THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

ELEMENTS

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Occult Science recognises Seven Cosmical Elements – entirely physical, and the fifth (Ether) semi-material, as it will become visible in the air towards the end of our Fourth Round, to reign supreme over the others during the whole of the Fifth. The remaining two are as yet absolutely beyond the range of human perception. These latter will, however, appear as presentments during the 6th and 7th Races of this Round, and will become known in the 6th and 7th Rounds respectively.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p12]

Occult Science has been teaching for ages that Akasa – of which Ether is the grossest form – the fifth universal Cosmic Principle (to which corresponds and from which proceeds human Manas) is, cosmically, a radiant, cool diathermanous plastic matter, creative in its physical nature, correlative in its grossest aspects and portions, immutable in its higher principles. In the former condition it is called the Sub-Root; and in conjunction with radiant heat, it recalls “dead worlds to life”. In its highest aspects it is the Soul of the World; in its lower – the DESTROYER.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p13fn]

The One Eternal Element, or element-containing Vehicle, is Space, dimensionless in every sense; co-existent with which are – endless duration, primordial (hence indestructible) matter, and motion – absolute “perpetual motion” which is the “breath” of the “One” Element. This breath, as seen, can never cease, not even during the Pralayic eternities.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p55]

The “Virgin Egg” is the microcosmic symbol of the macrocosmic prototype – the “Virgin Mother” – Chaos or the Primeval Deep. The male Creator (under whatever name) springs forth from the Virgin female, the immaculate root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and natural sciences, can fail to see its suggestiveness? Cosmos as receptive Nature is an Egg fructified – yet left immaculate; once regarded as boundless, it could have no other representation than a spheroid. The Golden Egg was surrounded by seven natural elements (ether, fire, air, water), “four ready, three secret.” It may be found stated in Vishnu Purâna, where elements are translated “envelopes” and a secret one is added: “Aham-kara”. The original text has no “Ahamkara;” it mentions seven Elements without specifying the last three.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p65-6]

The “Sea of Fire” is then the Super-Astral (i.e., noumenal) Light, the first radiation from the Root, the Mulaprakriti, the undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which becomes Astral Matter. It is also called the “Fiery Serpent,” as above described. If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying, and that all the rest – as in the world of phenomena – are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now called) of that One, from Cosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super-human down to human and subhuman beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence – then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered. All the Kabalists and Occultists, Eastern and Western, recognise (a) the identity of “Father-Mother” with primordial Æther or Akasa, (Astral Light); and (b) its homogeneity before the evolution of the “Son,” cosmically Fohat, for it is Cosmic Electricity. “Fohat hardens and scatters the seven brothers” (Book III. Dzyan); which means that the primordial Electric Entity – for the Eastern Occultists insist that Electricity is an Entity – electrifies into life, and separates primordial stuff or pregenetic matter into atoms, themselves the source of all life and consciousness.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p75-6]

Primordial matter, then, before it emerges from the plane of the never-manifesting, and awakens to the thrill of action under the impulse of Fohat, is but “a cool Radiance, colourless, formless, tasteless, and devoid of every quality and aspect.” Even such are her first-born, the “four sons,” who “are One, and become Seven, – the entities, by whose qualifications and names the ancient Eastern Occultists called the four of the seven primal “centres of Forces,” or atoms, that develop later into the great Cosmic “Elements,” now divided into the seventy or so sub-elements, known to science. The four primal natures of the first Dhyan Chohans, are the so-called (for want of better terms) “Akasic,” “Ethereal,” “Watery,” and “Fiery,” answering, in the terminology of practical occultism, to scientific definitions of gases, which, to convey a clear idea to both Occultists and laymen, must be defined as Parahydrogenic, Paraoxygenic, Oxyhydrogenic, and Ozonic, or perhaps Nitrozonic; the latter forces or gases (in Occultism, supersensuous, yet atomic substances) being the most effective and active when energising on the plane of more grossly differentiated matter. These are both electro-positive and electro-negative.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p82]

Next we see Cosmic matter scattering and forming itself into elements; grouped into the mystic four within the fifth element – Ether, the lining of Akasa, the Anima Mundi or Mother of Kosmos. “Dots, Lines, Triangles, Cubes, Circles” and finally “Spheres” – why or how? Because, says the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature geometrizes universally in all her manifestations.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p97]

He [our Sun] is called indifferently the Son of Dyaus and of Aditi, because no distinction is made with reference to, or scope allowed for, the esoteric meaning. Thus he is depicted as drawn by seven horses, and by one horse with seven heads; the former referring to his seven planets, the latter to their one common origin from the One Cosmic Element. This “One Element” is called figuratively “FIRE”. The Vedas teach that “fire is verily all the deities”.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p101]

Fohat is closely related to the “ONE LIFE.” From the Unknown One, the Infinite TOTALITY, the manifested ONE, or the periodical, Manvantaric Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its Fountain-Source, is the Demiurgos or the creative Logos of the Western Kabalists, and the four-faced Brahmâ of the Hindu religion. In its totality, viewed from the standpoint of manifested Divine Thought in the esoteric doctrine, it represents the Hosts of the higher creative Dhyan Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind, the concealed Wisdom of Adi-Budha – the One Supreme and eternal – manifests itself as Avalokiteshwara (or manifested Iswara), which is the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of the Hermetic philosopher, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Atman of the Vedantins. By the action of the manifested Wisdom, or Mahat, represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual Energy in the Kosmos, the reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and the intellectual Force accompanying such ideation, becomes objectively the Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven principles of AKASA, acts upon manifested substance or the One Element, as declared above, and by differentiating it into various centres of Energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various states of being in the manifested Solar System.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p110]

Moreover, in Occult metaphysics there are, properly speaking, two “ONES” – the One on the unreachable plane of Absoluteness and Infinity, on which no speculation is possible, and the Second “One” on the plane of Emanations. The former can neither emanate nor be divided, as it is eternal, absolute, and immutable. The Second, being, so to speak, the reflection of the first One (for it is the Logos, or Eswara, in the Universe of Illusion), can do all this. It emanates from itself – as the upper sephirothal Triad emanates the lower seven Sephiroth – the seven Rays or Dhyan Chohans; in other words, the Homogeneous becomes the Heterogeneous, the “Protyle” differentiates into the Elements. But these, unless they return into their primal Element, can never cross beyond the Laya, or zero-point.

