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it attaches itself to Anoia. What did Plato, and do you mean by this?
A. The entire annihilation of the personal consciousness, as an exceptional
and rare case, I think. The general and almost invariable rule is the
merging of the personal into the individual or immortal consciousness of the
Ego, a transformation or a divine transfiguration, and the entire
annihilation only of the lower quaternary. Would you expect the man of
flesh, or the temporary personality, his shadow, the "astral," his animal
instincts and even physical life, to survive with the "spiritual Ego" and
become everlasting, eternal? Naturally all this ceases to exist, either at,
or soon after corporeal death. It becomes in time entirely disintegrated and
disappears from view, being annihilated as a whole.
Q. Then you also reject resurrection in the flesh?
A. Most decidedly we do! Why should we, who believe in the archaic esoteric
philosophy of the Ancients, accept the unphilosophical speculations of the
later Christian theology, borrowed from the Egyptian and Greek exoteric
Systems of the Gnostics?
Q. The Egyptians revered Nature-Spirits, and deified even onions: your
Hindus are idolaters, to this day; the Zoroastrians worshiped, and do still
worship, the Sun; and the best Greek philosophers were either dreamers or
materialists-witness Plato and Democritus. How can you compare!
A. It may be so in your modern Christian and even Scientific catechism; it
is not so for unbiased minds. The Egyptians revered the "One-Only-One," as
Nout; and it is from this word that Anaxagoras got his denomination Nous, or
as he calls it, nous autokrates , "the Mind or Spirit Self-potent", the
archetes kinedeos , the leading motor, or primum-mobile of all. With him the
Nous was God, and the logos was man, his emanation. The Nous is the spirit
(whether in Kosmos or in man), and the logos, whether Universe or astral
body, the emanation of the former, the physical body being merely the
animal. Our external powers perceive phenomena; our Nous alone is able to
recognize their noumena. It is the logos alone, or the noumenon, that
survives, because it is immortal in its very nature and essence, and the
logos in man is the Eternal Ego, that which reincarnates and lasts forever.
But how can the evanescent or external shadow, the temporary clothing of
that divine Emanation which returns to the source whence it proceeded, be
that which is raised in incorruptibility?
Q. Still you can hardly escape the charge of having invented a new division
of man's spiritual and psychic constituents; for no philosopher speaks of
them, though you believe that Plato does.
A. And I support the view. Besides Plato, there is Pythagoras, who also
followed the same idea.
Says Plutarch:
Plato and Pythagoras distribute the soul into two parts, the rational
(noetic) and irrational (agnoia); that part of the soul of man which is
rational is eternal; for though it be not God, yet it is the product of an
eternal deity, but that part of the soul which is divested of reason
(agnoia) dies.
The modern term Agnostic comes from Agnosis, a cognate word. We wonder why
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The Key To Theosophy - HP Blavatsky.txt
Mr. Huxley, the author of the word, should have connected his great
intellect with "the soul divested of reason" which dies? Is it the
exaggerated humility of the modern materialist?
Pythagoras described the Soul as a self-moving Unit (monad) composed of
three elements, the Nous (Spirit), the phren (mind), and the thumos (life,
breath or the Nephesh of the Cabalists) which three correspond to our "
Atma-buddhi," (higher Spirit-Soul), to Manas (the Ego), and to Kamarupa in
conjunction with the lower reflection of Manas. That which the Ancient Greek
philosophers termed Soul, in general, we call Spirit, or Spiritual Soul,
Buddhi, as the vehicle of Atma (the Agathon, or Plato's Supreme Deity). The
fact that Pythagoras and others state that phren and thumos are shared by us
with the brutes, proves that in this case the lower Manasic reflection
(instinct) and Kamarupa (animal living passions) are meant. And as Socrates
and Plato accepted the clue and followed it, if to these five, namely,
Agathon (Deity or Atma), Psuche (Soul in its collective sense), Nous (Spirit
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