and that every form of life and condition is necessary to the unfoldment of the soul in its evolutionary steps of progress, and, comprehending the law of contradictories, knows only universal charity and communion of saints, those who have passed through the fires of purification and learned the lessons therein taught, without prejudice, sentiment or pain. Love actualized is Fraternity. Then are we able to look upon all life as one Divine Whole, recognizing all as one fraternity, each filling the necessary notes in the Anthem of Creative Life.
Life eternalized, making every moment eternity, lifts the soul to a plane above illusion. Realizing the realities of life leaves no room for illusions where, grasping the equality of ratios, it knows only Oneness. But this true equality with God distinguishes between thoughts and thinkers. The recognition of God’s variety of life, form, color, etc., are each equally necessary to the fulfillment of the Divine plan. This is the only law of equality. Life, thus eternalized, is equality.
Liberty, Fraternity and Equality must ever be the war-cry of the true warrior. But if the offerings, or truths, seen from the watch-tower through the first side of the Fiery Triangle are not acceptable, nor the sacrifices of our past ideas and illusions properly observed or parted with, then, instead of liberty, comes renewed bondage to error and disease; instead of fraternity, failures, strife and murder; instead of equality with Divinity, there is a descent to the lower sphere and union with demons and fiends.
On the other hand, the Ascetic who mutilates, denies, the truths realized in the major premise from the sentry’s watch-tower, and destroys the offerings, the knowledge thus revealed, and who refuses the experiences of the sacrifices can never hear the responses nor know the mystery of re-birth. In either case, remorse and repentance, in themselves, are perfectly stupid, and only delay realization.
The suffering implied in remorse is not a true and acceptable sacrifice, for the major premise is still wrong, for truth never brings remorse. Remorse implies a misconception of the nature of reality. If I have struck the wrong note in my chord, and experienced inharmony, I only make the more haste to strike the right note. I waste no time in groaning over the dismal sound.
This 1916 photograph of a Carmel landmark appears on a timeline of historic photographs on the admirable website of the local visitor center.
The epilogue below appears in the new reprint of The Quest of the Spirit.
The Brotherhood of Light was headquartered in Los Angeles throughout its fourteen years of public work, led by Elbert and Elizabeth Benjamine and Fred Skinner. Writing of the 21 volume Brotherhood of Light lessons and private meetings commenced in 1914, with public work beginning on November 11, 1918, the Armistice Day that ended the first world war.
Its successor organization The Church of Light was formed the week of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in November 1932. The Brotherhood of Light lessons were complete by 1934, although revisions continued until Elbert’s death in 1951. Its predecessor organization the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor had splintered in America due to divisions among the leaders, but continued in France, Algeria, and Israel as Max Theon’s Cosmic Philosophy for decades. Genevieve Stebbins returned to her native California in 1917 after more than thirty years in the eastern United States and England.
She returned with a second husband, Norman Astley, whom she had married in 1892 in Boston and who became the manager of her New York School of Expression and collaborator in its programs until they retired to England in 1907. Her first husband, Joseph Thompson, was the brother of her business partner Mary Thompson. The marital and business partnerships dissolved by 1892; Norman Astley filled both vacancies admirably, managing her investments and artistic endeavors with equal skill.
Their choice of Carmel-by-the-Sea as a place to retire after a life of international travel raises questions related to Astley’s former life as Thomas H. Burgoyne, who had collaborated there as a co-author with Sarah Stanley Grimké. His later life, in which he spent forty years as husband of Genevieve Stebbins included the lifespan of the Brotherhood of Light, whose lessons reflect his writings as well as hers and those of Grimké.
Elbert Benjamine’s writings reflect not only the influence of his mentors the Astleys, but also literary figures in the Monterey Bay milieu, including permanent residents Lincoln Steffens and Robinson Jeffers as well as Jack London and Upton Sinclair who visited the area and wrote about it.
Thomas Henry d’Alton (Dalton, Alton) was born April 14, 1855 in Douglas, Isle of Man. He was the son of chiropodist Thomas Henry d’Alton and Emma Rice, who had him christened in Grisham, Lancashire on July 1. He married Betsy Bella Prince May 12, 1878 in Lancaster, Lancashire and was the father of a son Thomas and a daughter Veda in Burnley, Lancashire when he adopted the pseudonym T.H. Burgoyne in 1884. Soon after Burgoyne was named Secretary of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, it was revealed by Theosophists that he had convicted in 1883 of obtaining money under false pretenses in West Riding, Yorkshire and had served six months in prison. Leaving his wife and children, he arrived in White County, Georgia as Burgoyne with Peter Davidson and family in 1886. Burgoyne’s periodical writings appeared solely in HBofL-related publications between 1885 and 1888: first The Occultist and The Occult Magazine in England and then Thomas Moore Johnson’s The Platonist.