Hence the allegory. The Lipika separate the world (or plane) of pure spirit from that of Matter. Those who “descend and ascend” – the incarnating Monads, and men striving towards purification and “ascending,” but still not having quite reached the goal – may cross the “circle of the Pass-Not,” only on the day “Be-With-Us”; that day when man, freeing himself from the trammels of ignorance, and recognising fully the non-separateness of the Ego within his personality – erroneously regarded as his own – from the UNIVERSAL EGO (Anima Supra-Mundi), merges thereby into the One Essence to become not only one “with us” (the manifested universal lives which are “ONE” LIFE), but that very life itself.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p130-1]

... from the purely occult and Cosmical, Fohat, the “Son of the sons”, the androgynous energy resulting from this “Light of the Logos”, and which manifests in the plane of the objective Universe as hidden, as much as the revealed, Electricity – which is LIFE.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p136-7]

The seven Laya centres are the seven Zero points, using the term Zero in the same sense that Chemists do, to indicate a point at which, in Esotericism, the scale of reckoning of differentiation begins. From the Centres – beyond which Esoteric philosophy allows us to perceive the dim metaphysical outlines of the “Seven Sons” of Life and Light, the Seven Logoi of the Hermetic and all other philosophers – begins the differentiation of the elements which enter into the constitution of our Solar System.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p138-9]

Although these Stanzas refer to the whole Universe after a Mahapralaya (universal destruction), yet this sentence, as any student of Occultism may see, refers also by analogy to the evolution and final formation of the primitive (though compound) Seven Elements on our Earth. Of these, four elements are now fully manifested, while the fifth – Ether – is only partially so, as we are hardly in the second half of the Fourth Round, and consequently the fifth Element will manifest fully only in the Fifth Round. The Worlds, including our own, were of course, as germs, primarily evolved from the ONE Element in its second stage (“Father-Mother,” the differentiated World’s Soul, not what is termed the “Over-Soul” by Emerson), whether we call it, with modern Science, Cosmic dust and Fire Mist, or with Occultism – Akasa, Jivatma, divine Astral Light, or the “Soul of the World.” But this first stage of Evolution was in due course of time followed by the next. No world, as no heavenly body, could be constructed on the objective plane, had not the Elements been sufficiently differentiated already from their primeval Ilus, resting in Laya.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p140]

Now, if one supposed element on proper treatment is thus found to comprise dissimilar molecules, we are surely warranted in asking whether similar results might not be obtained in other elements, perhaps in all elements, if treated in the right way. We may even ask where the process of sorting-out is to stop – a process which of course pre-supposes variations between the individual molecules of each species. And in these successive separations we naturally find bodies approaching more and more closely to each other”. (Presidential address before the Royal Society of Chemists, March, 1888.)

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p141fn]

... differentiated as these elements were in the beginning, still, they were not the compound bodies known to science, as they are now. Neither Water, Air, Earth (synonym for solids generally) existed in their present form, representing the three states of matter alone recognised by Science; for all these are the productions already recombined by the atmospheres of globes completely formed – even to fire – so that in the first periods of the earth’s formation they were something quite sui generis. Now that the conditions and laws ruling our solar system are fully developed; and that the atmosphere of our earth, as of every other globe, has become, so to say, a crucible of its own, Occult Science teaches that there is a perpetual exchange taking place in space of molecules, or of atoms rather, correlating, and thus changing their combining equivalents on every planet....The spectroscope only shows the probable similarity (on external evidence) of terrestrial and sidereal substance; it is unable to go any farther, or to show whether atoms gravitate towards one another in the same way and under the same conditions as they are supposed to do on our planet, physically and chemically. The scale of temperature, from the highest degree to the lowest that can be conceived of, may be imagined to be one and the same in and for the whole Universe; nevertheless, its properties, other than those of dissociation and re-association, differ on every planet; and thus atoms enter into new forms of existence, undreamt of, and incognizable to, physical Science. As already expressed in Five Years of Theosophy, the essence of cometary matter, for instance, “is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest chemists and physicists of the earth are familiar.” And even that matter, during rapid passage through our atmosphere, undergoes a certain change in its nature. Thus not alone the elements of our planets, but even those of all its sisters in the Solar System, differ as widely from each other in their combinations, as from the Cosmic elements beyond our Solar limits.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p142]

Men of science may term them Force or Forces generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism sees in the effects “Elementals” (forces), and, in the direct causes producing them, intelligent DIVINE Workmen. The intimate connection of those Elementals (guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers) – their correlation we might call it – with the elements of pure Matter, results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p146]

The sensation of light is like the sound of the rolling wheels – a purely phenomenal effect, having no existence outside the observer; the proximate exciting cause of the sensation is comparable to the driver – a supersensuous state of matter in motion, a Nature-Force or Elemental. But, behind even this, stand – just as the owner of the carriage directs the driver from within—the higher and noumenal causes, the Intelligences from whose essence radiate these States of “Mother,” generating the countless milliards of Elementals or psychic Nature-Spirits, just as every drop of water generates its physical infinitesimal Infusoria. It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the principles from one planet to the other, from one star to another – child-star. When a planet dies, its informing principles are transferred to a laya or sleeping centre, with potential but latent energy in it, which is thus awakened into life and begins to form itself into a new sidereal body.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p147]

This is what she described in one of her experiments; with a particle of a meteorite placed on her forehead, in an envelope, the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said:
“What a difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the real existence. (Vol.III, p 345-6.)

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p210fn]

Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element called the World-Soul, every nucleus of Cosmic matter, suddenly launched into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances for itself a place in the infinitudes. It circles round and round between denser and already fixed bodies, moving by jerks, and pulling towards some given point or centre that attracts it, trying to avoid, like a ship drawn into a channel dotted with reefs and sunken rocks, other bodies that draw and repel it in turn; many perish, their mass disintegrating through stronger masses, and, when born within a system, chiefly within the insatiable stomachs of various Suns.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p204]

The seven fundamental transformations of the globes or heavenly spheres, or rather of their constituent particles of matter, is described as follows: (1) The homogeneous (2) the aeriform and radiant (gaseous); (3) Curd-like (nebulous); (4) Atomic, Ethereal (beginning of motion, hence of differentiation); (5) Germinal, fiery, (differentiated, but composed of the germs only of the Elements, in their earliest states, they having seven states, when completely developed on our earth); (6) Fourfold, vapoury (the future Earth); (7) Cold and depending (on the Sun for life and light).

