THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

ANIMA MUNDI

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It is a mistake of those who know nothing of the Universality of the Occult doctrines from the very cradle of the human races, and especially so of those scholars who reject the very idea of a “primordial” revelation”, to teach that the Anima Mundi, the One Life or “Universal Soul”, was made known only by Anaxagoras, or during his age.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p50]

... “The Deity is one, because It is infinite. It is triple, because it is ever manifesting.” This manifestation is triple in its aspects, for it requires, as Aristotle has it, three principles for every natural body to become objective: privation, form, and matter. Privation meant in the mind of the great philosopher that which the Occultists call the prototypes impressed in the Astral Light – the lowest plane and world of Anima Mundi. The union of these three principles depends upon a fourth -- the LIFE which radiates from the summits of the Unreachable, to become an universally diffused Essence on the manifested planes of Existence.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p59]

Svabhavat is the mystic Essence, the plastic root of physical Nature – “Numbers” when manifested; the Number, in its Unity of Substance, on the highest plane. The name is of Buddhist use and a synonym for the four-fold Anima Mundi, the Kabalistic “Archetypal World,” from whence proceed the “Creative, Formative, and the Material Worlds.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p98-99]

Then steps on the stage of creation the “spirit” (of the Earth so-called, or the Soul, Psyche, which St. James calls ‘devilish’, the lower portion of the Anima Mundi or Astral Light.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p194]

“A characteristic of Akasa will serve to show how inadequately it is represented by ‘Aether’,” writes the author of Rational Refutations of the Hindu Philosophical Systems (Nilakantha Gore), thus unconsciously helping Occultism. “In dimension it is ... infinite; it is not made up of parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility do not appertain to it. So far forth it corresponds exactly to time, space, Isvara, (“The Lord,” but rather creative potency and soul – anima mundi). Its speciality, as compared therewith, consists in its being the material cause of sound. Except for its being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity” (p.120).

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p296fn]

“In the Hindu Kathakopanishad, Purusha, the divine spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great soul of thre world Mahan-atman, the Spirit of Life, etc., etc.”

The latter appellations are all identical with Anima Mundi, or the “Universal Soul”, the astral light of the Kabalist and the Occultist, or the “Egg of Darkness”.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p365 and fn]

Loki, the fire-god, is said to have hidden in the water, as well as in the moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein; and this belief that the fire finds refuge in the water was not limited to the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally taken up by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as fire” – the breath of the Father-SUN. This “Fire” descends also into the Water or the Sea: Mare, Mary. The dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations, it was sacred to Venus, the goddess born from the sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima-Mundi, or the Holy Spirit.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p402-3]

Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist (and the Kabalist). Both are electricity – the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect (or rather the architects, the “Builders” , called One collectively), its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling, electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p579]

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He [man, at start] is but one remove from the universal and Spiritual World Essence – the Anima Mundi of the Greeks, or that which humanity in its spiritual decadence has degraded into a mythical personal God.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 18, Chronological Edition or Letter 63, Barker Numbering.]

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Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity – the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling, electric bosom, springs matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies.

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 258]

The all-pervading, universal soul, the Anima Mundi, is Nirvana; and Buddha, as a generic name, is the anthropomorphized monad of Pythagoras. When resting in Nirvana, the final bliss, Buddha is the silent monad, dwelling in darkness and silence; he is also the formless Brahm, the sublime but unknowable Deity, which pervades invisibly the whole universe.

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 291]

The Astral Light, or anima mundi, is dual and bi-sexual.The male part of it is purely divine and spiritual; it is the Wisdom; while the female portion (the spiritus of the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life-principle of every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything living. Animals have only the germ of the highest immortal soul as a third principle. It will develop but through a series of countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolution is contained in the kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a spirit; and the spirit a god.”

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 301fn]

Pythagoras, Plato, Timæus of Locris, and the whole Alexandrian school derived the soul from the universal World-Soul; and the latter was, according to their own teachings – ether; something of such a fine nature as to be perceived only by our inner sight. Therefore, it cannot be the essence of the Monas, or cause, because the anima mundi is but the effect, the objective emanation of the former.... This divine and superior region, in which they located the invisible and supreme deity, was considered by them (by Aristotle himself) as a fifth element, purely spiritual and divine, whereas the anima mundi proper was considered as composed of a fine, igneous, and ethereal nature spread throughout the universe, in short – ether.

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 316-7]

The soul is born in this world upon leaving another world (anima mundi), in which her existence precedes the one we all know (on earth).

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 345]

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