Theos-Talk Archives (October 2003 Message tt00036)

Oct 3 2003

Dear Friends:

Consider what HPB has to say about Animals, their "souls" and suffering

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1
WHY DO ANIMALS SUFFER?

Article by H. P. Blavatsky



Q. Is it possible for me who love the animals to learn how to get more
power than I have to help them in their sufferings? 


A. Genuine unselfish LOVE combined with WILL is a "power" in itself.
They who love animals ought to show that affection in a more efficient
way than by covering their pets with ribbons and sending them to howl
and scratch at the prize exhibitions. 

__________


Q. Why do the noblest animals suffer so much at the hands men? I need
not enlarge or try to explain this question. Cities e torture places for
the animals who can be turned to any account for use or amusement by
man! and these are always the most noble. 


A. In the Sutras, or the Aphorisms of the Karma-pa, a sect which is an
offshoot of the great Gelukpa (yellow caps) sect in Tibet, and whose
name bespeaks its tenets--"the believers in the efficacy of Karma,"
(action, or good works)--an Upasaka inquires of his Master, why the fate
of the poor animals had so changed of late? Never was an animal killed
or treated unkindly the vicinity of Buddhist or other temples in China,
in days of old, while now, they are slaughtered and freely sold at the
markets of various cities, etc. The answer is suggestive: 

. . . "Lay not nature under the accusation of this unparalleled justice.
Do not seek in vain for Karmic effects to explain the cruelty for the
Tenbrel Chugnyi (causal connection, Nidâna) shall teach thee none. It is
the unwelcome advent of the Peling Christian foreigner), whose three
fierce gods refused to provide for the protection of the weak and little
ones (animals), that is answerable for the ceaseless and heartrending
sufferings of our dumb companions." . . . 

The answer to the above query is here in a nutshell. It may be useful,
if once more disagreeable, to some religionists to be told that the
blame for this universal suffering falls entirely upon our Western
religion and early education. 

Every philosophical Eastern system, every religion and sect in
antiquity--the Brahmanical, Egyptian, Chinese and finally, the purest as
the noblest of all the existing systems of ethics, Buddhism--inculcates
kindness and protection to every living creature, from animal and bird
down to the creeping thing and even the reptile. Alone, our Western
religion stands in its isolation, as a monument of the most gigantic
human selfishness ever evolved by human brain, without one word in favor
of, or for the protection of the poor animal. Quite the reverse. For
theology, underlining a sentence in the Jehovistic chapter of
"Creation," interprets it as a proof that animals, as all the rest, were
created for man! Ergo--sport has become one of the noblest amusements of
the upper ten. Hence--poor innocent birds wounded, tortured and killed
every autumn by the million, all over the Christian countries, for man's
recreation. Hence also, unkindness, often cold-blooded cruelty, during
the youth of horse and bullock, brutal indifference to its fate when age
has rendered it unfit for work, and ingratitude after years of hard
labour for, and in the service of man. In whatever country the European
steps in, there begins the slaughter of the animals and their useless
decimation.
 
"Has the prisoner ever killed for his pleasure animals?" inquired a
Buddhist Judge at a border town in China, infected with pious European
Churchmen and missionaries, of a man accused of having murdered his
sister. And having been answered in the affirmative, as the prisoner had
been a servant in the employ of a Russian colonel, "a mighty hunter
before the Lord," the Judge had no need of any other evidence and the
murderer was found "guilty"--justly, as his subsequent confession
proved. 

Is Christianity or even the Christian layman to be blamed for it?
Neither. It is the pernicious system of theology, long centuries of
theocracy, and the ferocious, ever-increasing selfishness in the Western
civilized countries. What can we do? 
H P B 
Lucifer, May, 1888 


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2

HAVE ANIMALS SOULS?

Article by H. P. Blavatsky

Continually soaked with blood, the whole earth is but an immense altar 
upon which all that lives has to be immolated--endlessly, incessantly. .
. .
-COMTE JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (Soirées I. ii, 35)


MANY are the "antiquated religious superstitions" of the East which
Western nations often and unwisely deride: but none is so laughed at and
practically set at defiance as the great respect of Oriental people for
animal life. Flesh-eaters cannot sympathize with total abstainers from
meat. We Europeans are nations of civilized barbarians with but a few
millenniums between ourselves and our cave-dwelling forefathers who
sucked the blood and marrow from uncooked bones. 