After the first edition of The Light of Egypt was published in Chicago by Religio-Philosophical Publishing House in 1889, Burgoyne was published exclusively by Astro-Philosophical Publications of Denver, which released Celestial Dynamics in 1896 and Language of the Stars in 1892. All three were published as works of Zanoni, identified finally as Burgoyne only in the 1900 expanded edition of The Light of Egypt. The influence of Burgoyne’s writings was greater in continental Europe than the English-speaking world, with translations and paraphrases of The Light of Egypt in French, Russian, German, and Spanish, and the Paris occultist Papus promoting Burgoyne’s astrological teachings in his own works. Burgoyne’s letters to Thomas Moore Johnson published in Letters to the Sage are significant evidence of HBofL practices and teachings, but later he becomes the subject of others’ letters that reveal the confusion unleashed by revelation of Burgoyne’s real name and history. Theosophical leaders saw it as a way to discredit a rival organization, and the ensuing controversy destroyed the HBofL in England, but not in France where it continued to thrive, nor in America where Peter Davidson pursued his studies in Georgia independently of Council President Johnson and Secretary Burgoyne.
Zanoni was a pen name derived from a Rosicrucian themed 1842 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which the adept teacher of the title character was named Mejnour. Peter Davidson, Provincial Grand Master of the North of the original HBof L, had written in the Scottish Highlands under the latter pen name. On July 12, 1886 the HBofL Council met in Kansas City without Burgoyne present to deliberate on evidence that d’Alton and Burgoyne were the same person. They agreed unanimously that they were identical and advised all members to avoid contact with Burgoyne and Davidson until further investigation. In St. Louis they met again on September 5, reinstating Burgoyne who was present this time as a member. Peter Davidson, on the other hand, is never mentioned again by Johnson and colleagues in the letters. This evidence implies that Burgoyne escaped the ostracism of his colleagues in the HBofL, but Davidson was blamed for the pseudonymous intrigues. Burgoyne first traveled to California in 1887, after visiting Topeka, Kansas with HBofL board member W.W. Allen, and in Denver with what was becoming the largest local group of members. He became a United States citizen in Shawnee County, Kansas in 1887. Ten years later in 1897 he obtained American citizenship as Norman Astley in New York City.
Meanwhile, in early 1887 Sarah Stanley Grimké had sent her daughter Angelina to live in Massachusetts with her father, after which she appears to have spent at least the next year in California. She left abruptly for New Zealand in 1888 before publication of her collaborative project with Burgoyne. The precise contribution of Grimké to The Light of Egypt was later described by Elbert Benjamine as assisting with The Science of the Stars portion of the 1889 edition.
One of the most salient echoes of Chevalier Louis in The Light of Egypt is Zanoni’s claim to have made “personal investigations, extending over a series of years in England, France, Germany, Austria, and the United States, with various types and phases of mediums.” In The Key to Theosophy, Blavatsky notes the continuity of adepts “used as sledge-hammers to break the theosophical heads with” which “began twelve years ago, with Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten’s `Louis’ of Art Magic and Ghost-Land, and now ends with the “Adept” and `Author’ of The Light of Egypt.” [H. P. Blavatsky, Key to Theosophy, 239.]
Letters to the Sage includescorrespondence from Burgoyne mailed in Monterey, California in the late 1880s, but none thereafter. He did, however, live briefly in Mendocino County and advertised a forthcoming book with a Cummings mailing address in 1891. When Norman and Genevieve Astley began acquiring property in North Carolina, they were described in a February 1894 Morganton newspaper story that mentions his having lived on a California ranch, which he claims to have owned. Bureau of Land Management records for patents, which are purchases of land directly from the federal government rather than from an individual owner and show that in January 1891 160 acres of ranch land in Mendocino County was patented to a John H. Burgoyne. The land is in the northwestern portion of the county, and just twenty miles as the crow flies from Cummings where he was receiving mail in 1891.
Born in San Francisco in 1857 the only child of a lawyer James Cole Stebbins who had relocated there from upstate New York with his young wife Henrietta, Genevieve lost her mother in infancy and was cared for by her aunt Louisa. She became a successful actress in New York in her twenties and by thirty had become an acting teacher. After further studies in England and France she emerged as a public figure, becoming the most prominent American teacher of the Delsarte method of elocution and acting. She combined Delsarte methods with yogic breathing learned from a swami at Oxford, as well as exercises involving stretches and postures adapted from yoga. With her marriage to Astley in 1892 he became her business manager and in addition to running the Manhattan school they traveled up and down the east coast giving classes and performances. Between 1894 and 1906 the Astleys owned property in the Blue Ridge mountains.
