Voices in Time

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Paulthier, the French Indianist, may or may not be taxed with too much enthusiasm when saying that India appears before him as the grand and primitive focus of human thought, whose steady flame has ended by communicating itself to, and setting on fire, the whole ancient world—yet, he is right in his statement. It is Aryan metaphysics that have led the mind to occult knowledge—the oldest and the mother science of all, since it contains within itself all the other sciences. And it is Occultism—the synthesis of all the discoveries in nature and chiefly of the psychic potency within and beyond every physical atom of matter—that has been the primitive bond that has cemented into one cornerstone the foundations of all the religions of antiquity.

The primitive spark has set on fire every nation, truly, and magic underlies now every national faith, whether old or young. Egypt and Chaldea are foremost in the ranks of those countries that furnish us with the most evidence upon the subject, helpless as they are to do as India does—to protect their paleographic relics from desecration. The turbid waters of the canal of Suez carry along to those that wash the British shores, the magic of the earliest days of pharaonic Egypt, to fill up with its crumbled dust the British, French, German, and Russian museums. Ancient, historical magic is thus reflecting itself upon the scientific records of our own all-denying century. It forces the hand and tires the brain of the scientist, laughing at his efforts to interpret its meaning in his own materialistic way, yet helps the occultist better to understand modern magic, the rickety, weak grandchild of her powerful, archaic grandam. Hardly a hieratic papyrus exhumed along with the swathed mummy of a king or priest hierophant, or a weather-beaten, indecipherable inscription from the tormented sites of Babylonia or Nineveh, or an ancient tile cylinder—that does not furnish new food for thought or some suggestive information to the student of Occultism. Withal, magic is denied and termed the “superstition” of the ignorant ancient philosopher.

Thus, magic in every papyrus; magic in all the religious formulas; magic bottled up in hermetically closed vials, many thousands of years old; magic in elegantly bound, modern works; magic in the most popular novels; magic in social gatherings; magic worse than that, sorcery—in the very air one breathes in Europe, America, Australia: the more civilized and cultured a nation, the more formidable and effective the effluvia of unconscious magic it emits and stores away in the surrounding atmosphere.

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