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5. Hermenêutica da Bíblia
(p. 157)
BELIEVERS in the conclusions of the exponents
of physical science are apt to bring against the students of Spiritual Science
the charge of reviving the old tricks and evil-doings of sorcery. Some persons who make this allegation believe that sorcery,
whether ancient or modern, never had, nor can have, any other basis than mere
imposture and ignorant credulity; others believe or suspect that it represents a
real art of an unlawful and abominable character. I propose to shew that sorcery
has indeed been revived in modern times to a considerable extent, but that its
revival has taken place, not in the domain of Spiritual Science, but in that of
physical science itself.
A further object of my address is to suggest to those who, like myself, hold as
a fundamental doctrine of all Spiritual knowledge, the Unity of Substance, and
who think it incumbent on them to give the knowledge of that doctrine practical
expression in universal sympathy with all forms of sentient being, that it is
high time for them to enter the lists actively against the worst manifestation
of Materialism and Atheism the world has yet seen, and to declare their recognition of the simple and obvious
moral issue of faith in a good God, namely, the duty of Love for all
incarnations of the Divine Substance, and horror and reprehension of cruelty as
such, whatever plea may be advanced for its practice.
It would be difficult to find stronger evidence of the
banefulness
of the influence exerted by the materialistic spirit of the day than that which
is furnished by the apathy and uncertainty of the public generally in regard to
the practice known as vivisection. To
(p. 158)
the vitalised minority of
persons, the spectacle thus afforded is as amazing as it is deplorable. That any
human being, claiming to be civilised, should, through
indifference or doubt, hesitate to condemn an organised
system of torture, on whatever plea instituted, is in itself sufficiently
surprising. But when all the aggravating circumstances are taken into the
account – especially the innocence and helplessness of the victims – the
prevalent attitude of the public mind becomes explicable only as the result of
some moral epidemic.
From the ordinary point of view, the utilitarian and the moral, this question
has already been amply discussed, and with these it is not now my purpose to
deal. There is a third aspect of it, especially interesting to the student of
psychological and occult science, and one which, for want of a more precise
definition, may be described as the Spiritualistic. Persons to whom the
chronicles of the modern vivisector’s
laboratory and the records of ancient and mediaeval sorcery are alike familiar
must doubtless have noted the family resemblance between the two, and will need
only to be reminded that the practice whose ethics are now so prominently
canvassed in medical conclaves, and on popular platforms, represents no new
feature in the world’s history, but is in every detail a resuscitation of the
old and hideous cultus of the Black Art, whose ghost
was deemed to be for ever laid.
The science of medicine, placed originally under the direct patronage of the
Gods, whether Egyptian, Oriental, Grecian, or Teutonic, and subsequently under
that of the Christian Church, was among all nations in the days of faith
associated with the priestly office. The relation between soundness of soul and
soundness of body was then held to be of the closest, and the health-giving man,
the therapeut, was one who cured the body by means of knowledge,
Divine alike in its source and in its method. In Egypt, where the order of the
Theraputae seems to have had its origin, healing was from the earliest times
connected with religion, and there is good reason to believe that the practice
of medicine was the exclusive and regularly exercised profession of the
priesthood, the first hospital of which we have any record being within the
consecrated precincts of the temple, and the sick being placed under the
immediate care of its ministrants.
More than one deity was associated with medical and therapeutic science.
According to Diodorus (lib. i.),
the Egyptians held themselves indebted for their proficiency in these respects
to
(p. 159)
the
AEsculapius, reputed the son of Apollo, gave his name to
medical science; and his temples, the principal of which were at Titana in
The course of treatment adopted comprised hydropathy,
shampooing, dieting, magnetism, fumigations, gymnastics, and herbal remedies,
internally and externally administered, these remedies, being in all cases
accompanied with prayers, music, and songs called νόμοι. In the hospitals of Pergamus and
This was also the idea of the early Hebrew and
(p. 160)
Many of the primitive Christian religious
communities were schools of medicine; and the visitation of the sick, not only
in the priestly, but in the medical capacity was held to be a special function
of the clergy. The custom still survives under a modified form in Catholic
countries, where “religious” of both sexes are employed in hospitals as nurses
and dressers, the higher duties of the calling having been wrested from them by
the laity – often too justly designated the “profane.”