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p206fn]

The highest group is composed of the divine Flames, so-called, also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior divine World. They are the formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper sephirothal TRIAD, which is placed by the Kabalists in the “Archetypal World.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p213]

“The first after the ‘One’ is divine Fire; the second, Fire and Æther; the third is composed of Fire, Æther and Water; the fourth of Fire, Æther, Water, and Air.” The One is not concerned with Man-bearing globes, but with the inner invisible Spheres. “The ‘First-Born’ are the LIFE, the heart and pulse of the Universe; the Second are its MIND or Consciousness,”

(c) The second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Æther corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or the Atma-Buddhi) whose names are legion, are still formless, but more definitely “substantial.” They are the first differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or “Creation” – a misleading word. As the name shows, they are the prototypes of the incarnating Jivas or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit of Life. It is through these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the ray which is furnished by them with its future vehicle, the Divine Soul, Buddhi. These are directly concerned with the Hosts of the higher world of our system. From these twofold Units emanate the threefold.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p216]

The three middle principles in earth and man became with every Race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the physical intellect; the essence of elements becoming the material and composite elements now known.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p225]

The worlds, to the profane,” [says a Commentary], “are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves collectively a divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of lives. Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, being, its particles are fiery lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other life that they consume. Therefore they are named the “DEVOURERS.” ... “Every visible thing in this Universe was built by such LIVES, from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.”... “From the ONE LIFE formless and Uncreate, proceeds the Universe of lives. First was manifested from the Deep (Chaos) cold luminous fire (gaseous light?) which formed the curds in Space.” (Irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?)....

... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifested MATERIAL, Fire, the hot flames, the wanderers in heaven (comets); heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water (?); then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the pilgrims (comets?) and forms solid watery wheels (MATTER globes). Bhumi (the Earth) appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element – WATER; and from the breath of all (atmospheric) AIR is born. These four are the four lives of the first four periods (Rounds) of Manvantara. The three last will follow.”

This means that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, – which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the “Ever-becoming” on the manifested plane, then those Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the Manvantaric end. Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be called one aspect of Nature – called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be so de facto, “One-dimensional Space.” The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements – Fire and Earth – and its humanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name Humanity to beings living under conditions unknown to men, was – to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense (the only way in which it can be used correctly) – “a two-dimensional species.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p249-251]

The elements, whether simple or compound, could not have remained the same since the commencement of the evolution of our chain. Everything in the Universe progresses steadily in the Great Cycle, while incessantly going up and down in the smaller cycles. Nature is never stationary during manvantara, as it is ever becoming, not simply being; and mineral, vegetable, and human life are always adapting their organisms to the then reigning Elements, and therefore those Elements were then fitted for them, as they are now for the life of present humanity. It will only be in the next, or fifth, Round that the fifth Element, Ether – the gross body of Akasa, if it can be called even that – will, by becoming a familiar fact of Nature to all men, as air is familiar to us now, cease to be as at present hypothetical, and also an “agent” for so many things. And only during that Round will those higher senses, the growth and development of which Akasa subserves, be susceptible of a complete expansion. As already indicated, a partial familiarity with the characteristic of matter – permeability – which should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the next element added to our resources in the next Round, permeability will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the densest forms of this will seem to man’s perceptions as obstructive to him as a thick fog, and no more.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p257-8]

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 Akâsic principle named * * * ...

“It is through and from the radiations of the seven bodies of the seven orders of Dhyanis, that the seven discrete quantities (Elements), whose motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are born.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p259]

Speaking of it in his Preface to the “History of Magic” Eliphas Lévi says: It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly communicate with each other; from it – that sympathy and antipathy are born; from it – that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural visions take place ... . Astral Light, acting under the impulsion of powerful wills, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things ... .God created it on that day when he said: Fiat Lux, and it is directed by the Egregores, .i.e., the chiefs of the souls who are the spirits of energy and action,” Eliphas Lévi ought to have added that the astral light, or primordial substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light, Lux, esoterically explained, is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane and the reflected radiance of the Divine Light emanating from the collective body of those who are called the “LIGHTS” and the “FLAMES”.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p259fn]

There were produced out of the Ideos, the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take place in a material mode or by simple separation, but spiritually and dynamically (not even complex combinations – e.g., mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination), just as fire may come out of a pebble or a tree out of a seed, although thereis originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed. “Spirit is living and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit (Prakriti-Purusha?) produce all thing, but they are essentially one and not two ...” The elements, too, have each one its own Yliaster, because all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fountain. But as from the seed grow the roots with their fibres, afterwards the stalk with its branches and leaves, and lastly the flowers and seeds; likewise all beings were born from the elements and consist of elementary substances out of which other forms may come into existence, bearing the characteristics of their parents. The elements , as the mothers of all creatures, are of an invisible spiritual nature, and have souls *. They all spring from the Mysterium Magnus.

Compare this with the Vishnu-Purana:

From ... Pradhana (primordial substance), presided over by soul, Kshetrajna (embodied Spirit?), proceeds the unequal development (Evolution) of those qualities ... From the great principle (Mahat) (Universal) Intellect (or Mind) ... is produced ... the origin of the (subtile) elements, and of the organs of sense ...

* Fn. The Eastern Occultist says – “are guided and informed by the Spiritual Beings” – the Workmen in the invisible worlds and behind the veil of Occult nature, or nature in abscondito.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p284]

(Note): 3rd and 4th orders p 218, 5th p 219, 6th and 7th p 221, relate to constitution of man.

Because sound and rhythm are closely related to the four Elements of the Ancients; and because such or another vibration in the air is sure to awaken corresponding powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case may be.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p307]

Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless Ether where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned – an Occult teaching.

It thus becomes clear that it is from Ether in its highest synthetic aspect, once anthropomorphised, that sprung the first idea of a personal creative deity. With the philosophical Hindus the elements are Tamas, i.e., “unenlightened by intellect, which they obscure.”

We have now to exhaust the question of the mystical meaning of “Primordial Chaos” and of the Root-Principle, and show how they were connected in the ancient philosophies with Akasa, wrongly translated Æther, and also with Maya (illusion) – of which Ishwara is the male aspect. We shall speak further on of the intelligent “principle,” or rather of the invisible immaterial properties, in the visible and material elements, that “sprang from the primordial Chaos.”

For, “What is the primordial Chaos but Æther?” it is asked in Isis Unveiled. Not the modern Ether; not such as is recognised now, but such as was known to the ancient philosophers long before the time of Moses, Æther, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the germs of universal creation. Upper Æther or Akasa, is the celestial virgin and mother of every existing form and being, from whose bosom, as soon as “incubated” by the Divine Spirit, are called into existence Matter and Life, Force and Action. Æther is the Aditi of the Hindus, and it is Akasa. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical action are so little understood even now that fresh facts are constantly widening the range of our knowledge. Who knows where ends the power of this protean giant – Æther; or whence its mysterious origin? Who, we mean, that denies the spirit that works in it, and evolves out of it all visible forms?

