H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3

Two Rituals of Magic - (Page 253) This seventh verse says with regard to such divine evocation or theomantic consultations:

One must invoke that divine and great name [ How can De Mirville see Satan in the Egyptian God of the great divine Name, when he himself admits that nothing was greater than the name of the oracle of Dodona, as it was that of the God of the Jews, IAO, or Jehovah? That oracle had been brought by the Pelasgians to Dodona more then fourteen centuries B.C. and left with the forefathers of the Hellenes, and its history is well-known and may be read in Herodotus. Jupiter, who loved the fair nymph of the ocean. Dodona, had ordered Pelasgus to carry his cult to Thessaly. The name of the God of that oracle at the temple of Dodona was Zeus Pelasgicos, the Zeuspater (God the Father), or as De Mirville explains: “It was the name par excellence, the name that the Jews held as the ineffable, the unpronounceable Name—in short, Jaoh-pater, i.e., ‘he who was, who is, and who will be,’ otherwise the Eternal.” And the author admits that Maury is right “in discovering in the name of the Vaidic Indra the Biblical Jehovah,” and does not even attempt to deny the etymological connection between the two names - “the great and the lost name with the sun and the thunder-bolts.” Strange confessions, and still stranger contradictions.] only in cases of absolute necessity, and when one feels absolutely pure and irreproachable.

Not so in the formula of black Magic. Reuvens, speaking of the two rituals of Magic of the Anastasi collection, remarks that they

Undeniably form the most instructive commentary upon the Egyptian Mysteries attributed to Jamblichus, and the best pendant to that classical work, for understanding the thaumaturgy of the philosophical sects, thaumaturgy based on ancient Egyptian religion. According to Jamblichus, thaumaturgy was exercised by the ministry of secondary genii. [ Reuvens” Letter to Letronne on the 75^th number of the Papyri Anastasi.” See De Mirville, v.255.]

Reuvens closes with a remark which is very suggestive and is very important to the Occultists who defend the antiquity and genuineness of their documents, for he says:

All that he [ Jamblichus] gives out as theology we find as history in our papyri.

But then how deny the authenticity, the credibility, and, beyond all, the trustworthiness of those classical writers, who all wrote about Magic and its Mysteries in a most worshipful spirit of admiration and reverence? Listen to Pindarus, who exclaims:

Happy he who descends into the grave thus initiated, for he knows the end of his life and the kingdom [The Eleusinian Fields.] given by Jupiter. [ Fragments. ix. ]

(Page 254) Or to Cicero:

Initiation not only teaches us to feel happy in this life, but also to die with better hope. [ De Legibus. 11. iv.]

Plato, Pausanias, Strabo, Diodorus and dozens of others bring their evidence as to the great boon of Initiation; all the great as well as the partially-initiated Adepts, share the enthusiasm of Cicero.

Does not Plutarch, thinking of what he had learned in his initiation, console himself for the loss of his wife? Had he not obtained the certitude at the Mysteries of Bacchus that “the soul [ spirit] remains incorruptible, and that there is a hereafter”? . . . Aristophanes went even further: “All those who participated in the Myseries,” he says, “led an innocent, calm, and holy life; they died looking for the light of the Eleusinian Fields [Devachan], while the rest could never expect anything but eternal darkness [ ignorance? ].

. . .And when one thinks about the importance attached by the States to the principle and the correct celebration of the Mysteries, to the stipulations made in their treaties for the security of their celebration, one sees to what degree those Mysteries had so long occupied their first and their last thought.

It was the greatest among public as well as private preoccupations, and this is only natural, since according to Döllinger, “the Eleusinian Mysteries were viewed as the efflorescence of all the Greek religion, as the purest essence of all its conceptions. [ Judaism and Paganism. i. 184.]

Not only conspirators were refused admittance therein, but those who had not denounced them; traitors, perjurers, debauchees, [Frag of Styg., ap. Stob.] . . .so that Porphyry could say that: “Our soul has to be at the moment of death as it was during the Mysteries. i.e., exempt from any blemishes, passion, envy, hatred, or anger.” [ De Special. Legi.]