After her retirement in 1907 Stebbins traveled with Astley, settling in England for several years before returning to the US in 1917. Norman Astley is far more elusive than his famous wife, and no record prior to their marriage can be solidly linked to him. We find the couple in a boarding house in Asbury Park, New Jersey in the 1900 census. Retiring first to Dittisham, Devon in 1907, they moved to St. Peter Port, Guernsey by 1911 and by 1913 were living in Slindon, Sussex which was listed as their most recent residence in the 1917 ship passenger list that recorded their return to the United States. Documentation of the Astleys’ American travels and citizenship provides dozens of such pieces of evidence of a man living more than fifty years as Norman Astley, leaving traces in five states as well as England. Thomas Henry Burgoyne, on the other hand, leaves far fewer traces, being recorded as name of an author of books and letters but appearing in no public documents other than those described above.
The thesis of Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body is that “the reciprocal influence of `harmonial’ gymnastic systems (like the American Delsartism of Genevieve Stebbins…) and modern hatha yoga is enormous.”ii While Stebbins is remembered now almost entirely as a pioneer in the history of women’s exercise and dance, the “gentler stretching, deep breathing, and `spiritual’ relaxation colloquially known in the West today as `hatha yoga’ are best exemplified by variants of the harmonial gymnastics developed by Stebbins…and others— as well as the stretching regimes of secular women’s physical culture with which they overlap.”[Mark Singleton, Yoga Body, 71.]
Stebbins’s Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics: A Complete System of Psychical, Aesthetic, and Physical Culture (1892) is as described by Singleton “a combination of calisthenic movement, deep respiration exercises, relaxation, and creative mental imagery within a harmonial religious framework. It is, in Stebbins’s words, `a completely rounded system for the development of body, brain and soul,’ a system of training which shall bring this grand trinity of the human microcosm into one continuous, interacting unison and remove the `inharmonious mental states’ that lead to discord.”[Ibid, 160.]
The Quest of the Spirit argues that “a true philosophy of life is the work of the future, in which the great philosophical systems of the past will form but a very subordinate part of the structure. We are convinced that the chief foundation-stones will be discovered in the works of Eucken, Bergson, and James.” Henri Bergson and William James were not just philosophical colleagues but close friends, and James was intending to write the introduction to the English translation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution but died before it was completed. The language about creation and evolution in the Brotherhood of Light lessons is strongly reminiscent of Bergson’s vitalist themes, and Bergson’s younger sister Moina Mathers was one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Like James, Bergson was interested in parapsychology; at the time of James’s death, Bergson was president of the British Society for Psychical Research. James was evidently a personal friend and not just an admired philosopher, in light of the Astleys’ residence in Boston in the early 1890s and longstanding interest in psychical research. Researcher Kelly Mullan reports that James became a friend of Stebbins at a Chautauqua conference where he and Genevieve were both speakers.
In the appendix to her magnum opus, written for this 1892 edition, Stebbins summarizes the conclusions reached in her decades as a teacher in a nine-point “my credo” of which the first three are quoted below: First—All faculties lie deep within the soul and are there potential as the oak in the acorn. Second—These faculties cannot be manifested without the cooperation of the brain, each portion of the brain having its own function. Third—Through the nervous system is established communication between brain and body; each function in the brain sympathizing with some part of the body, and corresponding surfaces also having corresponding meanings,—the upper with the upper, the lower with the lower, the anterior with the anterior, the posterior with the posterior, and so on. [Genevieve Stebbins, Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics, 146]
Poetics of Dance by Gabriele Brandstetter, first published in German in 1995, explains that “Stebbins’s main contribution to modern dance– her emphasis on the dynamics of dance movement– is still underestimated even today. She was the first to no longer regard dance from the perspective of dance technique, muscular training, or the systematic development of articulation, emphasizing instead its energetic principles. Stebbins’s elaboration of the Delsarte system heralded a paradigm shift in modern dance in an attempt to redefine dance movement on the basis of a vitalist understanding of dynamics. [Gabriele Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance, 4.]
Genevieve’s death in 1934 coincided with the completion of Benjamine’s Brotherhood of Light lessons and Norman’s immediate remarriage ushered in a period of discord and confusion in his personal life. He married the nurse who had cared for Genevieve within a week of her death, and his new wife Nellie Dougan immediately moved to seize his assets and declare him mentally incompetent. They relocated to Devon where she died five years later, leaving Norman to survive until 1943 living first in Plymouth and finally dying in Gloucestershire.
Carmel Neighbors
Donna Marek’s Crème de Carmel is a charming guide to local history. She reports: “The first Spanish mission in the area was the Presideo Chapel built in 1770 in Monterey, but the following year it was relocated on the Carmel River and renamed the Mission San Carlos de Borremeo.” [Donna Marek, Crème de Carmel, 8.] Monterey became the capital of both Californias in 1770, and continued as capital of only Alta California under Spanish rule in 1804, continuing as capital under Mexican sovereignty from 1822 through 1846. Carmel remained undeveloped except for the Carmel Mission and nearby ranches until 1888 when eighty acres in Carmel Woods was subdivided into lots. The community of Carmel-by-the-Sea was created in 1903 and rapidly developed with home sites and businesses. It was incorporated as a town on October 31, 1916.