Such, universally, was the early character of medical science, and such the
position of its professors. “Priest” and “Healer” were religious titles,
belonging of right only to initiates in Divinity. For the initiate only could
practise the true magic, which, originally, was neither more nor less
than the science of religion or the Mysteries, that Divine knowledge, won by
reverent and loving study of Nature, which made the Magian free of her secrets and gave him his distinctive
power.
Side by side with this true magic, sanctioned by the Gods, taught by the Church,
hallowed by prayer, there grew up, like the poisonous weed in the cornfield, the
unholy art of the black magician or sorcerer, whose endeavour
was to rival, by the aid of sub-human or “infernal” means, the results obtained
legitimately by the adept in white or celestial magic.
And as, on the one hand, in order to attain the grace and power necessary to
perform Divine works or “miracles,” the true Magian
cultivated purity in act and thought, denying the appetites, and abounding in
love and prayer; so, on the other hand, in order to achieve success in
witchcraft, it was necessary to adopt all the opposite practices. The sorcerer
was distinguished by obscene actions, malevolence, and renunciation of all human
sentiments and hopes of Heaven. His only virtues – if virtues they can be called
– were hardihood and perseverance. No deed was foul enough, no cruelty atrocious
enough, to deter him. As the supremacy of the Magian was obtained at the price of self-sacrifice and unwearying love and labour for
others, so the sorcerer, reversing the means to suit the opposite end,
sacrificed others to himself, and cultivated a spirit of indiscriminate
malignity. For the patient and reverent study by means of which the
Magian
sought to win the secrets of Nature the sorcerer substituted violence, and endeavoured to wrest from her by force the treasures she
gives only to love. In order to attract and bind to his service the powers he
invoked, he offered in secluded places living oblations of victims the most
innocent he could procure, putting
(p. 161)
them to deaths of hideous torture in the belief that
the results obtained would be favourable to his wishes
in proportion to the inhumanity and monstrosity of the means employed. Thus, as
Ennemoser observes, “the sorcerers inverted nature itself, abused the innocent animal
world with horrible ingenuity, and trod every human feeling under foot. Endeavouring by force to obtain benefits from hell, they had
recourse to the most terrible of infernal devices. For, where men know not God,
or having known, have turned away from Him to wickedness, they are wont to
address themselves in worship to the kingdom of hell, and to the powers of
darkness.”
Such, precisely, is the part enacted by the vivisector of to-day. He is, in
fact, a practitioner of black magic, the characteristic
cultus
of which has been described by a well-known writer on occult subjects as that of
vicarious death. “To sacrifice others to oneself, to kill others in order to get
life, – this was the great principle of sorcery” (Eliphas Levi). The witches of
(p. 162)
An almost exact parallel to the modern vivisector in motive, in method, and in
character is presented by the portrait thus preserved to us of the mediaeval
devil-conjurer. In it we recognise the delusion, whose
enunciation in medical language is so unhappily familiar to us, that by means of
vicarious sacrifices, divinations in living bodies, and rites consisting of
torture scientifically inflicted and prolonged, the secrets of life and of power
over nature are obtainable. But the spiritual malady which rages in the soul of
the man who can be guilty of the deeds of the
vivisector, is in itself sufficient to render him incapable of acquiring the
highest and best knowledge. Like the sorcerer, he finds it easier to propagate
and multiply disease than to discover the secret of health. Seeking for the germs of life he invents
only new methods of death, and pays with his soul the price of these poor gains.
