Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00145)

 8/17/2005 5:09 AM

Dear Friends:

I think this will be found of importance in defining exactly what "Black
Magic" is.


============================
 
 
BUDDHISM, CHRISTIANITY AND PHALLICISM by HPB 


WORKS by specialists and scholars have to be treated with a certain respect,
due to science. But such works as Payne Knight's On the Worship of Priapus,
and the Ancient Faiths, etc., of Dr. Inman, were merely the precursory drops
of the shower of phallicism that burst upon the reading public in the shape
of General Forlong's Rivers of Life. Very soon lay writers followed the
torrent, and Hargrave Jennings' charming volume, The Rosicrucians, was
superseded by his Phallicism. 
As an elaborate account of this work--that hunts up sexual worship, from the
grossest forms of idolatry up to its most refined and hidden symbolism in
Christianity--would better suit a newspaper review than a journal like the
present, it becomes necessary to state at once the reason it is noticed at
all. Were Theosophists entirely to ignore it, Phallicism 1 and such-like
works would be used some day against Theosophy. Mr. Hargrave Jennings' last
production was written, in every probability, to arrest its
progress--erroneously confounded as it is by many with Occultism, pure and
simple, and even with Buddhism itself. 
Phallicism appeared in 1884, just at a time when all the French and English
papers heralded the arrival of a few Theosophists from India as the advent
of Buddhism in Christian Europe--the former in their usual flippant way, the
latter with an energy that might have been worthy of a better cause, and
might have been more appropriately directed against "sexual worship at
home," according to certain newspaper revelations. Whether rightly or
wrongly, public rumour attributes this "mystic" production of Mr. Hargrave
Jennings' to the advent of Theosophy. However it may be, and whosoever may
have inspired the author, his efforts were crowned with success only in one
direction. Notwithstanding that he proclaims himself, modestly enough, "the
first introducer of the grand philosophical problem of this mysterious
Buddhism," and pronounces his work "undoubtedly new and original," declaring
in the same breath that all the "previous great men and profound thinkers
[before himself] labouring through the ages [in this direction] have worked
in vain," it is easy to prove the author mistaken. His "enthusiasm" and
self-laudation may be very sincere, and no doubt his labours were
"enormous," as he says; they have nevertheless led him on an entirely false
track, when he asserts that:
"These physiological contests [about the mysteries of animal generation] . .
. induced in the reflective wisdom of the earliest thinkers, laid the
sublime foundations of the phallic worship. They led to violent schisms in
religion, and to Buddhism."
Now it is precisely Buddhism which was the first religious system in history
that sprang up with the determinate object of putting an end to all the male
Gods and to the degrading idea of a sexual personal Deity being the
generator of mankind and the Father of men.
His book, the author assures us: "Comprises within the limit of a modest
octavo all that can be known of the doctrines of the Buddhists, Gnostics,
and Rosicrucians as connected with phallicism."
In this he errs again, and most profoundly, or--which would be still
worse--he is trying to mislead the reader by filling him with disgust for
such "mysteries." His work is "new and original" in so far as it explains
with enthusiastic and reverential approval the strong phallic element in the
Bible; for, as he says, "Jehovah undoubtedly signifies the universal male,"
and he calls Mary Magdalen before her conversion the "female St. Michael,"
as a mystical antithesis and paradox. 
No one, truly in Christian countries before him has ever had the moral
courage to speak so openly as he does of the phallic element with which the
Christian Church (the Roman Catholic) is honeycombed, and this is the
author's chief desert and credit. But all the merit of the boasted
"conciseness and brevity" of his "modest octavo" disappears on its becoming
the undeniable and evident means of leading the reader astray under the most
false impressions; especially as very few, if any, of his readers will
follow or even share his "enthusiasm . . . converted out of the utmost
original disbelief of these wondrously stimulating and beautiful phallic
beliefs." Nor is it fair or honest to give out a portion of the truth,
without allowing any room for a palliative, as is done in the cases of
Buddha and Christ. 
That which the former did in India, Jesus repeated in Palestine. Buddhism
was a passionate reactionary protest against the phallic worship that led
every nation first to the adoration of a personal God, and finally to black
magic, and the same object was aimed at by the Nazarene Initiate and
prophet. 
Buddhism escaped the curse of black magic by keeping clear of a personal
male God in its religious system; but this conception reigning supreme in