By the late 1920s the atmosphere had changed, as it was no longer an artist colony but a popular beach resort, as reported by biographer Justin Kaplan. It continued to attract famous writers but Kaplan reports that by 1927, when Lincoln Steffens arrived, “the real colony had disappeared” but Steffens welcomed visits from Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. “Steffens also knew John and Carol Steinbeck, and suggested that Steinbeck write a series of articles for the San Francisco News about the Oklahoma migrants and how they were treated in Monterey County. Over the next four years, those articles led to Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath.” [Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens,]
Robert Louis Stevenson had lived for several months in Monterey in 1879 and wrote articles for the Monterey Californian. Carmel is featured in Treasure Island. The poet Robinson “Jeffers moved to Carmel in 1916 where he and his wife raised their two sons…Jeffers built their home—called Tor house—near the ocean, an undertaking that took five years.” [Donna Marek, Crème de Carmel, 30.]
The Benedict Cottage in Carmel on Scenic Drive was the site of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1926 scandal. The stories that surfaced about her affair threw Carmel into the national limelight.”[Ibid, 31.]
The Sea Lion Point Trail at Point Lobos is the most easily accessible short walk to scenic overlooks where the rocky shoreline and sandy beaches can be viewed from above. The name Point Lobos would seem to imply that wolves inhabited the area, but the Spanish term for what we call Sea Lions translates to Sea Wolf, which Jack London used as a title for a book about seafarers based in the central California coast. [Jerry Emory, Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide, 254-55.]
Lincoln Steffens relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea several years after the Astleys moved there. He is not often associated with “the occult” but his biographer Justin Kaplan commented “Despite his later claim that he had shunned the fraternities as all bunk and pretension, Steffens was glad to belong to Zeta Psi, the oldest of Berkeley’s Greek-letter societies. And it was on his urging that Frederick Willis, his closest friend in college, also joined. Willis was interested in theosophy, the survival of the soul after death, ‘sacred occultism,’ and parapsychology, and considered himself an expert mesmerist. Like many other students he has given himself over to the passion that motivated William James, in 1884, to establish an American Society for Psychical Research with its various committees on Thought Transference, hypnotism, and Apparitions and Haunted Houses. In the Zeta Psi fraternity house near Bancroft Way, Steffens took instruction from Willis and began his own experiments with mesmerism, clairvoyance and thought transference.” [Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens, 30.]
When Steffens was an undergraduate, Berkeley was not the thriving intellecual community it later became. Kaplan reports that “as an intellectual community, as a breeding place for philosophers, William James had said in 1883, ‘it’s a poor place’; and some of his disciples who had been invite to teach there with a sense of going into exile. Yet it was at Berkeley, fifteen years later, that James, reading his paper ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,’ first announced pragmatism as a theory of truth and formulated his subsequent creed. (Ibid, 29.]
Sources Cited:
Helena P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1889,
Brandstetter, Gabriele, Poetics of Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Emory, Jerry, Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Kaplan, Justin, Lincoln Steffens. New York: Simion and Schuster, 2013.
Marek, Donna, Crème de Carmel. New York: Roberts Reinhardt, 1994.
Singleton, Mark, Yoga Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Stebbins, Genevieve, Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1892.
LESSON XIII.
THE WATERY TRIPLICITY.
♋ ♏
♓, OR VANQUISHING.
As the mists and the shadows of the battlefield clear away the warrior pauses, and from his height views the mighty field of conflict and weighs and considers the results from the twelve mansions of his dominion. Each has been penetrated and the fruits gathered and garnered and he has partaken thereof. The illusions and delusions of the battlefield have been perceived and their nothingness realized, and the warrior has now to vanquish them by the laws he has learned in watching, listening, patient and cautious advancement and reconnoitering, aspiring while attacking, and in his engagements in battle.
He has plenty of time to reflect while the atmosphere is clearing. His journey has led him to the last rung of the exoteric ladder.
The mists of seeming and sense begin to pass away, all preconceptions have vanished, he has climbed the exoteric ladder, and now he is about to face the realms of realities and to place his foot upon the first rung of the esoteric ladder.
Has he been released from all exoteric burdens, his bundles of loves, of hates, of revenge, of false conceptions and conclusions that were drawn from the realm of effects and dropped by the wayside? These are the mists and shadows of the battlefield, that have clung so tenaciously to the warrior’s outward self.
What are the considerations of his reflections?
Knowledge has been his lot and portion, and he is now fitted to proclaim his kingship, his queen by his side, the equilibrium gained, the fight for freedom won.
Having triumphantly conquered all upon the field of warfare and conflict he rests, to behold his victories’ trophies. The law of contradictories and correspondences guides him in judging of results, in drawing conclusions from being able to see both ends of his simple staff that he started out with. Cause rests upon one end and effects upon the other. Both lie within his grasp, and are obedient to all commands.