Like the sorcerer, he misunderstands alike the terms and the method of
knowledge, and voluntarily sacrifices his humanity in order to acquire the
eminence of a fiend. But perhaps the most significant of all points of
resemblance between the sorcerer and the vivisector, as contrasted with the Magian, is in the distinctive and exclusive solicitude for
the mere body manifested by the former. To secure advantages of a physical and
material nature merely, to discover some effectual method of self-preservation
in the flesh, to increase its pleasures, to assuage its self-induced diseases,
to minister to its sensual comforts, no matter at what cost of vicarious pain
and misery to innocent men and animals, these are the objects, exclusively, of the mere sorcerer, – of the mere
vivisector. His aims are bounded by the earthly and the sensual; he neither
cares nor seeks for any knowledge
unconnected with these. But the aspiration of the Magian,
the adept in true magic, is entirely towards the region of the Divine. He seeks primarily health for the soul,
knowing that health for the body will follow; therefore he works through and by
means of the soul, and his art is truly sympathetic, magnetic, and radical. He
holds that the soul is the true person, that her interests are paramount, and
that no knowledge of value to man can be bought by the vicarious tears and pain
of any creature soever. He remembers above all things
that man is the son of God, and if for a moment the interests of Knowledge and
of Love should seem to be at variance,
he will say with equal courage and wisdom: “I would rather that I and my beloved
should suffer and die in the body, than that to buy relief or life for it our
souls should be smitten with disease
(p.163)
and death.” For the Magian
is priest and king as well as physician; but the sorcerer, whose miserable
craft, divorced from religion, deals only with the lower nature, that is, with
the powers of darkness, clings with passionate despair to the flesh, and, by the
very character of his pursuits, makes himself incapable of real science. For, to
be an adept in this, it is indispensable to be pure of heart, clear of
conscience, and just in action. It is not enough that the aim be noble, it is
necessary that the means should be noble likewise. A Divine intention
presupposes a Divine method. As it is forbidden to man to enrich himself by
theft, or to free himself by murder, so also is it forbidden him to acquire
knowledge by unlawful means, – to fight even the battles of humanity with the
weapons of hell. It is impossible to serve humanity by the sacrifice of that
which alone constitutes humanity – justice and its eternal principles. Whenever
the world has followed the axioms of the vivisector, whenever it has put sword
and flame and rack to work in the interests of truth or of progress, it has but
reaped a harvest of lies, and started an epidemic of madness and delusion. All
the triumphs of civilisation
have been gained by civilised methods: it is the
Divine law that so it should be, and whoever affirms the contrary is either an
imbecile or a hypocrite. The vivisector’s plea that he
sins in the interests of humanity is, therefore, the product of a mind incapable
of reason, or wilfully concealing its true object with
a lie. That, in the majority of cases, the latter explanation is the correct one
is proved beyond doubt by the nature of the operations performed, and by not a
few incautious admissions on the part of some of the school itself. To multiply
pamphlets, “observations,” and “scientific” discussions; to gain notoriety among
followers of the cultus, to be distinguished as the
inventor of such a “method” or the chronicler of such a series of experiments,
and thereby to earn wealth and position, these constitute the ambitions of the
average vivisector. And, if he go beyond these, if some vague hope of a “great discovery”
delude and blind his moral nature as it did that of the miserable Seigneur de Retz, we must, in such case, relegate him to the category of
madmen, who, for the poor gains of the body, are willing to assassinate the
soul. Madness such as this was rife in those mediaeval times which we are wont
to speak of as the “dark ages,” and the following examples, selected for the
striking resemblance they present to the “scientific” crimes of the nineteenth
century, may, with the instances already given, suffice as specimens of the
(p. 164)
abominations which the delusions of sorcery are
able to suggest.
“The
Taigheirm was an infernal magical sacrifice of cats,
prevalent until the close of the sixteenth century, and of which the origin lies
in the remotest times. The rites of the Taigheirm
were indispensable to the worship or incantation of the subterranean or diabolic
gods. The midnight hour, between Friday and Saturday, was the authentic time for
these horrible practices; and the sacrifice was continued four whole days and
nights. After the cats had been put into magico-sympathetic (sur-excited)
condition by a variety of tortures, one of them was put alive upon a spit, and,
amid terrific howlings, roasted before a slow fire.