Truly,

Magic was considered a Divine Science which led to a participation in the attributes of the Divinity itself. [ De Mirville. v. 278, 279.]

Herodotus, Thales, Parmenides, Empedocles, Orpheus, Pythagoras, all went, each in his day, in search of the wisdom of Egypt’s great Hierophants, in the hope of solving the problems of the universe.

Says Philo:
The Mysteries were known to unveil the secret operations of Nature. [Isis Unveiled. i.25 ] The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgic magic are so well authenticated and the evidence—if human testimony is worth anything at all—is so overwhelming that, rather than confess that the pagan theurgists far outrivalled the Christians in miracles, Sir David Brewster conceded to the former the greatest proficiency in physics and everything that pertains to natural philosophy. Science finds herself in a very disagreeable dilemma . . . .
Magical Statues

(Page 255) “Magic,” says Psellus, “formed the last part of the sacerdotal science. It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary: of the elements and their parts, of animals, of various plants and their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its effects. And it formed statues [magnetized] which procure health, and made all various figures and things [talismans], which could equally become the instruments of disease as well as of health. Often, too, celestial fire is made to appear through magic, and then statues laugh and lamps are spontaneously enkindled. [ Isis Unveiled. I. 282. 283. ]

This assertion of Psellus that Magic “made statues which procure health,” is now proven to the world to be no dream, no vain boast of a hallucinated Theurgist. As Reuvens says, it becomes “history.” For it is found in the Papyrus Magique of Harris and on the votive stele just mentioned. Both Chabas and De Rougé state that:

On the eighteenth line of this very mutilated monument is found the formula with regard to the acquiescence of the God (Chons) who made his consent known by a motion he imparted to his statue. [ De Mirville. v.248 ]

There was even a dispute over it between the two Orientalists. While M. de Rougé wanted to translate the word “Han” by “favour” or “grace,” M. Chabas insisted that “Han” meant a “movement” or “a sign” made by the statue.

Excesses of power, abuse of knowledge and personal ambition very often led selfish and unscrupulous Initiates to black Magic, just as the same causes led to precisely the same thing among Christian popes and cardinals; and it was black Magic that led finally to the abolition of the Mysteries, and not Christianity, as is often erroneously thought. Read Mommsen’s Roman History, vol. i., and you will find that it was the Pagans themselves who put an end to the desecration of the Divine Science. As early as 560 B.C. the Romans had discovered an Occult association, a school of black Magic of the most revolting kind; it celebrated mysteries brought from Etruria, and very soon the moral pestilence had spread all over Italy.

More than seven thousand Initiates were prosecuted, and most of them were sentenced to death . . .

Later on, Titus-Livius shows us another three thousand Initiates sentenced during a single year for the crime of poisoning. [ De Mirville. v. 281.]

(Page 256) And yet black Magic is derided and denied!
Paulthier may or may not be too enthusiastic in saying that India appears to him as

The grand and primitive hearth of human thought, that has ended by embracing the whole ancient world,

