Page:A Collection of Esoteric Writings.djvu/81

67 Guru to disciple without any serions break of continuity during thousands of years in the East. And there is no danger of adept life ceasing to exist from want of transmission by hereditary descent. Nor is it possible to bring into existance a race of hierophants in whom occult knowledge will be acquired by birth without the necessity of special study or initiation. The experiment was tried, I believe, long ago in the East, but without success.

The author will be in a position to understand the nature of some of the difficulties which are to be encountered in making any such experiment from a perusal of Bulwer Lytton's "Zanoni."

The world has yet to see whether "under the sway of Solar Angels," the adepts trained under the system of Hierosophy, can retain their powers and knowledge after having renounced "asceticism, abstinence and celibacy," and transmit the so-called "adept life" to their descendants.

Speaking of the attitude of Theosophists towards spiritualism, Mr. Oxley observes that they hold that the so-called spiritualistic phenomena are due to the "intervention of enlightened living men, but not disembodied spirits." I shall be very glad if the learned author can point out any foundation for this statement in the utterances of Theosophists. Strangely enough, he says further on that, in the opinion of the Theosophists, such phenomena are due to "wandering shells and decaying reliquiæ of what was once a human being." This is no doubt true in the case of some of the phemomena at least: and the author should not presume to say that any one of these phenomena has its real origin in the action of disembodied living conscious beings," unless he is fully prepared to state exactly who these mysterious beings are, and demonstrate, by something weightier than mere assumption, the fact of their real existence. He is entirely mistaken in supposing that the modus operandi in the case of the socalledso-called [sic] spiritualistic phenomena are precisely the same as in the phenomena produced by Eastern adepts. However I do not mean to say