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CHAPTER VIII.

“Think not my magic wonders wrought by aid
Of Stygian angels summoned up from Hell;
Scorned and accursed by those who have essay'd
Her gloomy Divs and Afrites to compel.
But by perception of the secret powers

Of mineral springs, in nature's inmost cell,

Of herbs in curtain of her greenest bowers,

And of the moving stars o'er mountain tops and towers."

"Who dares think one thing and another tell

My heart detests him as the gates of Hell !"-POPE.

-TASSO, Canto XIV.,

If man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence whom nature or providence has condescended to deceive and cneat by capacities for which there are no available objects."-BULWER-LYTTON: Strange Story.

HE preface of Richard A. Proctor's latest work on astronomy, en

Inftities, contains the

ordinary words: "It was their ignorance of the earth's place among infinities, which led the ancients to regard the heavenly bodies as ruling favorably or adversely the fates of men and nations, and to dedicate the days in sets of seven to the seven planets of their astrological system."

Mr. Proctor makes two distinct assertions in this sentence: 1. That the ancients were ignorant of the earth's place among infinities; and 2, That they regarded the heavenly bodies as ruling, favorably or adversely, the fates of men and nations.* We are very confident that there is at least good reason to suspect that the ancients were familiar with the movements, emplacement, and mutual relations of the heavenly bodies. The testimony of Plutarch, Professor Draper, and Jowett, are sufficiently explicit. But we would ask Mr. Proctor how it happens, if the ancient astronomers were so ignorant of the law of the birth and death of worlds that, in the fragmentary bits which the hand of time has spared us of ancient lore there should be-albeit couched in obscure language-so much information which the most recent discoveries of science have verified? Beginning with the tenth page of the work under notice, Mr. Proc

* We need not go so far back as that to assure ourselves that many great men believed the same. Kepler, the eminent astronomer, fully credited the idea that the stars and all heavenly bodies, even our earth, are endowed with living and thinking souls.

tor sketches for us the theory of the formation of our earth, and the suc cessive changes through which it passed until it became habitable for man. In vivid colors he depicts the gradual accretion of cosmic matter into gaseous spheres surrounded with "a liquid non-permanent shell;" the condensation of both; the ultimate solidification of the external crust; the slow cooling of the mass; the chemical results following the action of intense heat upon the primitive earthy matter; the formation of soils and their distribution; the change in the constitution of the atmosphere; the appearance of vegetation and animal life; and, finally, the advent of

man.

Now, let us turn to the oldest written records left us by the Chaldeans, the Hermetic Book of Numbers,* and see what we shall find in the allegorical language of Hermes, Kadmus, or Thuti, the thrice great Trismegistus. "In the beginning of time the great invisible one had his holy hands full of celestial matter which he scattered throughout the infinity; and lo, behold! it became balls of fire and balls of clay; and they scat tered like the moving metal † into many smaller balls, and began thei ceaseless turning; and some of them which were balls of fire became balls of clay; and the balls of clay became balls of fire; and the balls of fire were waiting their time to become balls of clay; and the others envied them and bided their time to become balls of pure divine fire.”

Could any one ask a clearer definition of the cosmic changes which Mr. Proctor so elegantly expounds?

Here we have the distribution of matter throughout space; then its concentration into the spherical form; the separation of smaller spheres from the greater ones; axial rotation; the gradual change of orbs from the incandescent to the earthy consistence; and, finally, the total loss of heat which marks their entrance into the stage of planetary death. The change of the balls of clay into balls of fire would be understood by materialists to indicate some such phenomenon as the sudden ignition of the star in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and the one in Serpentarius, in 1604, which was noted by Kepler. But, do the Chaldeans evince in this expression a profounder philosophy than of our day? Does this change into balls of "pure divine fire" signify a continuous planetary existence,

* We are not aware that a copy of this ancient work is embraced in the catalogue of any European library; but it is one of the "Books of Hermes," and it is referred to and quotations are made from it in the works of a number of ancient and mediæval philosophical authors. Among these authorities are Arnoldo di Villanova's "Rosarium philosoph. ;" Francesco Arnolphim's "Lucensis opus de lapide." Hermes Trismegis tus' "Tractatus de transmutatione metallorum," "Tabula smaragdina," and above all in the treatise of Raymond Lulli, "Ab angelis opus divinum de quinta essentia." + Quicksilver.

