See Jung: Modern Man in Search of a Soul page 130.

be haunted by the venerable specter of Zarathustra, lying with the spear wound in his back; and Moses, the strong man of Israel, alone in death upon the dreary hills of Moab.

The line is endless, these Masters of other days. They were men above creed and clan. They were nobler than those distinctions with which we separate the common aspirations of humanity. They served not idols but ideals. Theologies grew up about them, yet each was greater than the order which he founded. From the same place they all came forth. The spirit of their doctrines was identical and each finally mingled his own smaller self with the common accomplishment. Among the great teachers of humanity there was neither superiority nor inferiority. There was simply difference. This was not a difference of purpose but of method; not a divergence of end but of way. Hand in hand they marched down the ages. Each revered the other, for all true greatness loves greatness, and only littleness hates. That same overshadowing consciousness that had made them truly great had revealed to them not only the brotherhood of all life but, more than this, the identity of all life.

As never before, the secret doctrines of the ancients intrigue the philosophically minded. The insufficient creeds and dogmas that survived the Renaissance are fast crumbling before the crushing force of rationalism. Men who were once of different faiths are now united in the common questing of a more reasonable code of living. Though the objects of his veneration may change, man remains essentially a religious animal. He may break away from the limitations and futilities of ecclesiastical schisms, but he cannot escape from the inherent urge to venerate his Creator. Ever surrounded by irrefutable evidence of an Abiding Destiny, the thinking man is powerless to resist that dominating impulse to propitiate in some appropriate manner the mysterious Spirit abiding in the Furthermost and the Innermost.

Throughout the first ages of humanity certain divinely instituted Mysteries were the intermediaries between man and his Maker. These august institutions were the custodians of a superior learning by which the human mind was inclined toward the way of truth and understanding. But as nations verged towards materialism and the peoples of the earth ceased to venerate the Sovereign Good, so these sacred schools gradually became corrupted. Those which through compromise escaped utter annihilation remained as perverse spirits to impede the very progress which they had once sponsored.

Politically we are disillusioned as to the divine right of temporal monarchs and ecclesiastically as to the apostolic succession of the spiritual elect. Thus disheartened by the sophistry of an unenlightened age, we turn from vagaries to renew our endless search for the substance of Truth. We would follow in the footsteps of those prophets of earlier days who, ascending the mountain tops of wisdom, beheld their Maker face to face in the midst of the lightnings and heard the deep rumble of his voice even above the far-flung echoes of the thunder. In his rocky cavern upon the slopes of Mount Hira, Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, prayed that the pure religion of the first patriarchs might again be revealed to a humanity bowed down in sackcloth and ashes by the weight of numberless afflictions. The strong man of Arabia stretched forth his arms into the darkness and pled with the night that the Wisdom which abides in Space might again come forth to lead men from idolatry back to the worship of that one God who is a Spirit and who must be served in Spirit and in Truth.

Too long have we wandered in the vale of shadows, grovelling before phantoms of our own creation and worshipping ghosts and specters; too long have we been afraid to lift our eyes to the radiant countenance of our Creator lest we be blinded by the awful light of Truth; too long have we prostrated ourselves abjectly at the feet of gilded men, bestowing upon mortals that homage reserved for the gods alone; too long has the shortness of our vision made gods of men and men of gods.

The darkest pages of history are those upon which are traced the record of men's faiths. In the great march of nations and beliefs, Death has ever ridden in the vanguard, loosing upon the earth the horrors described by Milton. Men have sung their "hymns of hate" and in their hearts they have tired of gory splendor. Enough of the God who marches with the arms of ambition and stands upon the battlefield surrounded by the bodies of the slain. A disillusioned humanity, weary of its own mistakes, turns again in despair to the mysterious emptiness about it. This emptiness seems to be the abiding place of a mighty Spirit.

In all this panorama of confusion and error, Space alone seems capable of gentle comprehension. In extremities, such as now confront mankind, the ages have a way of revealing their secrets. It is seriously to be doubted if the great commercial and industrial systems which we are now so gratifyingly Reconstructing will be of any more value when the next great world change comes. One knows that the present world-order is but a complicated theocracy of wealth.

There is a strange comfort in the realization as we gaze back through the vistas of the past. Not only a few thousand years have elapsed, but something utterly beyond the reach of history. In the essential nature of things, man has not only been enabled to survive, but has brought with him such a wealth of experience as to entitle him to accreditation as a veteran in the service of his god. By what strange alchemy of the soul is it which not only permits us to live while all structures are falling about us, but which enables us also to transcend the ruins and to perceive the all-pervading presence of an Eternal Good?

There is a magnificent promise in the return to the market place of those ancient philosophers who have been called "the first-born of the dawn." In an Egyptian papyrus of the 18th Dynasty it is written that the gods are the ashes of the stars, and through the long night of time these ashes can be caught up by the winds of destiny. The ashes of many stars have fallen upon the world. Eternal Realities are being restored. The government constitutes but a small part of the laws written down in the hearts of men. The spiritual bread of the world is its tradition of truth, which he will never find who seeks it only in the present.

9-fold Universal Essence

Egyptians — Thrice Deepest Darkness.
Kabbalistic — 3 modes of Ain Soph the Infinite.
Oriental — 3 hypostases foundational substances of Atman the Self or Spirit.

A large symbolic engraving titled "The Ladder of Souls" shows a central circular diagram with concentric rings. These represent planetary spheres including Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, along with the elemental realms of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. Four figures in the corners represent the elements or seasons. At the top center, a radiant sun containing an eye sits within a triangle, symbolizing the divine source. An ornate border frames the entire scene.

that they evolved, reached their crest, and declined even as the animal world is doing today.

