THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

ASTRAL LIGHT

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Privation meant in the mind of the great philosopher [Aristotle] 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]

It [Tetragrammaton] is now in the “lap of Maya,” the Great Illusion, and between itself and the Reality has the Astral Light, the great Deceiver of man’s limited senses, unless Knowledge through Paramarthasatya [Absolute Truth] comes to the rescue.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p60]

... the “Dragon” is an old glyph for “Astral Light” (Primordial Principle), “which is the Wisdom of Chaos.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p73]

The Astral Light, or the Ether, of the ancient pagans (for the name of Astral Light is quite modern) is Spirit-Matter. Beginning with the pure spiritual plane, it becomes grosser as it descends until it becomes the Maya or the tempting and deceitful serpent on our plane.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p74fn]

The Hindu Chitra-Gupta who reads out the account of every Soul’s life from his register, called Agra-Sandhani; the “Assessors” who read theirs from the heart of the defunct, which becomes an open book before (whether) Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma – are all so many copies of, and variants from the Lipikas, and their Astral Records. Nevertheless, the Lipikas are not deities connected with Death, but with Life Eternal.

Connected as the Lipikas are with the destiny of every man and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light -- not fatalistically, but only because the future, like the PAST, is ever alive in the PRESENT –

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p105]

... while Sophia Akhamoth personified the lower Astral Light or Ether.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p197] (also included in Akasha extracts)

The astral light stands in the same relation to Akasa and Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to the Deity. They are one and the same thing seen from two aspects: the spiritual and the psychic – the super-ethereal or connecting link between matter and pure spirit, and the physical.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p197fn] (also included in Akasha extracts)

For all we know, FIRE may have been pure AKASA , the first Matter of the Magnum Opus of the Creators and “Builders,” that Astral Light which the paradoxical Eliphas Lévi calls in one breath “the body of the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet”, the “Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;...

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p253]

Eliphas Lévi shows it [Astral Light] very truly “a force in Nature,” by means of which “a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the “great Arcanum of transcendent Magic”. Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form (see The Mysteries of Magic, by A. E. Waite), we may explain them perhaps the better by the occasional addition of a word or two to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The Author says of the great Magic Agent -- “This ambient and all-penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the [Central or ‘Spiritual’] Sun’s splendour ... fixed by the weight of the atmosphere [?!] and the power of central attraction ... the Astral Light, this electro-magnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines round two poles . . . and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn” – emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos – “Time” – not the god Saturn or the planet. “It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau . . . lastly, it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force (it is not blind, and Lévi knew it), which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth; ‘for if they should not,’ they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire.” This great archæus is now discovered by, and only for one man – Mr. J. W. Keeley, of Philadelphia. For others, however, it is discovered yet must remain almost useless. “So far shalt thou go ...”

All the above is as practical as it is correct, save one error, which we will explain in the text further on. Eliphas Lévi commits a great blunder in always identifying the Astral Light with what we call Akasa. What it really is will be given in Part II of Vol.II.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p253fn]

No Hindu has ever mistaken Prakriti – the Astral Light being only above the lowest plane of Prakriti, the material Kosmos – for the “immortal spirit”. Prakriti is ever called Maya, illusion, and is doomed to disappear with the rest,...

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p255]

When the “Devourers” (in whom the men of science are invited to see, with some show of reason, atoms of the Fire-Mist, if they will, as the Occultist will offer no objection to this); when the “Devourers,” we say, have differentiated “the fire-atoms” by a peculiar process of segmentation, the latter become life-germs, which aggregate according to the laws of cohesion and affinity. Then the life-germs produce lives of another kind, which work on the structure of our globes . * * * *

Thus, in the first Round, the globe, having been built by the primitive fire-lives, i .e ., formed into a sphere – had no solidity, nor qualifications, save a cold brightness, nor form nor colour; it is only towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element which from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence became now in our Round the fire we know throughout the system. The Earth was in her first rupa, the essence of which is the Akasic principle named * * *

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p259]

The ASTRAL LIGHT or lower Ether is full of conscious and semi-conscious and unconscious entities; only the church has less power over them than over invisible microbes or mosquitoes.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p331fn]

Their Aether was the Akasa of the Hindus; the Ether accepted in physics is but one of its sub-divisions, on our plane – the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as good effects.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p343

Even Æsculapius, called the “Saviour of all,” is identical, according to ancient classics, with Ptah, the Egyptian Creative Intellect (or Divine Wisdom), and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis and Hercules; and Ptah is, in one of its aspects, the “Anima Mundi,” the Universal Soul of Plato, the “Divine Spirit” of the Egyptians, the “Holy Ghost” of the early Christians and Gnostics, and the Akasa of the Hindus, and even, in its lower aspect, the Astral Light. For Ptah was originally the “God of the Dead,” he in whose bosom they were received, hence the Limbus of the Greek Christians, or the Astral Light.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p353]