but he was right in his idea. That primitive thought led to Occult knowledge, which is our Fifth Race is reflected from the earliest days of the Egyptian Pharaohs down to our modern times. Hardly a hieratic papyrus is exhumed with the tightly swathed-up mummies of kings and high priests that does not contain some interesting information for the modern students of Occultism.
All that is, of course, derided Magic, the outcome of primitive knowledge and of revelation, though it was practised in such ungodly ways by the Atlantean Sorceres that it has since become necessary for the subsequent Race to draw a thick veil over the practices which were used to obtain so-called magical effects on the psychic and on the physical planes. In the letter no one in our century will believe the statements, with the exception of the Roman Catholics, and these will give the acts a satanic origin. Nevertheless, Magic is so mixed up with the history of the world, that if the latter is ever to be written it has to rely upon the discoveries of Archaeology, Egyptology, and hieratic writings and inscriptions; if it insists that they must be free from that “superstition of the ages” it will never see the light. One can well imagine the embarrassing position in which serious Egyptologists, Assyriologists, savants and academicians find themselves. Forced to translate and interpret the old papyri and the archaic inscriptions on stelae and Babylonian cylinders, they find themselves compelled from first to last to face the distasteful, and to them repulsive, subject of Magic, with its incantations and paraphernalia. Here they find sober and grave narratives from the pens of learned scribes, made up under the direct supervision of Chaldaean or Egyptian Hierophants, the most learned among the Philosophers of antiquity. These statements were written at the solemn hour of the death and burial of Pharaohs, High Priests, and other mighty ones of the land of Chemi; their purpose was the introduction of the newly-born, Osirified Soul before the awful tribunal of the “Great Judge” in the region of Amenti—there where a lie was said to outweigh the greatest crimes. Were the Scribes and Hierophants, Pharaohs, and King—Priests all fools or frauds to have either believed in, or tried to make others believe in, such “cock-and-bull stories” as are found in the most respectable papyri? Yet there is no help for it.
Romances - But True - (Page 257) Corroborated by Plato and Herodotus, by Manetho and Syncellus, as by all the greatest and most trustworthy authors and philosophers who wrote upon the subject, those papyri note down—as seriously as they note any history, or any fact well known and accepted as to need no commentary—whole royal dynasties of Manes, to wit, of shadows and phantoms (astral bodies), and such feats of magic skill and such Occult phenomena, that the most credulous Occultist of our own times would hesitate to believe them to be true.
The orientalists have found a plank of salvation, while yet publishing and delivering the papyri to the criticism of literary Sadducees: they generally call them “romances of the days of Pharaoh So-and-So.” The idea is ingenious, if not absolutely fair.
                                 

SECTION XXVIII
The Origin of the Mysteries
(Page 258) ALL that is explained in the preceding Sections and a hundredfold more was taught in the Mysteries from time immemorial. If the first appearance of those institutions is a matter of historical tradition with regard to some of the later nations, their origin must certainly be assigned to the time of the Fourth Root Race. The Mysteries were imparted to the elect of that Race when the average Atlantean had begun to fall too deeply into sin to be trusted with the secrets of Nature. Their establishment is attributed in the Secret Works to the King-Initiates of the divine dynasties, when the “Sons of God” had gradually allowed their country to become Kookarma-des (land of vice).
The antiquity of the Mysteries may be inferred from the history of the worship of Hercules in Egypt. This Hercules, according to what the priests told Herodotus, was not Grecian, for he says:

Of the Grecian Hercules I could not in no part of Egypt procure any knowledge: . . . the name was never borrowed by Egypt from Greece . . . . Hercules, . . . . as they [the priests] affirm is one of the twelve (great Gods,) who were reproduced from the earlier eight Gods 17,000 years before the year of Amasis.

Hercules is of Indian origin, and—his Biblical chronology put aside—Colonel Tod was quite right in his suggestion that he was Balarâma or Baladeva. Now one must read the Purânas with the Esoteric key in one’s hand in order to find out how on almost every page they corroborate the Secret Doctrine. The ancient classical writers so well understood this truth that they unanimously attributed to Asia the origin of Hercules.

A section of the Mahâbhârata is devoted to the history of the Hercûla, of which race was Vyasa. . . . Diodorus has the same legend with some variety.