Then, when the hour struck, in the Fourth Round a period of planetary evolution in Theosophical teaching, they reappeared in a great new cycle of activity. They produced new forms, which were improvements on the old models. But the continuing stock — the stream of life or vital impulse — issued from man, as Dr. de Purucker has said, in the previous Globe Round, in what is known as the "great tidal wave of life."

The mammalians came from the human stock in the present Globe Round during the latter part of the Second Root Race and the early part of the Third Root Race. Man of that time was mindless and largely astral composed of subtle, non-physical matter. He was not consolidated as man is today. Neither was there a dominating spiritual entity to hold the lesser lives in check. Buds, or single cells, leaving man of that time continued to grow each along its own evolutionary tendency. The climate then was like a tropical jungle of today, both warm and damp.

The mammalian life, thus being started, increased rapidly in number and variety. Due to the laws of acceleration and retardation, it checked the advance of other forms of animal life. The mammalian life-wave reached its crest during the Miocene Period. Since that time the mammals have been steadily declining, both in number and in variety.

Dr. de Purucker writes in Man in Evolution:

Man still remains the storehouse or magazine of an incomputable number of vital or zoölogic tendencies latent in the cells of his body; and though the old method of their manifestation has ceased, new and different methods will supersede the old. The urge to life working through the tiny lives of man's physical body, will none the less inevitably find new methods of expression, and these latent or sleeping tendencies will in far distant ages find appropriate outlets, thus perhaps giving origin to new stocks in that far-off future. — p. 203

This, however, will come to pass in some future Round. During the remainder of this Round the origination of new stocks will become less and less. Those forms of life already existing will decrease rapidly in number as time passes.

We are gods to the lesser lives making up our bodies. In the far future these lesser lives will depart on a long evolutionary journey. They will be like grown children. Eventually, they will become self-conscious beings, just as man is now.

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parents and teachers, who have themselves passed from infancy to maturity, are to the young in their care, the Hierarchy of Compassion are to the host of human souls. These souls have still fully to evolve the intellectual and spiritual faculties which will manifest in the life yet to be on Earth. Do you think that the Cosmic Intelligences who established a planetary system are less capable of directing a host of souls through planetary experience than human guardians are of their task? This applies even more to greater units like galaxies. An urgent need at present is for thinkers to expand their views. They should include Beings as superior to Man as Man is to the black beetle, as the biologist Thomas Huxley once suggested. To do so would engender new faith in the future of mankind.

No more than human parents, however, can the Hierarchy of Compassion avert suffering from those whom they would protect and guide. "The fruit of Karma the law of cause and effect Sages dare not still." They know well that there is purgation in adversity. This is both necessary and salutary. On a larger scale, it appears in calamity.

In the long drama of evolution and involution the descent of spirit into matter, Man, "a young god in the making," plays a part. The glorious possibilities of this part are yet to be unfolded. From embryo to physical maturity, the human sums up the evolutionary history of the vehicle. This vehicle is required for the use and manifestation of the spiritual and divine parts of Man's nature. Man has "got his body." The next step will reveal the now partially evolved principles of the human constitution. These will enable Man to complete the human contribution to the Ladder of Life and to ascend to a Superior Hierarchy.

For Man's inner Self is one with the Spiritual Intelligences of the Cosmos. It is built of the same essence. It is Man's Self-conscious Mind that is the link with the Golden Everlasting Chain of Heroes, Sages, Mahātmans Great Souls, Buddhas, Watchers, and Guardians. It is for Man to communicate the truths of the Ancient Wisdom to his fellows. He must use his faculty of Imagination, his spiritual will, and his compassionate heart. He follows the Great Ones who have stepped down to him. This includes Brotherhood and Co-operation with Cosmic Law, of which the poet Wordsworth wrote in his "Ode to Duty":

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.

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was made in imitation of the world might be governed by an essence similarly divine.

Above the seven planetary spheres forming the ladder of the world stretches what the Hermetics called the firmament of the fixed stars. In their esoteric instructions, the Egyptians distinguished three conditions or aspects of this empyrean the highest heaven. Together they referred to as the "Thrice Deep Darkness." The highest division was the Ocean of Eternity. This diffused itself throughout all space. Through it were scattered innumerable masses of ungerminated stars. This was the Schamayim Fiery-Water or Heavens of the Cabalists. The middle division was the Milky Way, the seed-ground of souls. The last division was composed of the fixed stars. These were 1,122 in number and symbolized by the Syrian mystics as a circle of cherubim angelic beings filled with eyes. These three departments of the empyrean are equivalent to the three divisions of AIN SOPH the Infinite in the Cabala and the three hypostases essential substances of Atman in Oriental metaphysics. It is from this threefold firmament that the three divine constituents of the soul are derived. The lowest circle of the firmament formed the wall of heaven. This was known to the Greeks as Mount Olympus and to the Hindus as Mount Meru. In the outer classification of Ptolemy, the mundane sphere is divided into seven concentric circles. These are regarded as the orbits of the planets. The empyrean is not included. It is in no way a part of the inferior world. It is the abode of principles and not of vehicles. Paracelsus terms it the spirit of the world to distinguish it from the seven planetary rings which are the soul of the world and the four elemental substances which are the body of the world.

Enclosed within the firmament as a fruit within its rind are the concentric orbits of the planets, which the...