Thus, it is only natural that those who hold human life so cheaply in
their frequent and often iniquitous wars, should entirely disregard the
death-agonies of the brute creation, and daily sacrifice millions of
innocent, harmless lives; for we are too epicurean to devour tiger
steaks or crocodile cutlets, but must have tender lambs and golden
feathered pheasants. All this is only as it should be in our era of
Krupp cannons and scientific vivisectors. Nor is it a matter of great
wonder that the hardy European should laugh at the mild Hindu, who
shudders at the bare thought of killing a cow, or that he should refuse
to sympathize with the Buddhist and Jain, in their respect for the life
of every sentient creature--from the elephant to the gnat. 

But, if meat-eating has indeed become a vital necessity--"the tyrant's
plea!"--among Western nations; if hosts of victims in every city,
borough and village of the civilized world must needs be daily
slaughtered in temples dedicated to the deity, denounced by St. Paul and
worshipped by men "whose God is their belly":--if all this and much more
cannot be avoided in our "age of Iron," who can urge the same excuse for
sport? Fishing, shooting, and hunting, the most fascinating of all the
"amusements" of civilized life--are certainly the most objectionable
from the standpoint of occult philosophy, the most sinful in the eyes of
the followers of these religious systems which are the direct outcome of
the Esoteric Doctrine--Hinduism and Buddhism. Is it altogether without
any good reason that the adherents of these two religions, now the
oldest in the world, regard the animal world--from the huge quadruped
down to the infinitesimally small insect--as their "younger brothers,"
however ludicrous the idea to a European? This question shall receive
due consideration further on. 

Nevertheless, exaggerated as the notion may seem, it is certain that few
of us are able to picture to ourselves without shuddering the scenes
which take place early every morning in the innumerable shambles of the
so-called civilized world, or even those daily enacted during the
"shooting season." The first sun-beam has not yet awakened slumbering
nature, when from all points of the compass myriads of hecatombs are
being prepared--to salute the rising luminary. Never was heathen Moloch
gladdened by such a cry of agony from his victims as the pitiful wail
that in all Christian countries rings like a long hymn of suffering
throughout nature, all day and every day from morning until evening. In
ancient Sparta--than whose stern citizens none were ever less sensitive
to the delicate feelings of the human heart--a boy, when convicted of
torturing an animal for amusement, was put to death as one whose nature
was so thoroughly villainous that he could not be permitted to live. But
in civilized Europe rapidly progressing in all things save Christian
virtues--might remains unto this day the synonym of right. The entirely
useless, cruel practice of shooting for mere sport countless hosts of
birds and animals is nowhere carried on with more fervour than in
Protestant England, where the merciful teachings of Christ have hardly
made human hearts softer than they were in the days of Nimrod, "the
mighty hunter before the Lord." Christian ethics are as conveniently
turned into paradoxical syllogisms as those of the "heathen." The writer
was told one day by a sportsman that since "not a sparrow falls on the
ground without the will of the Father," he who kills for sport--say, one
hundred sparrows does thereby one hundred times over--his Father's will!


A wretched lot is that of poor brute creatures, hardened as it is into
implacable fatality by the hand of man. The rational soul of the human
being seems born to become the murderer of the irrational soul of the
animal--in the full sense of the word, since the Christian doctrine
teaches that the soul of the animal dies with its body. Might not the
legend of Cain and Abel have had a dual signification? 