The last external life of the embodied human soul has been experienced, the lessons learned, the fruits of good and evil partaken of and fully accepted as the Divine Fiat of God; “Man, know thyself, and thus know thy God.”
As the warrior steps from the last rung of the exoteric onto the first rung of the esoteric ladder his works do follow him, and these will constitute the enemies and friends of the new battle ground in another sphere. But when he consciously realizes which are the illusions and delusions, that which is mortal from the immortal, the seeming from the real, then all foes are put to Right and he henceforth dwells in the land of realities.
The mists of the battlefield having passed away, the country lies exposed to the scanning eye of its king. He looks upon his works. It calls forth the resolute courage of a well-trained, unfaltering will to behold and to hold in check the emotions of awe, consternation, sadness and joy that would fill his heart.
His own creations stand at his feet. The children created, born and reared in matter appeal to his care.
Can his soul fly from its own creations, whether of good or evil? No. And while some may be beautiful, encouraging and divinely inspiring, others will prove rebellious, and cling as a millstone about his neck, impeding his progress in his spiral Mazy Wheel of Necessity.
Vanquishing is the next step, the spirals have become large and expansive, taking in a vast domain, for he has not been a slothful warrior. His days of traveling have been filled with an unceasing activity that grew and broadened as he journeyed. He chose to know as he proceeded, and knowledge gained expands the field of vision, investigations and creations.
Now his domains have become a mighty kingdom. His aspirations set his mark high. The Pole-Star of Truth is his goal, and that star stands in the center of his empire, and when each spiral of the exoteric ladder has been traversed with but one motive, and that motive Truth, he can view, from the outward circle, or spiral of his ladder, the center.
This Pole-Star, which illumines the whole field of battle, exposes to the esoteric vision his possessions. Is it as he would wish? If it were so, vanquishing would not be necessary.
We have followed him thus far. The veil is drawn to other eyes than his own.
What his visions are we cannot see; but, taking courage, we can begin to prepare to enter on an investigating tour of our own country, and learn its circumference, the health of its soil and the products that may belong to it.
The Pole-Star of Love is in the center, filled with the radiance that can only be seen by climbing, and thus obtain “the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
LESSON X.
THE AIRY TRIPLICITY.
♊ ♎ ♒
♒, OR PROVIDING RATIONS.
The three duties of Bearing Arms, Obeying Orders and Providing Rations, comprised under the Airy Triplicity, relate more to the special training and individual discipline of the warrior, yet none the less necessary and important to his success, for the properly drilled and thoroughly disciplined warrior, having completed the three sides of the Airy Triplicity, stands forth as the wonder-working magician, able to transform light into the bread of Heaven, or the power to put into use the knowledge gained.
First, if he knows how to bear arms, i. e., to properly formulate with his esoteric hands; second, if he has thoroughly vitalized his purposes from a strict obedience to the laws of polar opposites and equilibrium; third, then he has only to strike the third note of the chord to realize his undertakings completed and actualized, and himself nourished and sustained as are the angels of light themselves.
Properly formulated and vitalized, his thoughts cannot return unto him void. Herein is the awful, the divinely and unspeakably awful force of this law of equilibrium or balance. They cannot return void, and if they have been revengeful, malicious or covetous, and have worked out results of sorrow and suffering to others, then, as he has measured so will it be measured out to him. Sooner or later will they complete their orbit and find him out. Polar opposites, vitalized, are the same things as centrifugal and centripetal forces set in motion. They will describe a circle. Mortal cannot annul Divine law.
The warrior has now reached a point where he must become a breadmaker. First, the loaves must be kneaded and formulated with the hands (♊); second, the loaves must be vitalized, fomented by an understanding of (♎) the equipoise of the two opposite forms of force, in order that, third, he may realize himself nourished and sustained and finally thus self- sustaining (♒).
His bread must be either life-giving or life-destroying, for, once formulated and fomented (vitalized), his loaves cannot return to him void.
It is perfectly possible for him to formulate expressions or images for what is absolutely impossible and unthinkable. It is also possible for him to seemingly vitalize his phantoms, but the awful results of this kind of breadmaking are sure to follow. His phantoms become vampires, which feed upon him, and even upon all who ignorantly come within his mental atmosphere. Yet this possibility must not deter the warrior, for he must be a breadmaker. He must put into practical use that which he has made himself acquainted with; he must let his cup overflow, so as to benefit those who walk with him. Inaction is as fatal as to create vampires for unthinkables and impossibilities. Therefore, let the work rely upon the purity of his motive, which is soul unfoldment and the attainment of his celestial heritage knowing that, sooner or later, the law will be revealed to him from within, how those loaves which turn out failures and abortions can be neutralized and nothingized.
If he is free from covetousness, vainglory and sensuousness, then let him work only to know truth and realize justice, and he will find himself self-sustaining and able to command in emergencies, and finally find within himself an image of that creative force which, in its turn, images the Divine creative will, or center of the universe.