the so-called monotheistic countries, black magic--the fiercer and stronger
for being utterly disbelieved in by its most ardent votaries, unconscious
perhaps of its presence among them--is drawing them nearer and nearer to the
maëlstrom of every nation given to sin, or to sorcery, pure and simple. 
No Occultist believes in the devil of the Church, the traditional Satan;
every student of Occultism and every Theosophist believes in black magic,
and in dark, natural powers present in the worlds, if he accept the white or
divine science as an actual fact on our globe. Therefore one may repeat in
full confidence the remark made by Cardinal Ventura on the devil--only
applying it to black magic:
The greatest victory of Satan was gained on that day when he succeeded in
making himself denied.
It may be said further, that "Black magic reigns over Europe as an
all-powerful, though unrecognized, autocrat," its chief conscious adherents
and practical servants being found in the Roman Church, and its unconscious
practitioners in the Protestant. The whole body of the so-called
"privileged" classes of society in Europe and America is honeycombed with
unconscious black magic, or sorcery of the vilest character.
But Christ is not responsible for the mediaeval and the modern Christianity
fabricated in His name. And if the author of Phallicism be right in speaking
of the transcendental sexual worship in the Roman Church and calling it
"true, although doubtless of profound mystical strictly 'Christian'
paradoxical construction," he is wrong in calling it the "celestial or
Theosophical doctrine of the unsexual, transcendental phallicism," for all
such words strung together become meaningless by annulling each other.
"Paradoxical" indeed must be that "construction" which seeks to show the
phallic element in "the tomb of the Redeemer," and the yonic in Nirvâna,
besides finding a Priapus in the "Word made Flesh" or the LOGOS. But such is
the "Priapomania" of our century that even the most ardent professed
Christians have to admit the element of phallicism in their dogmas, lest
they should be twitted with it by their opponents.
This is not meant as criticism, but simply as the defence of real, true
magic, confined by the author of Phallicism to the "divine magic of
generation." "Phallic ideas," he says, are "discovered to be the foundation
of all religions."
In this there is nothing "new" or "original." Since state religions came
into existence, there was never an Initiate or philosopher, a Master or
disciple, who was ignorant of it. Nor is there any fresh discovery in the
fact of Jehovah having been worshipped by the Jews under the shape of
"phallic stones" (unhewn)--of being, in short, as much of a phallic God as
any other Lingam, which fact has been no mystery from the days of Dupuis.
That he was pre-eminently a male deity--a Priapus--is now proven absolutely
and without show of useless mysticism, by Ralston Skinner of Cincinnati, in
his wonderfully clever and erudite volume, The Source of Measures, published
some years ago, in which he demonstrates the fact on mathematical grounds,
completely versed, as he seems to be, in kabalistic numerical calculations.
What then makes the author of Phallicism say that in his book will be found
"a more complete and more connected account than has hitherto appeared of
the different forms of the . . . peculiar veneration (not idolatry),
generally denominated the phallic worship"? "No previous writer has
disserted so fully," he adds with modest reserve, "upon the shades and
varieties of this singular ritual, or traced up so completely its mysterious
blendings with the ideas of the philosophers as to what lies remotely in
nature in regard to the origin of the history of the human race."
There is one thing really "original" and "new" in Phallicism, and it is
this: while noticing and underlining the most filthy rites connected with
phallic worship among every "heathen" nation, those of the Christians are
idealized, and a veil of a most mystic fabric is thrown over them. At the
same time the author accepts and insists upon Biblical chronology. Thus he
assigns to the Chaldaean Tower of Babel--"that magnificent, monster,
'upright,' defiant phallus," as he puts it--an age "soon after the Flood";
and to the Pyramids "a date not long after the foundation of the Egyptian
monarchy by Misraim, the son of Ham, 2118 B.C." The chronological views of
the author of The Rosicrucians seem to have greatly changed of late. There
is a mystery about his book, difficult, yet not wholly impossible to fathom,
which may be summed up in the words of the Comte de Gasparin with regard to
the works on Satan by the Marquis de Mirville: "Everything goes to show a
work which is essentially an act, and has the value of a collective labour."
But this is of no moment to the Theosophists. That which is of real
importance is his misleading statement, which he supports on Wilford's
authority, that the legendary war that began in India and spread all over
the globe was caused by a diversity of opinion upon the relative