The moment that the howls of one agonised creature
ceased in death, another was put on the spit – for a minute of interval must not
take place if the operators would control hell – and this sacrifice was
continued for four entire days and nights. When the Taigheirm was complete, the operators demanded of the demons
the reward of their offering, which reward consisted of various things, such as
riches, knowledge, fame, the gift of second sight, etc.” – Horst’s Deuteroscopy and Ennemoser’s
History of Magic. (1)
Let the following extracts from publications circulated among the vivisectors of
to-day be compared with the foregoing, and the reader will himself be enabled to
judge of the exactness of the parallel between the black art of the past and of
the present.
“Dr Legg’s experiments on cats at St Bartholomew’s Hospital included a great
variety of tortures. Among others, their stomachs were opened, while the cats
were pinned alive on a table, their livers were pricked with needles, the
stomachs were then sewn up, and the cats left in that condition until death
ensued from prolapse of the bowels, some of the
animals surviving the torture as long as twenty-six days.” – St Bartholomew
Hospital Reports.
“Burns were produced by sponging the chests and bellies of
dogs with turpentine five or ten times in quick succession, setting fire to it
each time; and scalds, by pouring over the dogs eight ounces of boiling
water nine times in quick succession. All the
(p. 165)
dogs died, either in a few hours, or at the latest,
after five days.” –
“Delaroche and Berger baked hundreds of animals to death in
ovens, the heat being gradually increased until death ensued. Claude Bernard
invented a furnace for roasting or baking animals to death, the details and
diagram of which apparatus are given in his Lessons on Animal Heat. Magendie
has also shewn by numerous experiments that dogs perish at the end of about
eighteen minutes in a furnace heated to 120° (centigrade), and at the end of
twenty-four minutes in one heated to 90°; or in one at 80° at the end of thirty
minutes.” – Béclard’s
Treatise on Physiology, and Gavarret’s
Animal Heat.
“Professor
Mantegazza has recently investigated the effects of
pain on the respiratory organs. The best methods for the production of pain he
finds to consist in planting nails, sharp and numerous, through the feet of an
animal in such a manner as to render the creature almost motionless, because in
every movement it would feel its torment more acutely. To produce still more
intense pain, it was found useful to employ injuries followed by inflammation.
An ingenious machine, constructed expressly for the purpose, enabled the
professor to grip any part of an animal with pincers with iron teeth, and to
crush or tear or lacerate the victim so as to produce pain in every possible
way. One little guinea-pig far advanced in pregnancy endured such frightful
tortures that it fell into convulsions, and no observations could be made on it.
In a second series of experiments, twenty-eight animals were sacrificed, some of
them taken from nursing their young, exposed to torture for an hour or two, then
allowed to rest an hour, and then replaced on the machine to be crushed or torn
for periods varying from two to six hours. Tables are appended by the professor
in which the cases of ‘great pain’ are distinguished from those of ‘excessive
pain,’ the victims of the last being ‘larded with nails in every part of the
body.’ All these experiments were performed with much patience and delight.” – Of the Action of
Pain, etc., by
Professor
Mantegazza, of
The two following experiments are cited from Baron Ernst de Weber’s Torture-chamber of
Science, and also from
the Courrier de Lyon, 8th June 1880: –
“The body of a pregnant bitch at the point of delivery was cut open to observe
whether in her dying and mutilated condition she would not attempt to caress and
lick her little ones.”
(p. 166)
“The forehead of a dog was pierced in two places with a large gimlet, and a
red-hot iron introduced through the wounds. He was then thrown into a river, to
observe whether in that state he would be able to swim.”
Professor
Goltz, of Strasburg, writes: “A very lively young dog
which had learnt to shake hands with both fore-paws had the left side of the
brain extracted through two holes on the 1st December 1875. This operation
caused lameness in the right paw. On being asked for the left paw the dog
immediately laid it in my hand. I now demand the right, but the creature only
looks at me sorrowfully, for he cannot move it. On my continuing to press for
it, the dog crosses the left paw over, and offers it to me on the right side, as
if to make amends for not being able to give the right. On the 13th January 1876
a second portion of the brain was destroyed; on February 15th, a third; and on
March 6th, a fourth, this last operation causing death.”
