The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and PhilosophyBlavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Religion
The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Theosophy
One more important point must be noticed, one that stands foremost in the
series of proofs given of the existence of one primeval, universal
Wisdom—at any rate for Christian Kabalists and students. The teachings
were, at least, partially known to several of the Fathers of the Church.
It is maintained, on purely historical grounds, that Origen, Synesius, and
even Clemens Alexandrinus, had themselves been initiated into the
Mysteries before adding to the Neo‐Platonism of the Alexandrian school
that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil. More than this, some of
the doctrines of the secret schools, though by no means all, were
preserved in the Vatican, and have since become part and parcel of the
Mysteries, in the shape of disfigured additions made to the original
Christian programme by the Latin Church. Such is the now materialised
dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This accounts for the great
persecutions set on foot by the Roman Catholic Church against Occultism,
Masonry, and heterodox Mysticism generally.
The days of Constantine were the last turning‐point in history, the period
of the supreme struggle, that ended in the Western world throttling the
old religions in favour of the new one, built on their bodies. From thence
the vista into the far distant past, beyond the Deluge and the Garden of
Eden, began to be forcibly and relentlessly shut out by every fair and
unfair means from the indiscreet gaze of posterity. Every issue was
blocked up, every record upon which hands could be laid, destroyed. Yet
there remains enough, even among such mutilated records, to warrant us in
saying that there is in them every requisite evidence of the actual
existence of a Parent Doctrine. Fragments have survived geological and
political cataclysms, to tell the story; and every survival shows evidence
that the now secret Wisdom was once the one fountain head, the ever‐
flowing perennial source, from which were fed all the streamlets—the later
religions of all nations—from the first down to the last. This period,
beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and finishing with the
Neo‐Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in
History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light
streaming from the æons of times gone by, unobscured by the hand of
bigotry and fanaticism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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