Theos-Talk Archives (November 2006 Message tt00871)

Re  Stabletons Starmaker, Golden Dawn, vampirism 


John writes:


<"...Thanks for the post. The part 
about the "time traveler" reminds me 
of a book written on the same topic 
back in the 1900s by Olaf Stapledon 
the Title was "Star Maker">



   Great book! as the Other Stabledon 
book's you list (below) (haven't read 
a few on your list - Dover also publishes 
him.) You doubtless also like 
"Voyage to Arcturus" by David Lindsay (?) 
which I think is from the time period, 
and equally imaginative. 


   That great idea for "Starmaker" - 
Stabledon may or may not have gotten the 
idea from a short story by AE (George 
William Russell), the Theosophist.  (Ideas 
and words even tend to get picked up by 
authors independently however sometimes.)  
The article in question is pasted below.


GD & HPB - I looked back in Carl's posts 
and see no where that he provides any 
evidence that HPB OK'd membership in 
the Golden Dawn for ES members - just 
Masons and Odd Fellows - pp. 496-7, 
BCW XII.  Was Carl just BSing us?


Vampirism  - Although it might initially 
seem counter-intuitive, Blavatsky in 
"Transactions" says that we absorb prana 
or energy from out environment - we 
don't create energy in our bodies.  The 
person with more energy can withstand 
more prana.  A vampire actually get in 
rapport with a healthier person, which 
person by induction (like one tuning 
fork starting another?) "harmonizes" 
the other persons body, so it can absorb 
or withstand more prana. 

        - jake j.

----------


THE STORY OF A STAR
- AE  (George W. Russell)

 	The emotion that haunted me in that little cathedral
town would be most difficult to describe.  After the
hurry, rattle, and fever of the city, the rare weeks
spent here were infinitely peaceful.  They were full
of a quaint sense of childhood, with sometimes a
deeper chord touched - the giant and spiritual things
childhood has dreams of.  The little room I slept in
had opposite its window the great grey cathedral wall;
 it was only in the evening that the sunlight crept
round it and appeared in the room strained through the
faded green blind.  It must have been this silvery
quietness of colour which in some subtle way affected
me with the feeling of a continual Sabbath;  and this
was strengthened by the bells chiming hour after hour:
 the pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by the
flying notes coloured the intervals with faint and
delicate memories.  They haunted my dreams, and I
heard with unutterable longing the astral chimes
pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic
memory, until the peace they tolled became almost a
nightmare, and I longed for utter oblivion or
forgetfulness of their reverberations.
 	

More remarkable were the strange lapses into other
worlds and times.  Almost as frequent as the changing
of the bells were the changes from state to state.  I
realised what is meant by the Indian philosophy of
Maya.  Truly my days were full of Mayas, and my
work-a-day city life was no more real to me than one
of those bright, brief glimpses of things long past. 
I talk of the past, and yet these moments taught me
how false our ideas of time are.  In the ever-living
yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow are words of no
meaning.  I know I fell into what we call the past and
the things I counted as dead for ever were the things
I had yet to endure.  Out of the old age of earth I
stepped into its childhood, and received once more the
primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty.  But
these things are too vast and vague to speak of; the
words we use to-day cannot tell their story.  Nearer
to our time is the legend that follows.
	

I was, I thought, one of the Magi of old Persia,
inheritor of its unforgotten lore, and using some of
its powers.  I tried to pierce through the great veil
of nature, and feel the life that quickened it within.
 I tried to comprehend the birth and growth of
planets, and to do this I rose spiritually and passed
beyond earth's confines into that seeming void which
is the matrix where they germinate.  On one of these
journeys I was struck by the phantasm, so it seemed,
of a planet I had not observed before.  I could not
then observe closer, and coming again on another
occasion it had disappeared.  After the lapse of many
months I saw it once more, brilliant with fiery beauty
- its motion was slow, rotating around some invisible
centre.  I pondered over it, and seemed to know that
the invisible centre was its primordial spiritual
state, from which it emerged a little while and into
which it then withdrew.  Short was its day;  its
shining faded into a glimmer, and then into darkness
in a few months.  I learned its time and cycles;  I
made preparations and determined to await its coming.


The Birth of a Planet 

	
At first silence and then an inner music, and then the
sounds of song throughout the vastness of its orbit
grew as many in number as there were stars at gaze. 
Avenues and vistas of sound!  They reeled to and fro. 
They poured from a universal stillness quick with
unheard things.  They rushed forth and broke into a
myriad voices gay with childhood.  From age and the
eternal they rushed forth into youth.  They filled the
void with reveling and exultation.  In rebellion they
then returned and entered the dreadful Fountain. 
Again they came forth, and the sounds faded into
whispers;  they rejoiced once again, and again died
into silence.
	