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p332]

From this triple ONE emanated the whole Kosmos. First from ONE emanated number TWO, or Air (the Father), the creative element; and then number THREE, Water (the Mother), proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic four, the Arba-il. “When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a point (primordial point, or the first Sephiroth, air, or Holy Ghost), shaped into a sacred form (the ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly man), and covered it with a rich and splendid garment, that is the world.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p337]

Therefore, Cosmic Ideation and Cosmic Substance in their primal character are one also.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p337fn]

Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance – one of whose principles is Ether – are one, and include the ELEMENTS, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyani-Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc., etc.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p339]

CHAOS – THEOS – KOSMOS.

THESE three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has defined it, “Space, the all containing uncontained, is the primary embodiment of simply Unity... . boundless extension.” But, he asks again, “boundless extension of what?” – and makes the correct reply – “The unknown container of all, the Unknown FIRST CAUSE.” This is a most correct definition and answer, most esoteric and true, from every aspect of occult teaching.

SPACE, which, in their ignorance and iconoclastic tendency to destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have proclaimed “an abstract idea” and a void, is, in reality, the container and the body of the Universe with its seven principles. It is a body of limitless extent, whose PRINCIPLES, in Occult phraseology – each being in its turn a septenary – manifest in our phenomenal world only the grossest fabric of their sub-divisions. “No one has ever seen the Elements in their fulness,” the Doctrine teaches....

“Chaos” is called senseless by the ancients, because it represented and contained in itself (Chaos and Space being synonymous) all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated state. They made of Ether, the fifth element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek philosophers is not its dregs – of which indeed they knew more than science does now – which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Akasa of the Hindus; the Ether accepted in physics is but one of its subdivisions, on our plane, – the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as good effects....

... Democritus, with his instructor Leucippus, taught that the first principles of all things contained in the Universe were atoms and a vacuum. The latter means simply latent Deity or force; which, before its first manifestation when it became WILL – communicating the first impulse to these atoms – was the great Nothingness, Ain-Soph, or NO-THING; was, therefore, to every sense, a Void – or CHAOS.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p342-3]

Chaos-Theos-Kosmos, the triple deity, is all in all. Therefore, it is said to be male and female, good and evil, positive and negative: the whole series of contrasted qualities. When latent (in pralaya) it is incognizable and becomes the unknowable Deity. It can be known only in its active functions; hence as matter-Force and living Spirit, the correlations and outcome, or the expression, on the visible plane, of the ultimate and ever-to-be unknown UNITY.

In its turn this triple unit is the producer of the four primary “Elements,” which are known in our visible terrestrial nature as the seven (so far the five) Elements, each divisible into forty-nine (or seven times seven) sub-elements, with about seventy of which Chemistry is acquainted. Every Cosmical Element such as Fire, Air, Water, Earth, partaking of the qualities and defects of their Primaries, are in their nature Good and Evil, Force (or Spirit) and Matter, etc., etc.; and each, therefore, is at one and the same time Life and Death, Health and Disease, Action and Reaction. They are ever and constantly forming matter under the never-ceasing impulse of the ONE Element (the incognizable), represented in the world of phenomena by Æther, or “the immortal gods who give birth and life to all.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p347]

Nevertheless, even Christians have to this day their sacred birds; for instance, the dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Nor have they neglected the sacred animals. The Evangelical zoolatry – the Bull, the Eagle, the Lion, and the Angel (in reality the Cherub, or Saraph, the fiery-winged Serpent) – is as much pagan as that of the Egyptians or the Chaldeans. These four animals are, in reality, the symbols of the four elements, and of the four lower principles in man. Nevertheless, they correspond physically and materially to the four constellations that form, so to speak, the suite or cortège of the Solar God, and occupy during the winter solstice the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p363]

... the hosts of Dhyani-Chohans, and all the existing Elements are at once merged in their original*. The primary Element, consciousness, combined with tamasa (spiritual darkness) is itself disintegrated by MAHAT (the Universal Intellect),

... whose characteristic property is inteligence (Buddhi), and earth and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe. In the manner – as (in the creation) were the seven forms of nature (Prakriti), reckoned from Mahat to earth – so, at the (time of elemental) dissolution (pratyahara), these seven successively re-enter into each other.

* The term “Elements” must be understood here to mean not only the visible and physical Elements, but also that which St. Paul calls Elements – the spiritual, intelligent Potencies – Angels and Demons in their Manvantaric form.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p372-3]

First from ONE emanated number TWO, or Air (the Father), the creative element; and then number THREE, Water, proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic four, the Arba-il. In the Eastern doctrine Fire is the first element – Ether, synthesizing the whole (since it contains all of them).

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p447]

METAPHYSICALLY and esoterically there is but One ELEMENT in nature, and at the root of it is the Deity; and the so-called seven elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the garment, the veil, of that deity; direct from the essence whereof comes MAN, whether physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually considered. Four elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, five admitted only in philosophy. For the body of ether is not fully manifested yet, and its noumenon is still “the Omnipotent Father-Æther, the synthesis of the rest.” But what are these “ELEMENTS” whose compound bodies have now been discovered by chemistry and physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer embrace the whole number suspected. Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.

The four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.” Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetishism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits – the Cosmic gods to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, respectful recognition by the wiser. In their turn the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.

In the Theogony of Moschus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the two principles from which Olam, the intelligible (...) deity (the visible Universe of mMatter) is born out of the Mundane Egg.

In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the divine Egg – which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, wind being “the Spirit of the unknown Darkness” – “the spirit of God,” (as explains K.O. Müller); the divine “Idea”, says Plato, “who is said to move in Æther”.

In the Hindu Kathakopanishad, Purusha, the divine spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great soul of the world, Mahan-atman, the Spirit of Life, etc., etc. – these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists, being its last and lowest division.

The ..., (Elements) of Plato and Aristotle, were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines those primitive beliefs ... as a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies. So close, indeed, that the hierarchies of those potencies or Forces have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are Septenary, – not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension – but in their real Cosmic gradation, from their chemical (or physical) to their purely spiritual composition. Gods – with the ignorant masses – gods independent and supreme; dæmons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the Spirit of the philosophical sentence, e pluribus unum. With the Hermetic philosopher they are FORCES relatively “blind,” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves, in our cultured age, finally degraded into simple chemical elements.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p460-1]

The tent which contained the Holy of Holies “was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and ETHER.... By its four colours the curtain symbolized the four principal Elements; and signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses of men can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p462]

It was the god of fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the god of water, symbolized by the fluvial bull of some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc., the god of air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vayu and Indra; and the god or spirit of the earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p462-3]

As gods of Fire, Air, Water, they were celestial gods; as gods of the lower region, they were infernal deities: the latter adjective applying simply to the earth.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p463]

The ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual elements, in the forces of nature.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p464]

Each must be addressed in the language of his respective element” – is a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning. “The Book of Rules” cited adds as an explanation of the nature of that Element-language : “It is composed of sounds, not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending Power” (the regent-god of the specific element needed).