They know that the soul of the ASTRAL LIGHT is divine, and its body (the light-waves on the lower planes) infernal....
This is the “Astral Light,” or DAEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS.
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Akasa – the astral light – can be defined in a few words; it is the universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, the “Mysterium Magnum” from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it fills all the infinite Space; is Space itself, in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh principles. But as the finite in the Infinite, as regards manifestation, this light must have its shadowy side – as already remarked. And as the infinite can never be manifested, hence the finite world has to be satisfied with the shadow alone, which its actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and force to activity. Hence, while it is the universal Cause in its unmanifested unity and infinity, the Astral light becomes, with regard to Mankind, simply the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It is not its bright denizens – whether they are called Spirits of Light or Darkness – that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the unavoidable action and reaction in the great magic agent. It is mankind which has become the “Serpent of Genesis,” and thus causes daily and hourly the Fall and sin of the “Celestial Virgin” – which thus becomes the Mother of gods and devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving, beneficent deity to all those who stir her Soul and heart, instead of attracting to themselves her shadowy manifested essence, called by Eliphas Lévi – “the fatal light” which kills and destroys. Humanity, in its units, can overpower and master its effects; but only by the holiness of their lives and by producing good causes. It has power only on the manifested lower principles – the shadow of the Unknown and Incognizable Deity in Space.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p512]

Says Johannes Tritheim, the Abbot of Spanheim, the greatest astrologer and Kabalist of his day – “The art of divine magic consists in the ability to perceive the essence of things in the light of nature (astral light), and by using the soul-powers of the spirit to produce material things from the unseen universe, and in such operations the Above and the Below must be brought together and made to act harmoniously. The spirit of Nature (astral light) is a unity, creating and forming everything, and acting through the instrumentality of man it may produce wonderful things. Such processes take place according to law. You will learn the law by which these things are accomplished, if you learn to know yourself. You will know it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, and accomplish it by mixing your spirit with the essence that comes out of yourself. If you wish to succeed in such a work you must know how to separate Spirit and Life in Nature, and, moreover, to separate the astral soul in yourself and to make it tangible, and then the substance of the soul will appear visibly and tangibly rendered objective by the power of the spirit.” – (Quoted in Dr. Hartman’s “Paracelsus.”)

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p512fn]

... through every point of Infinite Space thrill the magnetic and electrical currents of animate Nature, the life-giving and death-giving waves, for death on earth becomes life on another plane. Lucifer is divine and terrestrial light, the “Holy Ghost” and “Satan,” at one and the same time, visible Space being truly filled with the differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested effects of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the Karma of humanity, both a personal and impersonal entity: personal, because it is the mystic name given by St. Martin to the Host of divine Creators, guides and rulers of this planet; impersonal, as the Cause and effect of universal Life and Death.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p513]

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As for something eternal and infinite, for that which had neither beginning nor end, there can be neither past nor future, but everything that was and will be, IS, therefore there never was an action or even thought, however simple, that is not impressed in imperishable records on this substance called by the Buddhists Svabhavat, by the Kabalists astral light. As in a faithful mirror this light reflects every image, and no human imagination could see anything outside that which exists impressed somewhere on the eternal substance.

[C.W.I, 268]

... the ascetic is enabled to see with the spiritual eye in the Astral Light, hear with the spiritual ear subjective sounds inaudible to others, and live and feel, so to say, in the Unseen Universe.

[C.W.II, 466-7]

To ardently desire to see a dead person is to evoke the image of that person, to call it forth from the astral light or ether wherein rest photographed the images of the Past. That is what is being partially done in the seance rooms. The Spiritualists are unconscious NECROMANCERS.

[C.W.III, 293fn]

Preserving corpses is to create phantoms in the imagination of the earth;* the spectres of the nightmare, of hallucination, and fear, are but the wandering photographs of preserved corpses. (Comment 12) Their reflections in the astral light.
* Fn. To intensify these images in the astral or sidereal light.

[C.W.III, 294]

The Kabalists and the Hermetic philosophers call the Astral Light the “heavenly or celectial Virgin”. The Astral Light in its unity is the 7th. Hence the seven principles diffused in every unity, or the 6 and ONE – two triangles and a crown.

[C.W.III, 326]

... the action of the ever-living spirit, like a breeze that clears the sky from its obstructing clouds – sweeps away the mist which lies between our normal vision and the Astral Light, and we obtain glimpses into, and of, that light.

[C.W.III, 328]

The astral light is the store-house and the record book of all things, and deeds have no secrets for such men.