This law of the creative, or bread-making, syllogism is universal in its application, from the most seeming and external life up to the highest symbolic form of our present phase of Earth life, or child creating, in which the human approaches the nearest to the Divine parent.
To a certain extent, the warrior must have a varied and large experience throughout all the worlds of form-making. He must work unceasingly, as does the Great Creator. Herein is the import of the command to be “fruitful, increase and multiply;” not that man and woman are to devote their whole time, thought and energies to populating the globe, as the selfish sensualist proclaims from the house-top in order to procure a license for his own secret sins, but through that equilibrium gained by the harmonious blending and fusing of polar opposites, or twin souls.
His thoughts, truths, or bread, will be his children, who will guide and sustain him as well as those who partake of such royal dainties, born from the union of formulation and vitalization. Thus the bread-winner becomes the bread-distributor, and the loaves of understanding will not be void.
The consciousness of his dual self evolved through his journey on the first side of the Airy Triangle ♊, and where he learns to formulate, and on the second side (♎), where the creative principles are balanced — then, and not until then, does he become capable of breadmaking, or creating self-sustenance; and when he is able and strong enough to walk alone he must support others, for we cannot receive unless we also give. Thenceforward the warrior can enjoy the promise of his Creator: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath,” and cast forth upon the universal currents the life-sustaining rations of his own winning, not in floods or great downpours, but as the gentle, soothing, rippling waves of (♒).
In bearing arms the warrior is subject to the higher commands of his being, and is, in action, manipulated by the arms — not the arm, but the arms, implying the utter uselessness of one alone. The brave, positive Castor must be balanced by his mate, Pollux; thus the training and culture necessary for bearing arms correctly, as a skilled warrior, every movement known, and at what moment to so execute the laws of his will that they will not conflict with Nature’s laws and bring failure and sorrow for his ignorant disobedience.
Herein self is forgotten, self is lost in the recognition of the two as one, equalized, blended as one.
This awful mystery of self, this life-destroying monster, when alone, stalking about as the imperious I. Selfishness of the past must be lost, for now he becomes the man; that selfishness that ruled and regulated the life of the lower forms through which the soul was gaining experience before the plane of reason and intuition had been reached, and then only can perfect obedience and equilibrium be attained.
Bearing arms is wearisome, obeying orders difficult, and demands an indefatigable exercise in Watching, Listening and patient advancement that the balance is not tilted by misjudgements.
Then the warrior can traverse his kingdom and scan the circumference of his ground in so far as he has reached in his watch-tower. More climbing is to be done, hence sustenance is required; therefore he must utilize his balanced forces and provide his own self-sustaining rations. Another’s winnings or knowledge would not sustain and give him the freedom in exploring his universe in search of the object of his journey — Truth.
What constitute the Rations?
The attributes evolved on each side of the four equilateral triangles of Fire, Air, Earth and Water.
Providing Rations is externalizing the twelve manners of fruits, each division of his own kingdom providing the necessary material.
The truths that spring from every side of the triangles in the fourfold elements are food and sustenance to his soul.
His journey is not yet complete. He is now in the realm of Imagery. Knowledge and experience are necessary in this creative realm.
He must bear arms with caution. The Lance of Light and Truth must be borne aloft constantly, that impossible imageries may not be formulated and spring into active expression to impede his progress.
His desires and loyal aspirations make him charitable to all life. Yet the true warrior must not hesitate at sacrifices. He must become master of his own kingdom, hence must make the lives born from his own thoughts subject and useful to his Divine will.
The higher he ascends into the tower the brighter becomes his Ray of Light, the expanse of country broader, and new things appear to his vision, new conditions present themselves. A new stimulus to action is received. Responsibility is increased and more knowledge is required, and ever on and on.
Life is motion, as the Airy Triplicity symbolizes, and motion is eternal.
LESSON VII.
THE EARTHY TRIPLICITY.
♉ ♍ ♑
♑, OR ADVANCING.
When the Sun enters the sign of ♑, where lived the framers of the Zodiac, then the Goats advanced up the mountain sides, for the time of grazing was at hand. The fruits of labor were beginning to spring up and be realized by the laborer. So now advances the warrior into the region of winter, toward the point where shadows are congealed or hardened into the substances called matter and solids; where the indigo ray passes almost to black — the exact antipodes of soul and summer, the white light. Here the black of negation mixes with blue to form the indigo of righteousness.
But with his faithful compass (Cross) he advances, undismayed. His knees do not knock together through the weakness of fear; fear belongs to immature natures. The patient waiting acquired as a reconnoiterer has admitted him into the laboratory of Mother Earth, and he has there armed himself with the force which solves solids and transmutes matter into its correlatives of spirit — black to white, death to life.