Thus this “language” is that of incantations or of MANTRAS, as they are called in India, sound being the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and the Immortals. He who believes in the words and teachings of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only that he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of cosmic gods and their presence among us.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p464]

This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above-quoted words, namely, the spirituality of the “ultimate generating power”, it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognize this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their compounds – as present in the fire, air, water or earth.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p465-6]

Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth—in the spiritual and the material, the visible and the invisible nature, and that science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove has it, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the “ultimate generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. “ETHEREAL fire is the emanation of the KABIR proper; the ærial is but the union (correlation) of the former with terrestrial fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity” – an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces: magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental – every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral – the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upadhi, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and recognised as perfectly natural, even by science. Why should man be the only exception in nature, and why cannot even the ELEMENTS have their vehicles, their “Vahans” in what we call the PHYSICAL FORCES? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p469-70]

For the occultists it [light] is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of motion,” now regarded as “the property of matter” and nothing more, they perceive the radiant noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy (or emanation) is stored in the Sun, the great Life-Giver of the physical world, as the hidden concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light- and Life-Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms....

It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the mystic or occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense. That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “Fiat Lux” is, – when esoterically rendered – “Let there be the ‘Sons of Light,’” or the noumena of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage as referring to Angels, and wrongly as meaning Powers created by an anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and punishing Jehovah.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p481]

The qualities of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and dogmatize on them from their manifestation (likewise sevenfold in itself) on the material or objective plane above is quite arbitrary. For it is only by the SELF emancipating itself from these (seven) causes of illusion that one acquires the knowledge (secret wisdom) of the qualities of objects of sense on their dual plane of manifestation – the visible and the invisible.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p534]

It is said in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that “all the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but modifications of a single material element.”

Occult philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and languages, adding only, on the principle of the immutable law of analogy – “as it is above, so it is below” – that other axiom, that there is neither Spirit nor matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden is (or Sat). The homogeneous primordial Element is simple and single only on the terrestrial plane of consciousness and sensation, since matter, after all, is nothing else than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element which is defined on our earth by current science, as the ultimate undecomposable constituent of some kind of matter, would be pronounced in the world of a higher spiritual perception as something very complex indeed.

Surely, then, the elements now known to us – be their number whatever it may – as they are understood and defined at present, are not, nor can they be, the primordial elements. Those were formed from “the curds of the cold radiant Mother” and “the fire-seed of the hot Father” who “are one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of modern science, those elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial fire-mist – the masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ;...

He [the occultist] maintains that Spirit and Matter are two FACETS of the unknowable UNITY, their apparently contrasted aspects depending, (a) on the various degrees of differentiation of the latter, and (b) on the grades of consciousness attained by man himself. This is, however, metaphysics, and has little to do with physics – however great in its own terrestrial limitation that physical philosophy may now be.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p542-3]

WHEN the Occultist speaks of “Elements,” and of human Beings who lived during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as impossible to determine, according to the opinion of one of the best English geologists, as the nature of matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he [the occultist] says “Man” and Elements, he neither means “man” in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the elemental atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, the entitative abstractions of matter in its highly attenuated state, as existing at present in scientific minds; nor, again, the compound Elements of antiquity. In Occultism the word Element means “rudiment” in every case. When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proemial, incipient sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that form which now lies latent in physical man during his life-time, and takes shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or that form which for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an “Elementary.” With regard to “Element,” when the term is used metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient divine man; and, in its physical usage, inchoate matter in its first undifferentiated condition, or in the laya state, which is the eternal and the normal condition of substance, differentiating only periodically, and is during that differentiation in an abnormal state – in other words, a transitory illusion of the senses.

As to the “elemental atoms,” so called, the Occultists refer to them by that name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by the Hindu to Brahmâ when he calls him ANU, the “Atom.” Every elemental atom, in search of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the Alchemists, is, in their firm belief (when not knowledge), a SOUL; not necessarily a disembodied soul, but a jiva, as the Hindus call it, a centre of POTENTIAL VITALITY, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the case of compound Souls – intelligent active EXISTENCE, from the highest to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It requires a metaphysician – an Eastern metaphysician – understand our meaning. All those atom-Souls are differentiations from the ONE, and in the same relation to it as the divine Soul – Buddhi – its informing and inseparable Spirit, or Atman.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p566-7]

Modern exact Science, as soon as it began to grow out of its teens, perceived the great, and, to it, hitherto esoteric axiom, that nothing – whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of being – could come into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested universe without its adequate effects, whether in space or time; nor can there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its existence to a still higher one – the final and absolute cause having to remain to man for ever an incomprehensible CAUSELESS CAUSE. But even this is no solution, and must be viewed, if at all, from the highest philosophical and metaphysical standpoints, otherwise the problem had better be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which human reason – however trained to metaphysical subtleties – trembles, threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any European who would undertake to solve the problem of existence by the articles of faith of the true Vedantin, for instance. Let him read and study the sublime teachings on the subject of Soul and Spirit, of Sankaracharya, and the reader will realize what is now said.

While the Christian is taught that the human soul is a breath of God – being created by him for sempiternal existence, i.e., having a beginning, but no end (and therefore never to be called eternal) – the Occult teaching says, “Nothing is created, but is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in this universe – from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought – that was not in the universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal IS; as everything on the objective plane is an ever becoming – because transitory.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p569-70]

Nor did the “hierogram within a Circle, or equilateral Triangle,” ever mean “the exemplification of the unity of the divine Essence”; for this was exemplified by the plane of the boundless Circle. What it really meant was the triune co-equal Nature of the first differentiated Substance, or the con-substantiality of the (manifested) Spirit, matter and the Universe – their “Son,” who proceeds from the Point (the real, esoteric LOGOS) or the Pythagorean MONAD. For the Greek Monas signifies “Unity” in its primary sense. Those unable to seize the difference between the monad – the Universal Unit – and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the ever-hidden and the revealed LOGOS or the Word, ought never to meddle in philosophy, let alone the Esoteric Sciences. It is needless to remind the educated reader of Kant’s Thesis to demonstrate his second Antinomy. Those who have read and understood it will see clearly the line we draw between the absolutely Ideal Universe and the invisible though manifested Kosmos. Our Gods and Monads are not the Elements of extension itself, but only those of the invisible reality which is the basis of the manifested Kosmos....