Look at that other disgrace of our cultured age--the scientific
slaughter-houses called "vivisection rooms." Enter one of those halls in
Paris, and behold Paul Bert, or some other of these men--so justly
called "the learned butchers of the Institute"--at his ghastly work. I
have but to translate the forcible description of an eye-witness, one
who has thoroughly studied the modus operandi of those "executioners," a
well known French author: 

"Vivisection"--he says--"is a specialty in which torture, scientifically
economised by our butcher-academicians, is applied during whole days,
weeks, and even months to the fibres and muscles of one and the same
victim. It (torture) makes use of every and any kind of weapon, performs
its analysis before a pitiless audience, divides the task every morning
between ten apprentices at once, of whom one works on the eye, another
one on the leg, the third on the brain, a fourth on the marrow; and
whose inexperienced hands succeed, nevertheless, towards night after a
hard day's work, in laying bare the whole of the living carcass they had
been ordered to chisel out, and that in the evening, is carefully stored
away in the cellar, in order that early next morning it may be worked
upon again if only there is a breath of life and sensibility left in the
victim! We know that the trustees of the Grammont law (loi) have tried
to rebel against this abomination; but Pans showed herself more
inexorable than London and Glasgow."l 

And yet these gentlemen boast of the grand object pursued, and of the
grand secrets discovered by them. "Horror and lies!"--exclaims the same
author. "In the matter of secrets--a few localizations of faculties and
cerebral motions excepted--we know but of one secret that belongs to
them by rights: it is the secret of torture eternalized, beside which
the terrible natural law of autophagy (mutual manducation), the horrors
of war, the merry massacres of sport, and the sufferings of the animal
under the butcher's knife--are as nothing! Glory to our men of science!
They have surpassed every former kind of torture, and remain now and for
ever, without any possible contestation, the kings of artificial anguish
and despair!"2 

The usual plea for butchering, killing, and even for legally torturing
animals--as in vivisection--is a verse or two in the Bible, and its
ill-digested meaning, disfigured by the so-called scholasticism
represented by Thomas Aquinas. Even De Mirville, that ardent defender of
the rights of the church, calls such texts--"Biblical tolerances, forced
from God after the deluge, as so many others, and based upon the
decadence of our strength." However this may be, such texts are amply
contradicted by others in the same Bible. The meat-eater, the sportsman
and even the vivisector--if there are among the last named those who
believe in special creation and the Bible--generally quote for their
justification that verse in Genesis, in which God gives dual
Adam--"dominion over the fish, fowl, cattle, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth"--(Ch. I., v. 28); hence--as the Christian
understands it--power of life and death over every animal on the globe.
To this the far more philosophical Brahman and Buddhist might answer;
"Not so. Evolution starts to mould future humanities within the lowest
scales of being. Therefore, by killing an animal, or even an insect, we
arrest the progress of an entity towards its final goal in nature--MAN";
and to this the student of occult philosophy may say "Amen," and add
that it not only retards the evolution of that entity, but arrests that
of the next succeeding human and more perfect race to come. 

Which of the opponents is right, which of them the more logical? The
answer depends mainly, of course, on the personal belief of the
intermediary chosen to decide the questions. If he believes in special
creation--so-called--then in answer to the plain question--"Why should
homicide be viewed as a most ghastly sin against God and nature, and the
murder of millions of living creatures be regarded as mere sport?"--he
will reply:--"Because man is created in God's own image and looks upward
to his Creator and to his birth-place--heaven (os homini sublime dedit);
and that the gaze of the animal is fixed downward on its
birth-place--the earth; for God said--'Let the earth bring forth the
living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of
the earth after his kind'." (Genesis I, 24.) Again, "because man is
endowed with an immortal soul, and the dumb brute has no immortality,
not even a short survival after death." 

Now to this an unsophisticated reasoner might reply that if the Bible is
to be our authority upon this delicate question, there is not the
slightest proof in it that man's birth-place is in heaven anymore than
that of the last of creeping things--quite the contrary; for we find in
Genesis that if God created "man" and blessed "them," (Ch. I, v. 27-28)
so he created "great whales" and "blessed them" (2I, 22). 

Moreover, "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground" (II, v.
7): and "dust" is surely earth pulverized? Solomon, the king and
preacher, is most decidedly an authority and admitted on all hands to
have been the wisest of the Biblical sages; and he gives utterances to a
series of truths in Ecclesiastes (Ch. III) which ought to have settled
by this time every dispute upon the subject. "The sons of men . . .
might see that they themselves are beasts" (v. 18) . . . "that which
befalleth the sons of men, befalleth the beasts . . . a man has no
pre-eminence above a beast,"--(v. 19) "all go into one place; all are of
the dust and turn to dust again, (v. 20) . . . "who knoweth the spirit
of man that goeth upwards, and the spirit of the beast, that goeth
downward to the earth? (v. 21.) Indeed, "who knoweth!" 