M.
Brachet writes: “I inspired a dog with a great
aversion for me, tormenting him and inflicting on him some pain or other as
often as I saw him. When this feeling was carried to its height, so that the
animal became furious every time he saw and heard me, I put out his eyes. I
could then appear before him without his manifesting any aversion; but if I
spoke, his barkings and furious movements proved the
indignation which animated him. I then destroyed the drums of his ears, and disorganised the internal ear as much as I could. When an
intense inflammation had rendered him completely deaf, I filled up his ears with
wax. He could now no longer hear or see.
This series of operations was afterwards performed on another dog.”
The prize for physiology was, by the French Institute, awarded to the
perpetrator of the above “experiments.”
In
Cyon’s Methodik, a “Handbook for Vivisectors,” we
read the following: “The true vivisector should approach a difficult experiment
with joyous eagerness and delight. He who, shrinking from the dissection of a
living creature, approaches experimentation as a disagreeable necessity may,
indeed, repeat various vivisections, but can never become an artist in
vivisection. The chief delight of the vivisector is that experienced when from
an ugly-looking incision, filled with bloody humours
and injured tissues, he draws out the delicate nerve-fibre,
and by means of irritants revives its apparently extinct sensation.”
(p. 167)
Have we in this nineteenth century indeed expunged from among us the foul and
hideous practice of sorcery, or rather, if comparison be fairly made between the
witchcraft of the “dark ages” and the “science” of the present, does it not
appear that the latter, alike for number of professors, ingenuity of cruelty,
effrontery and folly, bears away the palm? No need in this “year of grace” to
seek in the depths of remote forests, or in the recesses of mountain caves
and ruined castles, the midnight haunts of the sorcerer. All day he and his
assistants axe at their work unmolested in the underground laboratories of all
the medical schools throughout the length and breadth of
But between the positions of sorcery in the past and in the present is one
notable and all-important difference. In the past it was held a damnable offence
to practise the devil’s craft; and once proved guilty, the
sorcerer, no matter what his worldly rank or public services, could not hope to
escape from death by fire. But now the professors of the Black Art hold their
Sabbat in public, and their enunciations and the recitals of their
hideous “experiments” are reported in the journals of the day. They are
decorated by princes, feted by great ladies, and honoured with the special protection of State legislation.
It is held superstition to believe that in former ages wizards were enabled by
the practice of secret abominations and cruelties to wrest knowledge from
nature, but now the self-same crimes are openly and universally perpetrated, and
men everywhere trust their efficacy.
And in the last invention of this horrible cultus of
Death and Suffering the modern sorcerer shews us his “devils casting out devils”
and urges us to look to the parasites of contagion – foul germs of disease – as
the regenerators of the future. Thus, if the sorcerer be permitted to have his
way, the malignant spirits of fever, sickness, and corruption will be let loose
and multiplied upon earth, and as in
(p. 168)
the cattle in the field to the firstborn son of the
king, will be smitten with plague and death. By his evil art he will keep alive
from generation to generation the multitudinous broods of foul living, of vice,
and uncleanness, none of them being suffered to fail for need of culture,
ingrafting them afresh day by day and year by year in
the bodies of new victims; paralysing the efforts of
the hygienist, and rendering vain the work of the true Magian,
the Healer, and the teacher of pure life.
• •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The report in Light (pp. 57-58) says that an interesting
discussion followed this address. “The question of the suffering in the animal
creation, both that inflicted by animals upon each other, apparently in part by
way of amusement and torture, and also that caused by the ‘blind, unreasoning
forces of nature,’ was referred to by more than one of the speakers, and it was
suggested that an argument might be based thereon by vivisectors in partial
defence of their position.