The Monad -- only the emanation and reflection of the Point (Logos) in the phenomenal World – becomes, as the apex of the manifested equilateral triangle, the “Father.” The left side or line is the Duad, the “Mother,” regarded as the evil, counteracting principle; the right side represents the Son (“his Mother’s husband” in every Cosmogony, as one with the apex); at the basic line is the Universal plane of productive Nature, unifying on the phenomenal plane Father-Mother-Son, as these were unified in the apex, in the supersensuous World. By mystic transmutation they became the Quaternary – the triangle became the TETRAKTIS.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p613-4]

This will be the case with all the atoms and molecules when they have separated from their compound forms and bodies – when pralaya sets in. Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new manvantara. The pure “silver” of the absorbed material will once more separate into SUBSTANCE, which will generate “Divine Essences” whose “principles”* are the primary elements, the sub-elements, the physical energies and subjective and objective matter; or, as these are epitomised -- GODS, MONADS, and ATOMS. If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the question, – dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and intelligent beings and entities believed in by the Kabalists and Christians – we turn to the atomical theory of evolution, the occult teachings are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, as far, at least, as regards the supposed “simple” elements, now suddenly degraded into poor and distant relatives – not even second cousins to the latter.

* Corresponding on the cosmic scale with the Spirit, Soul-mind, Life, and the three Vehicles – the astral, the Mayavic and the physical bodies (of mankind), whatever division is made.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p624-5]

But what say the Occult Sciences to this, and what do they add?

They say that what is called collectively Monads by Leibnitz – roughly viewed, and leaving every subdivision out of calculation, for the present – may be separated into three distinct Hosts, which, counted from the highest planes, are, firstly, “gods,” or conscious, spiritual Egos; the intelligent architects, who work after the plan in the Divine Mind. Then come the Elementals, or Monads, who form collectively and unconsciously the grand Universal Mirrors of everything connected with their respective realms. Lastly, the atoms, or material molecules, which are informed in their turn by their apperceptive monads, just as every cell in a human body is so informed. There are shoals of such informed atoms which, in their turn, inform the molecules; an infinitude of monads, or Elementals proper, and countless spiritual Forces – Monadless, for they are pure incorporealities, except under certain laws, when they assume a form – not necessarily human. Whence the substance that clothes them – the apparent organism they evolve around their centres? The Formless (“Arupa”) Radiations, existing in the harmony of Universal Will, and being what we term the collective or the aggregate of Cosmic Will on the plane of the subjective Universe, unite together an infinitude of monads – each the mirror of its own Universe – and thus individualize for the time being an independent mind, omniscient and universal; and by the same process of magnetic aggregation they create for themselves objective, visible bodies, out of the interstellar atoms. For atoms and Monads, associated or dissociated, simple or complex, are, from the moment of the first differentiation, but the principles, corporeal, psychic and Spiritual, of the “Gods,” – themselves the Radiations of primordial nature. Thus, to the eye of the Seer, the higher Planetary Powers appear under two aspects: the subjective – as influences, and the objective – as mystic FORMS, which, under Karmic law, become a Presence, Spirit and Matter being One, as repeatedly stated. Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is Spirit – on the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both – are MAYA.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p632-3]

Outside the boundaries of the solar system, it is other Suns, and especially the mysterious “central Sun” (the “Abode of the invisible deity” as some reverend gentlemen have called it) that determines the motion of bodies and their direction. That motion serves also to differentiate the homogeneous matter, round and between the several bodies, into elements and sub-elements unknown to our earth, which are regarded by modern Science as distinct individual elements, whereas they are merely temporary appearances, changing with every small cycle within the Manvantara, some Esoteric works calling them “Kalpic Masks.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p673]

Now what is that “Spiritual Fire”? In alchemy it is HYDROGEN, in general; while in esoteric actuality it is the emanation or the Ray which proceeds from its noumenon, the “Dhyani of the first Element.” Hydrogen is gas only on our terrestrial plane. But even in chemistry hydrogen would be the only existing form of matter, in our sense of the term,”and is very nearly allied to protyle, which is our laya. It is the father and generator, so to say, or rather the Upadhi (basis), of both AIR and WATER, and is “fire, air and water,” in fact: one under three aspects; hence the chemical and alchemical trinity. In the world of manifestation or matter it is the objective symbol and the material emanation from the subjective and purely spiritual entitative Being in the region of noumena. Well might Godfrey Higgins have compared Hydrogen to, and even identified it with, the ... [to on], the “One” of the Greeks. For, as he remarks, Hydrogen is not Water, though it generates it; Hydrogen is not fire, though it manifests or creates it; nor is it Air, though air may be regarded as a product of the union of Water and Fire – since Hydrogen is found in the aqueous element of the atmosphere. It is three in one.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p105-6]

... the ancients associated sound or Speech with the Ether of Space, of which Sound is the characteristic. Hence Fire, Water and Air are the primordial Cosmic Trinity. “I am thy Thought, thy God, more ancient than the moist principle, the light that radiates within Darkness (Chaos), and the shining Word of God (Sound) is the Son of the Deity.”

Thus we have to study well the “Primary creation,” before we can understand the Secondary. The first Race had three rudimentary elements in it; and no fire as yet; because, with the Ancients, the evolution of man, and the growth and development of his spiritual and physical senses, were subordinate to the evolution of the elements on the Cosmic plane of this Earth. All proceeds from Prabhavapyaya, the evolution of the creative and sentient principles in the gods, and even of the so-called creative deity himself. This is found in the names and appellations given to Vishnu in exoteric scriptures. As the Protologos (the Orphic), he is called Purvaja, “pregenetic,” and then the other names connect him in their descending order more and more with matter.