[C.W.VII, 250]

As each student lives a better life and by his example imprints upon the astral light the picture of a higher aspiration acted in the world, he thus aids the souls of advanced development to descend from other spheres where the cycles are so dark that they can no longer stay there. [C.W.IX, 104]

[C.W.IX, 104]

Sage. — ... Then there is that which I referred to in a preceding conversation, about the effect of our acts and thoughts upon, not only the portion of the astral light belonging to each of us with its elementals but upon the whole astral world. If men saw the dreadful pictures imprinted there and constantly throwing down upon us their suggestions to repeat the same acts or thoughts, a millennium might soon draw near. The astral light is, in this sense, the same as the photographer’s negative plate, and we are the sensitive paper underneath, on which is being printed the picture. We can see two sorts of pictures for each act. One is the act itself, and the other is the picture of the thoughts and feelings animating those engaged in it. You can therefore see that you may be responsible for many more dreadful pictures than you had supposed. For actions of a simple outward appearance have behind them, very often, the worst of thoughts and desires.
Student.— Have these pictures in the astral light anything to do with us upon being reincarnated in subsequent earth-lives?
Sage. — They have very much indeed. We are influenced by them for vast periods of time, and in this you can perhaps find clues to many operations of active Karmic law for which you seek.

[C.W.IX, 126-7]

See Akasa for C.W.X, 251

Q. Can you explain to us how it is related to man, and its action in dream-life?
A. Differentiation in the physical world is infinite. Universal Ideation – or Mahat, if you like it – sends its homogeneous radiation into the heterogeneous world, and this reaches the human or personal minds through the Astral Light.
Q. But do not our minds receive their illuminations direct from the higher Manas through the Lower? And is not the former the pure emanation of divine Ideation – the “Manasa-Putras,” which incarnated in men?
A. They are. Individual Manasa-Putras or the Kumaras are the direct radiations of the divine Ideation – “individual” in the sense of later differentiation, owing to numberless incarnations. In sum they are the collective aggregation of that Ideation, become on our plane, or from our point of view, Mahat, as the Dhyan Chohans are in their aggregate the WORD or “Logos” in the formation of the World. Were the Personalities (Lower Manas or the Physical minds) to be inspired and illumined solely by their higher alter Egos there would be little sin in this world. But they are not; and getting entangled in the meshes of the Astral Light, they separate themselves more and more from their parent Egos. Read and study what Éliphas Lévi says of the Astral Light, which he calls Satan and the Great Serpent. The Astral Light has been taken too literally to mean some sort of a second blue sky. This imaginary space, however, on which are impressed the countless images of all that ever was, is, and will be, is but a too sad reality. It becomes in, and for, man – if at all psychic -- and who is not? – a tempting Demon, his “evil angel,” and the inspirer of all our worst deeds. It acts on the will of even the sleeping man, through visions impressed upon his slumbering brain (which visions must not be confused, with the “dreams”), and these germs bear their fruit when he awakes.

[C.W.X, 252]

... the Astral Light, the great Deceiver of man’s limited senses,...

[C.W.X, 356]

See Akasa for C.W.X, 360-1

Q. Is there an evolution of types through the various planes of the Astral Light?
A. You must follow out the simile of the evolution of the acorn. From the acorn will grow an oak and this oak, as a tree, may have a thousand forms, all of which vary the one from the other. All these forms are contained within the acorn, and though the form which the tree will take depends on extraneous circumstances, yet that, which Aristotle called the “privation of matter” exists beforehand in the Astral waves. But the noumenal germ of the oak exists beyond the plane of the Astral Light; it is only the subjective picture of it that already exists in the Astral Light, and the development of the oak tree is the result of the developed prototype in the Astral Light, which development proceeds from higher to lower planes, until on the lowest plane it has its last consolidation and development of form. And here is the explanation of the curious fact according to the Vedantin assertion that each plant has its Karma and that its growth is the result of Karma. This Karma proceeds from the lower Dhyan-Chohans who trace out and plan the growth of the tree.

[C.W.X, 362-3]

See Akasa for C.W.X, 384

See Akasa for C.W.XI, 490

According to Occult teaching the Astral light is not the “thought substance” of the Universe, but the recorder of every thought; the universal mirror which reflects every event and thought as every being and thing, animate or inanimate. We call it the great Sea of Illustion, Maya.

[C.W.XII, 56]

For, as Occultism teaches, if the Higher Mind-Entity – the permanent and the immortal – is of the divine homogeneous essence of “Alaya-Akasa,” or Mahat – its reflection, the Personal Mind, is, as a temporary “Principle,” of the Substance of the Astral Light. As a pure ray of the “Son of the Universal Mind,” it could perform no functions in the body, and would remain powerless over the turbulent organs of Matter. Thus, while its inner constitution is Manasic, its “body,” or rather functioning essence, is heterogeneous, and leavened with the Astral Light, the lowest element of Ether. It is a part of the mission of the Manasic Ray, to get gradually rid of the blind, deceptive element which, though it makes of it an active spiritual entity on this plane, still brings it into so close contact with matter as to entirely becloud its divine nature and stultify its intuitions.

