Modern Kabbalists in Science and Occult Astronomy
This section explores how ancient Kabalistic ideas about the Universe—divided into physical, astral, and super-astral realms—align with some modern scientific theories and occult principles.
SECTION XXIV
MODERN KABALISTS IN SCIENCE AND OCCULT ASTRONOMY
There is a physical, an astral, and a super astral Universe in the three chief divisions of the Kabalah, as there are terrestrial, super-terrestrial, and spiritual Beings. The "Seven Planetary Spirits" may be ridiculed by Scientists to their hearts' content. Yet, the need for intelligent ruling and guiding Forces is so much felt to this day that scientific men and specialists who will not hear of Occultism or ancient systems find themselves obliged to generate some kind of semi-mystical system in their inner consciousness. Metcalf's "sun-force" theory and that of Zaliwsky, a learned Pole, which made Electricity the Universal Force and placed its storehouse in the Sun (La Gravitation par l'Electricite, p. 7. quoted by De Mirville, iv. 156) were revivals of the Kabalistic teachings. Zaliwsky tried to prove that Electricity, producing "the most powerful, attractive, calorific, and luminous effects," was present in the physical constitution of the Sun and explained its peculiarities.
This is very near the Occult teaching. It is only by admitting the gaseous Nature of the Sun-reflector and the powerful Magnetism and Electricity of the solar attraction and repulsion that one can explain (a) the evident absence of any waste of power and luminosity in the Sun - inexplicable by the ordinary laws of combustion; and (b) the behavior of the planets, so often contradicting every accepted rule of weight and gravity.
And Zaliwsky makes this "solar electricity" differ from anything known on earth."
Father Seccchi may be suspected of having sought to introduce Forces of quite a new order and quite foreign to gravitation, which he had discovered in Space. (De Mirville iv.157) to reconcile Astronomy with theoretical Astronomy. But Nagy, a Hungarian Academy of Sciences member, was no clerical. Yet, he develops a theory on the necessity of intelligent Forces whose complacency "would lend itself to all the whims of the comets." He suspects that:
Notwithstanding all the current research on the rapidity of light - that dazzling product of an unknown force. . . .which we see too frequently to understand - that light is motionless in reality.
(C. E. Love, the well-known railway builder and engineer in France, tired of blind forces, made all the (then) "imponderable agents" - now called "forces" - subordinates of Electricity and declared the latter to be an Intelligence - albeit molecular in Nature and material. (Essai sur l'identite des Agents Producteurs du S on, de laLumiere, etc., p. 15, ibid)
The author believes these Forces are atomistic agents endowed with intelligence, spontaneous will, and motion. (Ibid.,p.218) and he thus, like the Kabbalists, makes the causal Forces substantial, while the Forces that act on this plane are only the effects of the former, as with him matter is eternal, and the Gods also; (Summarized from Ibid., p.213, De Mirville, iv. 158) so is the Soul likewise, though it has inherent in itself a still higher Soul (Spirit), preexistent, endowed with memory, and superior to Electric Force, the latter is subservient to the higher Souls, those superior Souls forcing it to act according to the eternal laws. The concept is rather hazy but is evidently on the Occult lines. Moreover, the system proposed is entirely pantheistic and works out purely scientifically. Monotheists and Roman Catholics fall foul of it, of course, but one who believes in the Planetary Spirits and who endows Nature with living intelligence must always expect this.
In this connection, however, it is curious that after the moderns have so laughed at the ignorance of the ancients, who, knowing only of seven planets (yet having an ogdoad which did not include the earth!), invented, therefore, seven Spirits to fit in with the number, Babinet should have vindicated the "superstition" unconsciously to himself.
Adapted from the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by Helene Blavatsky.
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