“In her replies to the various remarks, Dr. Kingsford took the ground that there
must be, somewhere or somewhen, compensation or
justification for all that we call evil, and for all suffering. In thinking this
out, she was brought face to face with a succession of problems which had led
her to the belief that evil and suffering are the result of a degradation, of a
departure from the Divine; that, in fact, the ferocity and the cunning of a
man-eating tiger, for instance, were the ferocity and cunning of a human spirit,
who in a previous incarnation had indulged in those passions. The lecturer also
ably and eloquently defended
(p. 169)
her comparison between the ‘sorcerer’ and the mere
‘scientist,’ pointing out that the aim and ambition of both was the acquisition
of knowledge for the benefit of the external, the material, the sensuous man
only. Whereas the knowledge sought for by the true priest, the
Magian, the real healer, is that which is for the good of the inner, the
Divine man, and such knowledge need not to be obtained through the infliction of
pain and suffering on others.”
FOOTNOTES
(157:1) Lecture given by Anna Kingsford, on the 23rd
January 1882, to the British National Association of Spiritualists, and
published in Light, 4th February 1882, pp. 55-58 (see p. 8, ante). Edward Maitland says that it was one of her “most notable
contributions to the anti-vivisection cause,” and that it “attracted much
attention both at home and abroad, being reproduced in various languages,” and
that it “represented, besides her own medical knowledge, much research at the
I hope, shortly, to bring out a volume of Anna Kingsford’s and Edward Maitland’s
Addresses and Essays on Vivisection, which will include much material of the
greatest value for the anti-vivisection cause. – S.H.H.
(161:1) These formulae,
prescribed by the ancient science of alchemy, have reference, of course, to
truths of which the terms used are symbols only. But the sorcerer, not being an
initiate, understood these terms in their ordinary sense, and acted accordingly.
– A.K.
(164:1) Among the practices of Japanese sorcerers in
the present century, the following is cited in Mr. Pfoundes’
book Fu-so
Mimi Bukuro: “A dog is buried alive, the head only being
left above ground, and food is then put almost within its reach, thus exposing
it to the cruel fate of Tantalus. When in the greatest agony and near death, its
head is chopped off and put in a box.” – A.K.
(168:1) In a note in The Virgin of the World, Anna Kingsford says: “In the
Divine
Pymander, it is clearly set forth that it a human soul
continue evil ‘it shall neither taste of immortality nor be partaker of the
good, but being drawn back it returneth into creeping
things; and this is the condemnation of an evil soul.’ Yet, Trismegistus hastens immediately to explain and qualify this
statement by adding that such a calamity cannot befall any truly human soul –
that is, a soul possessing the divine mind, however fallen from grace – for so
long as the soul retains this living fire it is the soul of a man, and man ‘is
not to be compared to any brute beast upon the earth, but to them that are above
in heaven, that are called Gods.’ But there is a condition so low and lost that
at length the divine flame is quenched, and the soul is left dark and Godless, a
human soul no longer. ‘And such a soul, O Son,’ says Hermes, ‘hath no mind;
wherefore neither must such an one be called Man.’ Therefore, while it is true
that ‘no other body is capable of a human soul, neither is it lawful for a man’s
soul to fall into the body of an unreasonable living thing,’ so also is it true
that a soul, bereft of its Divine Particle which alone made it human, is human
no longer, and, following the universal law of affinity, straightway gravitates
to its proper level, sinking to its similars, and
drawn to its analogues. Nevertheless, when its purgation is accomplished, such a
soul may ‘come to itself and say, I will arise and go unto my Father.’
“There are some Rabbis indeed who have thought such an occult significance to
lie hid in the parable of the prodigal; swine being accounted universally a
figure of lust and sordid desire. The Hermetic doctrine, thus interpreted, is
identical with that of the Kabalah on the same point,
and also with the teaching of Apollonius of Tyana”
(pp. 12–13; see also The Perfect Way, III, 21, etc.; Clothed With the Sun, Pt. I. Nos. XII, XXI.).
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