At any rate it is neither science nor "school divine." 

Were the object of these lines to preach vegetarianism on the authority
of Bible or Veda, it would be a very easy task to do so. For, if it is
quite true that God gave dual Adam--the "male and female" of Chapter I
of Genesis--who has little to do with our henpecked ancestor of Chapter
II--"dominion over every living thing," yet we nowhere find that the
"Lord God" commanded that Adam or the other to devour animal creation or
destroy it for sport. Quite the reverse. For pointing to the vegetable
kingdom and the "fruit of a tree yielding seed"--God says very plainly:
"to you (men) it shall be for meat." (I, 29.) 

So keen was the perception of this truth among the early Christians that
during the first centuries they never touched meat. In Octavio
Tertullian writes to Minutius Felix: "we are not permitted either to
witness, or even hear narrated (novere) a homicide, we Christians, who
refuse to taste dishes in which animal blood may have been mixed." 

But the writer does not preach vegetarianism, simply defending "animal
rights" and attempting to show the fallacy of disregarding such rights
on Biblical authority. Moreover, to argue with those who would reason
upon the lines of erroneous interpretations would be quite useless. One
who rejects the doctrine of evolution will ever find his way paved with
difficulties; hence, he will never admit that it is far more consistent
with fact and logic to regard physical man merely as the recognized
paragon of animals, and the spiritual Ego that informs him as a
principle midway between the soul of the animal and the deity. It would
be vain to tell him that unless he accepts not only the verses quoted
for his justification but the whole Bible in the light of esoteric
philosophy, which reconciles the whole mass of contradictions and
seeming absurdities in it--he will never obtain the key to the
truth;--for he will not believe it. 

Yet the whole Bible teems with charity to men and with mercy and love to
animals. The original Hebrew text of Chapter XXIV of Leviticus is full
of it. Instead of the verses 17 and 18 as translated in the Bible: "And
he that killeth a beast shall make it good, beast for beast" in the
original it stands:--"life for life," or rather "soul for soul," nephesh
tachat nephesh.3 And if the rigour of the law did not go to the extent
of killing, as in Sparta, a man's "soul" for a beast's "soul"--still,
even though he replaced the slaughtered soul by a living one, a heavy
additional punishment was inflicted on the culprit. 

But this was not all. In Exodus (Ch. XX. 10, and Ch. XXIII. 2 et seq.)
rest on the Sabbath day extended to cattle and every other animal. "The
seventh day is the sabbath . . . thou shalt not do any work, thou nor
thy . . . cattle"; and the Sabbath year . . . "the seventh year thou
shalt let it (the land) rest and lie still . . . that thine ox and thine
ass may rest"--which commandment, if it means anything, shows that even
the brute creation was not excluded by the ancient Hebrews from a
participation in the worship of their deity, and that it was placed upon
many occasions on a par with man himself. The whole question rests upon
the misconception that "soul," nephesh, is entirely distinct from
"spirit"--ruach. And yet it is clearly stated that "God breathed into
the nostrils (of man) the breath of life and man became a living soul,"
nephesh, neither more or less than an animal, for the soul of an animal
is also called nephesh. It is by development that the soul becomes
spirit, both being the lower and the higher rungs of one and the same
ladder whose basis is the UNIVERSAL SOUL or spirit. 

This statement will startle those good men and women who, however much
they may love their cats and dogs, are yet too much devoted to the
teachings of their respective churches ever to admit such a heresy. "The
irrational soul of a dog or a frog divine and immortal as our own souls
are?"--they are sure to exclaim but so they are. It is not the humble
writer of the present article who says so, but no less an authority for
every good Christian than that king of the preachers--St. Paul. Our
opponents who so indignantly refuse to listen to the arguments of either
modern or esoteric science may perhaps lend a more willing ear to what
their own saint and apostle has to say on the matter; the true
interpretation of whose words, moreover, shall be given neither by a
theosophist nor an opponent, but by one who was as good and pious a
Christian as any, namely, another saint--John Chrysostom--he who
explained and commented upon the Pauline Epistles, and who is held in
the highest reverence by the divines of both the Roman Catholic and the
Protestant churches. Christians have already found that experimental
science is not on their side; they may be still more disagreeably
surprised upon finding that no Hindu could plead more earnestly for
animal life than did St. Paul in writing to the Romans. Hindus indeed
claim mercy to the dumb brute only on account of the doctrine of
transmigration and hence of the sameness of the principle or element
that animates both man and brute. St. Paul goes further: he shows the
animal hoping for, and living in the expectation of the same
"deliverance from the bonds of corruption" as any good Christian. The
precise expressions of that great apostle and philosopher will be quoted
later on in the present Essay and their true meaning shown. 