The following order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution of the Elements and the Senses; or in Cosmic terrestrial “MAN” or “Spirit,” and mortal physical man:—
1. Ether ... Hearing... Sound.
2. Air ... Touch ... Sound and Touch.
3. Fire, or Light Sight ... Sound, Touch and Colour.
4. Water ... Taste ... Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste.
5. Earth ... Smell ... Sound, Touch, Colour, Taste and Smell.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p107]

And these three are all quaternaries completed by their Root, Fire. The Spirit, beyond manifested Nature, is the fiery BREATH in its absolute Unity. In the manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the Spirit of Nature, the terrestrial god. And in, on, and around the Earth, the fiery Spirit thereof – air, fluidic fire; water, liquid fire; Earth, solid fire. All is fire – ignis, in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of which is O (nought) in our conceptions, the All in nature and its mind.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p114]

As stated in Book I., the humanities developed co-ordinately, and on parallel lines with the four Elements, every new Race being physiologically adapted to meet the additional element. Our Fifth Race is rapidly approaching the Fifth Element – call it interstellar ether, if you will – which has more to do, however, with psychology than with physics.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p135]

The Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of being) are the NOUMENA of the actual and the future elements,...

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p273]

The “Gods of the Elements” are by no means the Elementals. The latter areat best used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p273fn]

The quaternary of the intellectual world [the world of Mahat] is To Agathon, Nous, Psyche, Hyle; while that of the sensible world [of matter], which is properly what Pythagoras meant by the Kosmos – is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. The four elements are called by the name of rhizomata, the roots or principles of all mixed bodies.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p599]

---

... there is but one element and it is impossible to comprehend our system before a correct conception of it is firmly fixed in one’s mind. You must therefore pardon me if I dwell on the subject longer than really seems necessary. But unless this great primary fact is firmly grasped the rest will appear unintelligible. This element then is the – to speak metaphysically – one sub-stratum or permanent cause of all manifestations in the phenomenal universe. The ancients speak of the five cognizable elements of ether, air, water, fire, earth, and of the one incognizable element (to the uninitiates) the 6th principle of the universe – call it Purush Sakti, while to speak of the seventh outside the sanctuary was punishable with death. But these five are but the differentiated aspects of the one. As man is a seven-fold being so is the universe – the septenary microcosm being to the septenary macrocosm but as the drop of rainwater is to the cloud from whence it dropped and whither in the course of time it will return. In that one are embraced or included so many tendencies for the evolution of air, water, fire, etc. (from the purely abstract down to their concrete condition) and when those latter are called elements it is to indicate their productive potentialities for numberless form changes or evolution of being. Let us represent the unknown quantity as X; that quantity is the one eternal immutable principle – and A, B, C, D, E, five of the six minor principles or components of the same; viz., the principles of earth, water, air, fire and ether (akasa) following the order of their spirituality and beginning with the lowest. There is a sixth principle answering to the sixth principle Buddhi, in man (to avoid confusion remember that in viewing the question from the side of the descending scale the abstract All or eternal principle would be numerically designated as the first, and the phenomenal universe as the seventh, and whether belonging to man or to the universe – viewed from the other side the numerical order would be exactly reversed) but we are not permitted to name it except among the initiates. I may however hint that it is connected with the process of the highest intellection. Let us call it N. And besides these, there is under all the activities of the phenomenal universe an energizing impulse from X, call this Y. Algebraically stated, our equation would therefore read A + B + C + D + E + N + Y = X. Each of these six letters represents, so to speak, the spirit or abstraction of what you call elements (your meagre English gives me no other word). This spirit controls the entire line of evolution, around the whole manwantaric cycle in its own department. The informing, vivifying, impelling, evolving cause, behind the countless phenomenal manifestations in that department of Nature. Let us work out the idea with a single example. Take Fire. D – the primal igneous principle resident in X – is the ultimate cause of every phenomenal manifestation of fire on all the globes of the chain. The proximate causes are the evoluted secondary igneous agencies which severally control the seven descents of fire on each planet, (every element having its seven principles and every principle its seven sub-principles and these secondary agencies before doing so, having in turn become primary causes.) D is a septenary compound of which the highest fraction is pure spirit. As we see it on our globe it is in its coarsest, most material condition, as gross in its way as is man in his physical encasement.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 67, Chronological Edition or Letter 183, Barker Numbering.]

---

... human elementaries are recognized as existing, apart from the gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders – beings purely elemental; and that annihilation of the soul is regarded as potential.

Says Paracelsus, in his Philosophia Sagax: “The current of astral light with its peculiar inhabitants, gnomes, sylphs, etc., is transformed into human light at the moment of the conception, and it becomes the first envelope of the soul – its grosser portion; combined with the most subtle fluids, it forms the sidereal (astral, or ethereal) phantom – the inner man.” And Eliphas Lévi: “The astral light is saturated with souls which it discharges in the incessant generation of beings ... At the birth of a child, they influence the four temperaments of the latter – the element of the gnomes predominates in melancholy persons; of the salamanders in the sanguine; of the undines, in the phlegmatic; of the sylphs, in the giddy and bilious... . These are the spirits which we designate under the term of occult elements.”

[C.W.I, p284-5]

... embodies the idea which we express by the term elemental – that which pertains to the four elements of the material world, the first principles or primary ingredients. The word “elemental”, as defined by Webster, was not current at the time of Khunrath, but the idea was perfectly understood.

[C.W.I, p330]

Kabalists regard the five points of the pentagram as representing the five cardinal limbs of the human body? We are no ardent disciple or follower of the Western Kabalists; yet, we maintain that in this they are right. If the twenty-five elements represented by the five-pointed star, make up “a living human creature” then these elements are all vital, whether mental or physical, and the figure symbolizing “creative energy” gives the more force to the Kabalistic idea. Every one of the five gross elements – earth, water, fire, air (or “wind”) and ether – enters into the composition of man; and whether we say, “five organs of action” or the “five limbs” or yet “the five senses,” it will always amount to splitting hairs, for it means all one and the same thing.

[C.W.III, p322]

Light, then, like heat – of which it is the crown – is simply the ghost, the shadow of matter in motion, the boundless, eternal, infinite SPACE, MOTION and DURATION, the trinitarian essence of that which the Deists call God, and we – the One Element; Spirit-matter, or Matter-spirit, whose septenary properties we circumscribe under its triple abstract form in the equilateral triangle.

[C.W.IV, p220]

But the Occultists recognize but One Element which they divide into seven parts, which include the five exoteric elements and the two esoteric ones of the ancients. As to that Element, they call it, indifferently, matter or spirit, claiming that as matter is infinite and indestructible and Spirit likewise, and as there cannot exist in the infinite Universe two omnipresent Eternal elements, any more than two Indestructibles or Infinites can exist – hence Matter and Spirit must be one. “All is Spirit and all is Matter,” they say: Purusha Prakriti are inseparable and the one cannot exist without the other.