The Rod and the Knee express the two extremes of Power and Submission. The monarch who sways the rod enforces the homage of the bended knee from his subjects. Never was there such a despot as fear, and the victim swayed by fear is the most craven and knock-kneed object in existence. The one who has not learned to wait is still the slave of fear, and is held bound in the bowels of Earth, and has yet to break the bars of iron and steel which hold him a prisoner of pomp, splendor, honor and dignity, and this also implies its exact opposite. Yet, the one whom the world delights to honor is not the one who advances, a conqueror, into the realm of realities. Ah, no! He is the one most overcome by fear and that grim, monster-shadow called Death. But the true warrior, “compass” in hand, even though despised and rejected by men advances undismayed, knowing before-hand the exact nature of that which he is to explore. He knows the grim monster-shadow, death, to be but Nature’s initiation into the great mysteries of existence, whose realms he, like Virgil and Dante and others before him, have invaded while yet embodied.
He will find it possible to go, and, returning, give a clever and entertaining account of adventures, hairbreadth escapes, etc., to a gaping crowd. He may bring back a lot of curios, to dispose of for money to the highest bidder, for curiosity mongers to “Oh!” and “Ah!” over.
Or he may transform his knowledge into a comfortable “Sale of Indulgences,” proclaim: “There is no such thing as Death; he is only a scarecrow; all is life; there is no such thing as Evil, all is good. Therefore gormandize, cheat and steal to your heart’s content. You are one with God, and your soul can never be lost!” But he strikes a note which grates on the purely trained ear, and he communicates a conclusion which does not accord with, nor follow, the premises. With the major premise of Taurus (humility) and the minor premise of Virgo (patience), sooner or later will he trip in the meshes of his false syllogism and be brought in abject terror before the awful Voice of the Mighty One, whose Ineffable Name he, himself, has attempted to assume, instead of, in true humility, saying ” Hallowed be Thy Name,” and, as a penitent reconnoiterer, he must add, ” Forgive us our trespasses,” and upon his knees confess, “For Thine is the Kingdom.”
But not thus with the warrior who has the first two premises correctly formed. His conclusion is incontrovertible. At the very outset of his advance he learns his immortality, his heritage; also discerns the conditions upon which they are won. He realizes the dignity, grandeur and meaning of life, and knows that he is saved, crowned and Deified in spite of himself; whether he will or no. Neither for the simple wishing on his part, but with the knowledge obtained in Dame Nature’s laboratory he has but to hold up the Mystic Cross, which combines in its significance polar opposites and contradictory opposites, and the most fixed becomes volatile. Baser metals are changed to gold, and gold transmuted to Sunlight, the Water of Soul to the Wine of Spirit, the mask to reality, shadows to substance, error to truth, hate to love, death to life.
He also knows that the direct ray is Truth Absolute, while the oblique ray is Truth Relative, and will be refracted and reflected indefinitely from one plane to another and soon bewilder him in a labyrinth of shadowy reflects unless he sternly adheres to his knowledge and boldly clings to his Cross.
And, while he knows that it is his duty to realize and actualize all that he possibly can of truth absolute, he also knows it is likewise his duty to recognize the different planes of expression, and remember that truths on different planes are relative to each other, but that each is absolute on its own plane, and that, in order to advance from one plane to another, or higher, like water he cannot rise above his level until he find the point of equilibrium of that plane upon which he is, by means of which, like water vaporized, he rises to the plane above him.
But, until he does actually rise to the plane above him, he is ruled by the laws of that plane, and he is its subject until he, by rising to the plane above, becomes ruler of the plane below.
Poison, calumny and malice are absolute monarchs on their own special plane, but to the warrior, armed with the force which solves and transmutes, they become relative, and finally obedient.
Neither do I become ruler by simply repeating, parrot-like, “There is no such thing as malaria; malaria does not rule me, I rule malaria,” etc., but I must have within me the force which, having divined the meanings of things, has made them a part of me, having neutralized (nothing-ized) it by counterbalancing it with its polar opposite.
Thus, from ♑ of the Earthy Triplicity, do I arrive at true Progress, Advancing. The Fiery trip showed the perfect syllogism — the righteous judgment of Sagittarius, deducted from the major premise of Aries and the minor premise of Leo.
The Earthy syllogism, analogous to the Fiery, is symbolized in terms of a chemical compound, in which the sharp and stinging acids of censure and uncharitableness, leading to humility (Taurus), fuse and blend with the alkalies of patience (Virgo) under afflictions, and from this fusing and blending arising to a higher plane, or Capricorn.
From this Earthy syllogism I have learned from Taurus: “Hark!” from Virgo: “Wait!” from Capricorn: “Be Strong!”
Listening in true Humility for Thy hallowed name, I have found that even sorrow and failure, if accepted in patience, although they may seem like the reconnoiterer’s path, too often go back instead of forward, are, after all, accomplished progress, and are but seeming bonds, from which my soul, “like a hind let loose” all the more swiftly advances up the mountain steeps when the time for grazing arrives. Then he has reached that point where he can utilize the power and knowledge gained while passing through the first syllogism, Fire, and the second, Earth.
LESSON IV.