"superiority of the male or female emblem . . . in regard of the idolatrous
magic worship.... These physiological disputes led to violent schisms in
religion and even to bloody and devastating wars, which have wholly passed
out of the history . . . or have never been recorded in history . . .
remaining, only as a tradition."
This is denied point-blank by initiated Brâhmanas.
If the above be given on Col. Wilford's authority, then the author of
Phallicism was not fortunate in his selection. The reader has only to turn
to Max Müller's Science of Religion to find therein the detailed history of
Col. Wilford becoming--and very honestly confessing to the fact--the victim
of Brâhmanical mystification with regard to the alleged presence of Shem,
Ham, and Japhet in the Purânas. The true history of the dispersion and the
cause of the great war are very well known to the initiated Brâhmanas, only
they will not tell it, as it would go directly against themselves and their
supremacy over those who believe in a personal God and Gods. It is quite
true that the origin of every religion is based on the dual powers, male and
female, of abstract Nature, but these in their turn were the radiations or
emanations of the sexless, infinite, absolute Principle, the only One to be
worshipped in spirit and not with rites; whose immutable laws no words of
prayer or propitiation can change, and whose sunny or shadowy, beneficent or
maleficent influence, grace or curse, under the form of Karma, can be
determined only by the actions--not by the empty supplications--of the
devotee. This was the religion, the One Faith of the whole of primitive
humanity, and was that of the "Sons of God," the B'ne Elohim of old. This
faith assured to its followers the full possession of transcendental psychic
powers, of the truly divine magic. Later on, when mankind fell, in the
natural course of its evolution "into generation," i.e., into human creation
and procreation, and carrying down the subjective process of Nature from the
plane of spirituality to that of matter--made in its selfish and animal
adoration of self a God of the human organism, and worshipped self in this
objective personal Deity, then was black magic initiated. This magic or
sorcery is based upon, springs from, and has the very life and soul of
selfish impulse; and thus was gradually developed the idea of a personal
God. The first "pillar of unhewn stone," the first objective "sign and
witness to the Lord," creative, generative, and the "Father of man," was
made to become the archetype and progenitor of the long series of male
(vertical) and female (horizontal) Deities, of pillars, and cones.
Anthropomorphism in religion is the direct generator of and stimulus to the
exercise of black, left-hand magic. And it was again merely a feeling of
selfish national exclusiveness--not even patriotism--of pride and
self-glorification over all other nations, that could lead an Isaiah to see
a difference between the one living God and the idols of the neighbouring
nations. In the day of the great "change," Karma, whether called personal or
impersonal Providence, will see no difference between those who set an altar
(horizontal) to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar
(vertical) at the border thereof (ls. xix. 19) and they "who seek to the
idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to
the wizards"--for all this is human, hence devilish black magic.
It is then the latter magic, coupled with anthropomorphic worship, that
caused the "Great War" and was the reason for the "Great Flood" of Atlantis;
for this reason also the Initiates--those who had remained true to primeval
Revelation--formed themselves into separate communities, keeping their magic
or religious rites in the profoundest secrecy. The caste of the Brâhmanas,
the descendants of the "mind-born Rishis and Sons of Brahmâ" dates from
those days, as also do the "Mysteries."
Natural sciences, archæology, theology, philosophy, all have been forced in
The Secret Doctrine to give their evidence in support of the teachings
herein again propounded. Vox audita perit: litera scripta manet. Published
admissions cannot be made away with--even by an opponent: they have been
made good use of. Had I acted otherwise, The Secret Doctrine, from the first
chapter to the last, would have amounted to uncorroborated personal
affirmations. Scholars and some of the latest discoveries in various
departments of science being brought to testify to what might have otherwise
appeared to the average reader as the most preposterous hypotheses based
upon unverified assertions, the rationality of these will be made clearer.
Occult teaching will at last be examined in the light of science, physical
as well as spiritual.
Lucifer, July, 1896
 
1 Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial, Heathen and Christian; its
connection with the Rosiscrucians and the Gnostics and its foundation in
Buddhism. 

From: "Theosophical Articles" by Blavatsky. iii 29 
=========================================

I truest there are important ideas here t be carefully mulled over.


Dallas