The fact that so many interpreters--Fathers of the Church and
scholastics,--tried to evade the real meaning of St. Paul is no proof
against its inner sense, but rather against the fairness of the
theologians whose inconsistency will be shown in this particular. But
some people will support their propositions, however erroneous, to the
last. Others, recognizing their earlier mistake, will, like Cornelius a
Lapide, offer the poor animal amende honorable. Speculating upon the
part assigned by nature to the brute creation in the great drama of
life, he says: "The aim of all creatures is the service of man. Hence,
together with him (their master) they are waiting for their
renovation"--cum homine renovationem suam expectant.4 "Serving" man,
surely cannot mean being tortured, killed, uselessly shot and otherwise
misused; while it is almost needless to explain the word "renovation."
Christians understand by it the renovation of bodies after the second
coming of Christ; and limit it to man, to the exclusion of animals. The
students of the Secret Doctrine explain it by the successive renovation
and perfection of forms on the scale of objective and subjective being,
and in a long series of evolutionary transformations from animal to man,
and upward. . . . 

This will, of course, be again rejected by Christians with indignation.
We shall be told that it is not thus that the Bible was explained to
them, nor can it ever mean that. It is useless to insist upon it. Many
and sad in their results were the erroneous interpretations of that
which people are pleased to call the "Word of God." The sentence "cursed
be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren" (Gen.
IX, 25),--generated centuries of misery and undeserved woe for the
wretched slaves--the negroes. It is the clergy of the United States who
were their bitterest enemies in the anti-slavery question, which
question they opposed Bible in hand. 

Yet slavery is proved to have been the cause of the natural decay of
every country; and even proud Rome fell because "the majority in the
ancient world were slaves," as Geyer justly remarks. But so terribly
imbued at all times were the best, the most intellectual Christians with
those many erroneous interpretations of the Bible, that even one of
their grandest poets, while defending the right of man to freedom,
allots no such portion to the poor animal. 
God gave us 

... only over beast, fish, fowl, 
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but man over man
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free
--says Milton. 

But, like murder, error "will out," and incongruity must unavoidably
occur whenever erroneous conclusions are supported either against or in
favour of a prejudged question. The opponents of Eastern philozoism thus
offer their critics a formidable weapon to upset their ablest arguments
by such incongruity between premises and conclusions, facts postulated
and deductions made. 
It is the purpose of the present Essay to throw a ray of light upon this
most serious and interesting subject. Roman Catholic writers in order to
support the genuineness of the many miraculous resurrections of animals
produced by their saints, have made them the subject of endless debates.
The "soul in animals" is, in the opinion of Bossuet, "the most difficult
as the most important of all philosophical questions." 

Confronted with the doctrine of the Church that animals, though not
soulless, have no permanent or immortal soul in them, and that the
principle which animates them dies with the body, it becomes interesting
to learn how the school-men and the Church divines reconcile this
statement with that other claim that animals may be and have been
frequently and miraculously resurrected 

Though but a feeble attempt--one more elaborate would require
volumes--the present Essay, by showing the inconsistency of the
scholastic and theological interpretations of the Bible, aims at
convincing people of the great criminality of taking--especially in
sport and vivisection--animal life. Its object, at any rate, is to show
that however absurd the notion that either man or brute can be
resurrected after the life-principle has fled from the body forever,
such resurrections--if they were true--would not be more impossible in
the case of a dumb brute than in that of a man; for either both are
endowed by nature with what is so loosely called by us "soul," or
neither the one nor the other is so endowed. 

Part 2 (continued in) HAVE ANIMALS SOLS ?

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