AN INVISIBLE EARTH.

255

correspondent with the spirit-life of man, beyond the awful mystery of death? If worlds have, as the astronomers tell us, their periods of embryo, infancy, adolescence, maturity, decadence, and death, may they not, like man, have their continued existence in a sublimated, ethereal, or spiritual form? The magians so affirm. They tell us that the fecund mother Earth is subject to the same laws as every one of her children. At her appointed time she brings forth all created things; in the fulness of her days she is gathered to the tomb of worlds. Her gross, material body slowly parts with its atoms under the inexorable law which demands their new arrangement in other combinations. Her own perfected vivi. fying spirit obeys the eternal attraction which draws it toward that central spiritual sun from which it was originally evolved, and which we vaguely know under the name of GOD.

"And the heaven was visible in seven circles, and the planets appeared with all their signs, in star-form, and the stars were divided and numbered with the rulers that were in them, and their revolving course was bounded with the air, and borne with a circular course, through the agency of the divine SPIRIT.

*

We challenge any one to indicate a single passage in the works of Hermes which proves him guilty of that crowning absurdity of the Church of Rome which assumed, upon the geocentric theory of astronomy, that the heavenly bodies were made for our use and pleasure, and that it was worth while for the only son of God to descend upon this cosmic mote and die in expiation for our sins! Mr. Proctor tells us of a liquid non-permanent shell of uncongealed matter enclosing a "viscous plastic ocean," within which "there is another interior solid globe rotating." We, on our part, turn to the Magia Adamica of Eugenius Philalethes, published in 1650, and at page 12, we find him quoting from Trismegistus in the following terms: "Hermes affirmeth that in the Beginning the earth was a quackmire or quivering kind of jelly, it being nothing else but water congealed by the incubation and heat of the divine spirit ; cum adhuc (sayeth he) Terra tremula esset, Lucente sole compacta

esto."

art.

In the same work, Philalethes, speaking in his quaint, symbolical way, says, "The earth is invisible . . . on my soul it is so, and which is more, the eye of man never saw the earth, nor can it be seen without To make this element invisible, is the greatest secret in magic. . as for this fæculent, gross body upon which we walk, it is a compost, and no earth but it hath earth in it, . . . in a word all the elements are visible but one, namely the earth, and when thou hast attained to so much per

"Hermes," iv. 6. Spirit here denotes the Deity-Pneuma, & @6os.

fection as to know why God hath placed the earth in abscondito,* thou hast an excellent figure whereby to know God Himself, and how He is visible, how invisible." †

Ages before our savants of the nineteenth century came into existence, a wise man of the Orient thus expressed himself, in addressing the invisible Deity: "For thy Almighty Hand, that made the world of formless matter."

There is much more contained in this language than we are willing to explain, but we will say that the secret is worth the seeking; perhaps in this formless matter, the pre-Adamite earth, is contained a "potency" with which Messrs. Tyndall and Huxley would be glad to acquaint themselves.

rant.

"Magia Adamica," p. 11.