And now all around glowed a vast twilight;  it filled
the cradle of the planet with colourless fire.  I felt
a rippling motion which impelled me away from the
centre to the circumference.  At that centre a still
flame began to lighten;  a new change took place, and
space began to curdle, a milky and nebulous substance
rocked to and fro.  At every motion the pulsation of
its rhythm carried it farther and farther away from
the centre,  it grew darker, and a great purple shadow
covered it so that I could see it no longer.  I was
now on the outer verge, where the twilight still
continued to encircle the planet with zones of clear
transparent light.
	

As night after night I rose up to visit it they grew
many-coloured and brighter.  I saw the imagination of
nature visibly at work.  I wandered through shadowy
immaterial forests, a titanic vegetation built up of
light and colour;  I saw it growing denser, hung with
festoons and trailers of fire, and spotted with the
light of myriad flowers such as earth never knew. 
Coincident with the appearance of these things I felt
within myself, as if in harmonious movement, a sense
of joyousness, an increase of self-consciousness;  I
felt full of gladness, youth, and the mystery of the
new.  I felt that greater powers were about to appear,
those who had thrown outwards this world and erected
it as a place in space.
	

I could not tell half the wonder of this strange race.
 I could not myself comprehend more than a little of
the mystery of their being.  They recognised my
presence there, and communicated with me in such a way
that I can only describe it by saying that they seemed
to enter into my soul breathing a fiery life;  yet I
knew that the highest I could reach to was but the
outer verge of their 
spiritual nature, and to tell you but a little I have
many times to translate it, for in the first unity
with their thought I touched on an almost universal
sphere of life, I peered into the ancient heart that
beats throughout time;  and this knowledge became
change in me, first, into a vast and nebulous
symbology, and so down through many degrees of human
thought into words which hold not at all the pristine
and magical beauty.
	

I stood before one of this race, and I thought, "What
is the meaning and end of life here?"  Within me I
felt the answering ecstasy that illuminated with
vistas of dawn and rest, it seemed to say:
	

"Our spring and our summer are unfolding into light
and form, and our autumn and winter are a fading into
the infinite soul."
	

I thought, "To what end is this life poured forth and
withdrawn?"
	

He came nearer and touched me;  once more I felt the
thrill of being that changed itself into vision.
	

"The end is creation, and creation is joy: the One
awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, and knows
itself in us;  as we return we enter it in gladness,
knowing ourselves.  After long cycles the world you
live in will become like ours;  it will be poured
forth and withdrawn;  a mystic breath, a mirror to
glass your being."
	

He disappeared while I wondered what cyclic changes
would transmute our ball of mud into the subtle
substance of thought.
	

In that world I dared not stay during its period of
withdrawal;  having entered a little into its life, I
became subject to its laws:  the Power on its return
would have dissolved my being utterly.  I felt with a
wild terror its clutch upon me, and I withdrew from
the departing glory, from the greatness that was my
destiny - but not yet.
	

>From such dreams I would be aroused, perhaps by a
gentle knock at my door, and my little cousin
Margaret's quaint face would peep in with a "Cousin
Robert, are you not coming down to supper?"
	

Of these visions in the light of after thought I would
speak a little.  All this was but symbol, requiring to
be thrice sublimed in interpretation ere its true
meaning can be grasped.  I do not know whether worlds
are heralded by such glad songs, or whether any have
such a fleeting existence, for the mind that reflects
truth is deluded with strange phantasies of time and
place in which seconds are rolled out into centuries
and long cycles are reflected in an instant of time. 
There is within us a little space through which all
the threads of the universe are drawn;  and,
surrounding that incomprehensible centre the mind of
man sometimes catches glimpses of things which are
true only in those glimpses;  when we record them the
true has vanished, and a shadowy story - such as this
- alone remains.  Yet, perhaps, the time is not
altogether wasted in considering legends like these,
for they reveal, though but in phantasy and symbol, a
greatness we are heirs to, a destiny which is ours,
though it be yet far away.


(Irish Theosophist, August 15, 1894)

------------------


<14. Re: Re Science, New Point Loma Books
    Posted by: "samblo@cs.com" samblo@cs.com 
    Date: Sun Nov 12, 2006 12:46 pm ((PST))

<Mark,
    Thanks for the post. The part about the "time
traveler" reminds me 
<of a 
book written on the same topic back in the 1900s by
Olaf Stapledon the 
Title 
was "Star Maker" and tells about a man who travels by
projecting his 
consciousness visiting many new planets and sharing
consciousness with 
life forms he 
finds there. Olaf Stapledon was somewhat of a
visionary of his time, he 
wrote then 
about our present situation of Oil and demand supply
shrinkage. I 
recommend 
his books;

<Sirius                               1944 Penguin
Books Paperback
<Star Maker                       1937   "            
  '"           "
<The Last and First Men      1930   "                "
         " 
<The Last Men in London     1932   "                " 
        "
<Odd  John                         1935
<A Man Divided                   1950 
<A Modern Theory of Ethics  1935?

John

-----------------




 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Want to start your own business?
Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index