THE FIERY TRIPLICITY.
♈ ♌ ♐
♐, OR JUDGING.
As the victims have been slaughtered and consumed by the flames, the warrior must carefully collect together the ashes, or remnants, into the Sacred Urn of Pure-Heart, and then, placing them before the bar of conscience, await the responses.
These responses are judgments, proceeding from the Divinity within. If the offerings have been good and acceptable, and the rites properly observed, then the replies will surely be auspicious. But if the two former duties have not been properly performed, then am I guilty of the most awful sacrilege in approaching the Divinity profanely.
According to my own actions am I judged; my own conscience is the arbiter. This judge must give the decisions according to the manner in which the sentinel and the sacrificial priest have performed their tasks, for the judgment follows as inevitably as when, having placed two sides of an equilateral triangle together at the proper angle, the third side is the response, depending upon the other two.
Again, this response is the third note in the primary chord. If I have struck the first two, there is only one other which possibly can complete the chord.
Again, this response is the conclusion, or third term, in the perfect syllogism. The sentinel upon the watch-tower, having properly performed his duty, states the major premise; the sacrifice, with its implied suffering, gives out the minor note or premise; the Oracle speaks out the conclusion. Although the conclusion of a syllogism is its third term, yet it expresses the mystery of the trinity, for it is a trinity, and at the same time an organic unity. It combines the major and minor premises into a higher unity, which differs from either of them, just as the molecule of water combines two dissimilar elements into a unity differing from its component parts, and also as H and O combine with a lightning flash of soul which accompanies the combining together of the two premises of a syllogism into their higher unity, and is an intuitive spark from the altar of Divinity.
This altar is my Hearth ♐ of Pure- Heart. Unless this Urn is sufficiently purified by properly accepting (not rejecting) the experiences of life, it cannot receive the ashes of the sacrifice and impart to them the Divine Spark which makes them over into a living, organic unity, on a higher plane than they were before, nor raise in power and might the ashes of actions sown in weakness and watered with tears of suffering. This expresses the mystery of the re-birth, whereby the physical body is raised to the plane of spiritual body while yet in the possession of the physical.
This is that which constitutes the spiritual plane upon which one is born. There is a Divine correspondence, and the latent possibilities of the soul have the corresponding possibilities in the brain, which can be brought forth to usefulness while in the physical body. Bringing about the harmony between the two constitutes re-birth.
There is only one way of being re-born, just as there is only one way to be born into the physical, and this one way is revealed through the fiery syllogism (triplicity), the major premise of which is Truth Realized from the Sentry’s Watch-tower, the minor premise of which is Love Actualized by the Sacrifice of Burnt Offerings, the conclusion of which is Life Immortalized, or lifted from the plane of Time to Eternity. This conclusion is the Immaculate Conception of the re-birth, which is conscious son-ship with the Father.
Truth realized frees from every illusion of sense and casts out every error and all diseases. Truth realized is liberty, for from or by the power born of Knowledge you can be free.
Love actualized, or practiced, recognizes the Divine origin of every soul, and that every form of life and condition is necessary to the unfoldment of the soul in its evolutionary steps of progress, and, comprehending the law of contradictories, knows only universal charity and communion of saints, those who have passed through the fires of purification and learned the lessons therein taught, without prejudice, sentiment or pain. Love actualized is Fraternity. Then are we able to look upon all life as one Divine Whole, recognizing all as one fraternity, each filling the necessary notes in the Anthem of Creative Life.
Life eternalized, making every moment eternity, lifts the soul to a plane above illusion. Realizing the realities of life leaves no room for illusions where, grasping the equality of ratios, it knows only Oneness. But this true equality with God distinguishes between thoughts and thinkers. The recognition of God’s variety of life, form, color, etc., are each equally necessary to the fulfillment of the Divine plan. This is the only law of equality. Life, thus eternalized, is equality.
Liberty, Fraternity and Equality must ever be the war-cry of the true warrior. But if the offerings, or truths, seen from the watch-tower through the first side of the Fiery Triangle are not acceptable, nor the sacrifices of our past ideas and illusions properly observed or parted with, then, instead of liberty, comes renewed bondage to error and disease; instead of fraternity, failures, strife and murder; instead of equality with Divinity, there is a descent to the lower sphere and union with demons and fiends.
On the other hand, the Ascetic who mutilates, denies, the truths realized in the major premise from the sentry’s watch-tower, and destroys the offerings, the knowledge thus revealed, and who refuses the experiences of the sacrifices can never hear the responses nor know the mystery of re-birth. In either case, remorse and repentance, in themselves, are perfectly stupid, and only delay realization.
The suffering implied in remorse is not a true and acceptable sacrifice, for the major premise is still wrong, for truth never brings remorse. Remorse implies a misconception of the nature of reality. If I have struck the wrong note in my chord, and experienced inharmony, I only make the more haste to strike the right note. I waste no time in groaning over the dismal sound.