The ignorance of the ancients of the earth's sphericity is assumed without war · What proof have we of the fact? It was only the literati who exhibited such an ignorance. Even so early as the time of Pythagoras, the Pagans taught it, Plutarch testifies to it, and Socrates died for it. Besides, as we have stated repeatedly, all knowl. edge was concentrated in the sanctuaries of the temples from whence it very rarely spread itself among the uninitiated. If the sages and priests of the remotest antiquity were not aware of this astronomical truth, how is it that they represented Kneph, the spirit of the first hour, with an egg placed on his lips, the egg signifying our globe, to which he imparts life by his breath. Moreover, if, owing to the difficulty of consulting the Chaldean "Book of Numbers," our critics should demand the citation of other authorities, we can refer them to Diogenes Laertius, who credits Manetho with having taught that the earth was in the shape of a ball. Besides, the same author, quoting most probably from the "Compendium of Natural Philosophy," gives the following statements of the Egyptian doctrine: "The beginning is matter Apxÿv pev eivai viņ, and from it the four elements separated. . . . The true form of God is unknown; but the world had a beginning and is therefore perishable. . . . The moon is eclipsed when it crosses the shadow of the earth" (Diogenes Laertius: 'Procin," §§ 10, 11). Besides, Pythagoras is credited with having taught that the earth was round, that it rotated, and was but a planet like any other of these celestial bodies. (See Fenelon's "Lives of the Philosophers.") In the latest of Plato's translations ("The Dialogues of Plato," by Professor Jowett), the author, in his introduction to "Timæus," notwithstanding "an unfortunate doubt" which arises in consequence of the word ico@ai capable of being translated either "circling" or "compacted," feels inclined to credit Plato with having been familiar with the rotation of the earth. Plato's doctrine is expressed in the following words: "The earth which is our nurse (compacted or) circling around the pole which is extended through the universe." But if we are to believe Proclus and Simplicius, Aristotle understood this word in "Timæus" "to mean ircling or revolving" (De Cœlo), and Mr. Jowett himself further admits that "Arist. tle attributed to Plato the doctrine of the rotation of the earth." (See vol. ii. of “Dial. of Plato." Introduction to "Timæus," pp. 501-2.) It would have been extraordinary, to say the least, that Plato, who was such an admirer of Pythagoras and who certainly must have had, as an initiate, access to the most secret doctrines of the great Samian, should be ignorant of such an elementary astronomical truth.

"Wisdom of Solomon," xi. 17.

EVOLUTION TAUGHT BY HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.

257

But to descend from universals to particulars, from the ancient theory of planetary evolution to the evolution of plant and animal life, as opposed to the theory of special creation, what does Mr. Proctor call the following language of Hermes but an anticipation of the modern theory of evolution of species? "When God had filled his powerful hands with those things which are in nature, and in that which compasseth nature, then shutting them close again, he said: 'Receive from me, O holy earth! that art ordained to be the mother of all, lest thou shouldst want anything;' when presently opening such hands as it becomes a God to have, he poured down all that was necessary to the constitution of things." Here we have primeval matter imbued with "the promise and potency of every future form of life," and the earth declared to be the predestined mother of everything that should thenceforth spring from her bosom.

More definite is the language of Marcus Antoninus in his discourse to himself. "The nature of the universe delights not in anything so much as to alter all things, and present them under another form. This is her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird, then out of the bird a beast-now a flower, then a frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performances as men are with their own fancies." *

Before any of our modern teachers thought of evolution, the ancients taught us, through Hermes, that nothing can be abrupt in nature; that she never proceeds by jumps and starts, that everything in her works is slow harmony, and that there is nothing sudden-not even violent death.

The slow development from preëxisting forms was a doctrine with the Rosicrucian Illuminati. The Tres Matres showed Hermes the mysterious progress of their work, before they condescended to reveal themselves to medieval alchemists. Now, in the Hermetic dialect, these three mothers are the symbol of light, heat, and electricity, or magnetism, the two latter being as convertible as the whole of the forces or igents which have a place assigned them in the modern "Force-correlaion." Synesius mentions books of stone which he found in the temple of Memphis, on which was engraved the following sentence: "One mature delights in another, one nature overcomes another, one nature overrules another, and the whole of them are one."

The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of Hermes: "Action is the life of Phta;" and Orpheus calls nature Пoλvμýxàvos μätmp, "the mother that makes many things," or the ingeni ous, the contriving, the inventive mother.

* Engenius Philalethes: "Magia Adamica."

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