[C.W.XII, 371]

And this is how the great Mage of the XIXth century corroborates the foregoing when speaking of the Astral Light:
We have said that to acquire magical power, two things are necessary: to disengage the will from all servitude, and to exercise it in control.
The sovereign will [of the adept] is represented in our symbols by the woman who crushes the serpent’s head, and by the resplendent angel who represses the dragon, and holds him under his foot and spear; the great magical agent, the dual current of light, the living and astral fire of the earth, has been represented in the ancient theogonies by the serpent with the head of a bull, a ram, or a dog. It is the double serpent of the caduceus, it is the Old Serpent of Genesis, but it is also the brazen serpent of Moses entwined around the tau, that is to say, the generative lingam. It is also the goat of the witch-sabbath, and the Baphomet of the Templars; it is the Hylê of the Gnostics; it is the double-tailed serpent which forms the legs of the solar cock of the Abraxas: finally, it is the Devil of M. Eudes de Mirville. But in very fact it is the blind force which souls [i.e., the lower Manas or Nephesh] have to conquer to liberate themselves from the bonds of the earth; for if their will does not free them from this fatal attraction, they will be absorbed in the current by the force which has produced them, and will return to the central and eternal fire.

[C.W.XII, 373-4]

The record of past events, of every minutest action, and of passing thoughts, in fact, are really impressed on the imperishable waves of the ASTRAL LIGHT,...

[C.W.XII, 407]

Now the Astral Light is not a universally diffused stuff, but pertains to our earth and all other bodies of the system on the same plane of matter with it. Our Astral Light is, so to speak, the Linga-Sarira of our earth; only instead of being its primordial prototype, as in the case of our Chhaya, or Double, it is the reverse. While the human and animal bodies grow and develop in the model of their antetypal doubles, it is the Astral Light that is born from the terrene emanations, grows and develops after its prototypal parent, and reflects everything reversed in its treacherous wave (both from the upper planes and from its lower solid plane, the earth).

[C.W.XII, 613]

In that paragraph where it is said under “Astral Prakritic Consciousness,” that objects are reversed, it should be further remembered that although objects, numbers, etc., are in fact reversed on that plane, many clairvoyants unconsciously to themselves often perform the reversion of the reversed image, so as to see the numbers and objects correctly. This again illustrates the delusive character of this plane, inasmuch as the ordinary seer does not know the facts as they are, and acts unknowingly so far as his reason is concerned, being unaware that he has reversed the reverse image, just as we do with the physical eye.

[C.W.XII, 680]

Hence the Lower Manas clothes itself with the essence of the Astral Light, and this Astral Envelope shuts it out from its Parent, except through the Antaskarana.

[C.W.XII, 710]

In the Chaldean cosmogony, Ana signifies the “invisible kingdom”, the Heavenly Mother of the terrestrial sea: or esoterically Akasa the mother of the Astral Light.

[C.W.XIII, 75fn]

... a pencil of “focalised akasa” or astral light,...

[C.W.XIII, 292]

That which the world regards simply as cosmic Space, an abstract representation, the Hindu Rishi, the Chaldaean Magus, the Egyptian Hierophant held, each and all, as the one eternal Root of all, the playground of all the Forces in Nature. It is the fountainhead of all terrestrial life, and the abode of those (to us) invisible swarms of existences – of real beings, as of the shadows only thereof, conscious and unconscious, intelligent and senseless – that surround us on all sides, that interpenetrate the atoms of our Kosmos, and see us not, as we do not either see or sense them through our physical organisms. For the Occultist “Space” and “Universe” are synonyms. In Space there is not Matter, Force, nor Spirit, but all that and much more. It is the One Element, and that one the Anima Mundi – Space, Akasa, Astral Light – the Root of Life which, in its eternal, ceaseless motion, like the out- and in-breathing of one boundless ocean, evolves but to reabsorb all that lives and feels and thinks and has its being in it.

[C.W.XIV, 412]

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In the Hindu Katakopanisad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World, “Maha = Atma, Brahm, the Spirit of Life”; these latter appellations are identical with the Universal soul, or Anima Mundi, and the Astral Light of the theurgists and kabalists.

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 56]

And what can these dual myths mean but the physico-chemical principle of primordial creation? The first revelation of the Supreme Cause in its triple manifestation of spirit, force, and matter; the divine correlation, at its starting-point of evolution, allegorized as the marriage of fire and water, products of electrifying spirit, union of the male active principle with the female passive element, which become the parents of their tellurian child, cosmic matter, the prima materia, whose spirit is ether [aether], the ASTRAL LIGHT!

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 156]

When those circulations – Eliphas Levi calls “currents of the astral light” – in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period.

[Isis Unveiled, Vol.I, 247]

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