[C.W.V, p52]

... though the body of the Sun, – a body that was never yet reflected by telescope or spectroscope that man invented – cannot be said to be constituted of those terrestrial elements with the state of which the chemist is familiar, yet that these elements are all present in the sun’s outward robes, and a host more of elements unknown so far to science. There seems little need, indeed, to have waited so long for the lines belonging to these respective elements to correspond with dark lines of the solar spectrum to know that no element present on our earth could ever be possibly found wanting in the sun; although, on the other hand, there are many others in the sun which have either not reached or not as yet been discovered on our globe. Some may be missing in certain stars and heavenly bodies still in the process of formation; or, properly speaking, though present in them, these elements on account of their undeveloped state may not respond as yet to the usual scientific tests. But how can the earth possess that which the Sun has never had? The “Adepts” affirm as a fact that the true Sun, – an invisible orb of which the known one is the shell, mask, or clothing – has in him the spirit of every element that exists in the solar system; and his “Chromo¬sphere,” as Mr. Lockyer named it, has the same, only in a far more developed condition though still in a state unknown on earth; our planet having to await its further growth and development before any of its elements can be reduced to the condition they are in within that chromosphere.

[C.W.V, p156]

The Doctrine teaches the Presence of a Universal Life (or motion) within which all is, and nothing outside of it can be. This is pure Spirit. Its manifested aspect is cosmic primordial Matter coeval with, since it is, itself. Semi-spiritual in comparison to the first, this vehicle of the Spirit-Life is what Science calls Ether, which fills the boundless space, and it is in this substance, the world-stuff, that germinate all the atoms and molecules of what is called matter. However homogeneous in its eternal origin, this Universal Element, once that its radiations were thrown into the space of the (to be) manifested Universe, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of perpetual motion, of attraction and repulsion, would soon polarize its scattered particles, endowing them with peculiar properties now regarded by Science as various elements distinct from each other.

[C.W.VI, p192]

Ammianus Marcellinus states that the ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the “spirits” of the elements (spiritus elementorum),... Now the latter are not the “spirits” of the stars [planets], nor are they divine Beings; they are simply the creatures inhabiting their respective elements, called by the Kabalists elementary spirits, and by the Theosophists elementals.

[C.W.VII, p234]

“8. The spirit pervading all the elements, seeing that they are eternal bodies, is always and everywhere strong in the power of prescience, and as the result of the knowledge which we acquire through varied studies makes us also sharers in the gifts of divination; and the elemental powers, when propitiated by divers rites, supply mortals with words of prophecy, as if from the veins of inexhaustible founts.”

[C.W.VII, p234fn]

The ignorant judge of all things by their appearance and not by what they are in reality. On this earth, of course, water is an element quite distinct from any other element, using the latter term in the sense of different manifestations of the one element. The root elements, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, are far more comprehensive states of differentiation. Such being the case, in Occultism Transubstantiation becomes a possibility, seeing that nothing which exists is in reality that which it is supposed to be.

[C.W.X, p349]

Water is the first cosmic element and the terms “darkness” and “chaos” are used to denote the same “element.” There are seven states of matter of which three are generally known, viz., solid, liquid, and gaseous. It is necessary to consider everything cosmic and terrestrial as existing in variations of these seven states.

[C.W.X, p366]

When we say that fire is the first of the Elements, it is the first only in the visible universe, the fire that we commonly know. Even on the highest plane of our universe, the plane of Globe A or G, fire is in one respect only the fourth. For the Occultist, the Rosecroix of the Middle Ages, and even the mediaeval Kabalists, said that to our human perception and even to that of the highest “angels,” the universal Deity is darkness, and from this Darkness issues the Logos in the following aspects: [1] Weight [Chaos which becomes aether in its primordial state]; [2] Light; [3] Heat; [4] Fire.

[C.W.X, p376]

... Hydrogen, Oxygen, Ozone and Nitrogen, the primordial elements on this plane of matter?
A. The answer to the first part of this question will be found by studying the symbolism of The Secret Doctrine.

With regard to the four elements named it is the case; but bear in mind that on a higher plane even volatile ether would appear to be as gross as mud. Every plane has its own denseness of substance or matter, its own colours, sounds, dimensions of space, etc., which are quite unknown to us on this plane;...

[C.W.X, p381]

The Advaita begins with examining the divisions of Prakriti and clearly demonstrates, perhaps for the first time in the field of ancient Indian Rationalism, the truth that the five elements – Akasa, Vayu, Tejas, Jala, Prithivi – are but five states of prakriti derivable from one another. From Akasa whose specific mark is Sadba which, by the way, we render not by sound but differentiation, proceeds (gaseous matter) with its specific mark Sparsa (touch) super-added to the original sabda; differentiation in Vayu leads to Tejas (heated matter) with its specific mark rupa (form, heat, light) super-added to sabda and sparsa; from Tejas, Jala (liquid matter) with its specific mark rasa (taste); and from Jala, Prithivi with its specific mark Gandha (smell). Thus the five Tanmatras [Rudiments] and the five Bhutas [Elementals] of the Sankhya are reduced to Akasa, the all-pervading potential form (ether) of original matter (Mula-prakriti).” [pp. 34-35.]

Now we are taught that a new element evolves with every Root-Race and as we are two-thirds through the 5th Root Race, the fifth element of the seven is now in the course of its evolution. We have thus a key to the understanding of the 7 Amens and the 3 Amens; to the 5 Trees, 12 Saviours, etc., and the corresponding Mysteries. It must also be remembered that the explanation of the elements above quoted, is only their last reflection on the visible, material plane of matter. Their psychic, spiritual and divine prototypes are of a nature that cannot be described in words, as we can see by the terminology of Table VIII..

[C.W.XIII, p67-8]

Ragon mentions the curious fact that the first four numbers in German are named after the elements.
Ein, or one, means the air, the element which, ever in motion, penetrates matter throughout, and whose continual ebb and tide is the universal vehicle of life.
Zwei, two, is derived from the old German Zweig, signifying germ, fecundity; it stands for earth the fecund mother of all.
Drei, three, is the trienos of the Greeks, standing for water, whence the Sea-gods, Tritons; and trident, the emblem of Neptune – the water, or sea, in general being called Amphitrite (surrounding water).
Vier, four, a number meaning in Belgian fire ... It is in the quaternary that the first solid figure is found, the universal symbol of immortality, the Pyramid, ‘whose first syllable means fire.’ Lysis and Timaeus of Locris claimed that there was not a thing one could name that had not the quaternary for its root ... The ingenious and mystical idea which led to the veneration of the ternary and the triangle was applied to number four and its figure; it was said to express a living being, 1, the vehicle of the triangle 4, vehicle of God, or man carrying in him the divine principle.

[C.W.XIV, p100fn]

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