An Instant in Heaven - (Page 259) He says: “Hercules was born amongst the Indians and, like the Greeks, they furnish him with a club and lion’s hide.” Both [Krishna and Baladeva] are (lords) of the race (cûla) of Heri (Heri-cul-es) of which the Greeks might have made the compound Hercules.[Tod’s Rajasthañ,i.28.]
The Occult Doctrine explains that Hercules was the last incarnation of one of the seven “Lords of the Flame,” as Krishna’s brother, Baladeva. That his incarnations occurred during the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Root-Races, and that his worship was brought into Egypt from Lanka and India by the later immigrants. That he was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians is certain, the more so as the Greeks place his birth at Thebes, and only his twelve labours at Argos. Now we find in the Vishnu Purâna a complete corroboration of the statement made in the Secret Teachings, of which Purânic allegory the following is a short summary:
Raivata, a grandson of Sharyâti, Manu’s fourth son, finding no man worthy of his lovely daughter, repaired with her to Brahmâ’s region to consult the God in this emergency. Upon his arrival Hâ Hâ Hâhû, and other Gandharvas were singing before the throne, and Raivata, waiting till they had done, imagined that but one Muhûrta (instant) had passed, whereas long ages had elapsed. When they had finished Raivata prostrated himself and explained his perplexity. Then Brahmâ asked him whom he wished for a son-in-law, and upon hearing a few personages named, the Father of the World smiled and said: “Of those whom you have named the third and fourth generation [Root-Races] no longer survive, for many successions of ages [Chatur-Yuga, or the four Yuga cycles] have passed away while you were listening to our songsters. Now on earth the twenty-eighth great age of the present Manu is nearly finished and the Kali period is at hand. You must therefore bestow this virgin-gem upon some other husband. For you are now alone.”
Then the Râja Raivata is told to proceed to Kushasthaî, his ancient capital, which was now Dvârakâ, and where reigned in his stead a portion of the divine being (Vishnu) in the person of Baladeva, the brother of Krishna, regarded as the seventh incarnation of Vishnu whenever Krishna is taken as a full divinity.
“Being thus instructed by the Lotus-born [Brahmâ], Raivata returned with his daughter to earth, where he found the race of men dwindled in stature [see what is said in the Stanzas and Commentaries of the races of mankind gradually decreasing in stature]; . . . (Page 260) reduced in vigour, and enfeebled in intellect. Repairing to the city of Kushasthalî, he found it much altered,” “Krishna had reclaimed from the sea a portion of the country,” which means in plain language that the continents had all been changed meanwhile–-and “had renovated the city”–-or rather built a new one, Dvârakâ; for one reads in the Bhagavad Purâna [Op. cit., ix. iii. 28.] that Kushasthalî was founded and built by Raivata within the sea; and subsequent discoveries showed that it was the same, or on the same spot, as Dvârakâ. Therefore it was on an island before. The allegory in Vishnu Purâna shows King Raivata giving his daughter to “the wielder of the ploughshare”–or rather “the plough-bannered”–Baladeva, who “beholding the damsel of excessively lofty height, . . . .shortened her with the end of his ploughshare, and she became his wife.” [Vishnu Purâna. iv. i. Wilson’s translation, iii. 248-254.]
This is a plain allusion to the Third and Fourth Races–-to the Atlantean giants and the successive incarnations of the “Sons of the Flame” and other orders of Dhyân Chohans in the heroes and kings of mankind, down to the Kali Yuga, or Black Age, the beginning of which is within historical times. Another coincidence: Thebes is the city of a hundred gates, and Dvârakâ is so called from its many gateways or doors, from the word “Dvâra,” “gateway.” Both Hercules and Baladeva are of a passionate, hot temper, and both are renowned for the fairness of their white skins. There is not the slightest doubt that Hercules is Baladeva in Greek dress. Arrian notices the great similarity between the Theban and the Hindu Hercules, the latter being worshipped by the Suraseni who built Methorea, or Mathûrâ, Krishna’s birthplace. The same writer places Sandracottus (Chandragupta, the grandfather of King Asoka, of the clan of Morya) in the direct line of the descendants of Baladeva.
There were no Mysteries in the beginning, we are taught. Knowledge (Vidyâ) was common property, and it reigned universally throughout the Golden Age (Satya Yuga). As says the Commentary:

Men had not created evil yet in those days of bliss and purity, for they were of God-like more than of human nature.

But when mankind, rapidly increasing in numbers, increased also in variety of idiosyncrasies of body and mind, then incarnated Spirit showed its weakness. Natural exaggerations, and along with these superstitions, arose in the less cultured and healthy minds.

Growth of Popular Beliefs - (Page 261) Selfishness was born out of desires and passions hitherto unknown, and but too often knowledge and power were abused, until finally it became necessary to limit the number of those who knew. Thus arose Initiation.
Every separate nation now arranged for itself a religious system, according to its enlightenment and spiritual wants. Worship of mere form being discarded by the wise men, these confined true knowledge to the very few. The need of veiling truth to protect it from desecration becoming more apparent with every generation, a thin veil was used at first, which had to be gradually thickened according to the spread of personality and selfishness, and this led to the Mysteries. They came to be established in every country and among every people, while to avoid strife and misunderstanding exoteric beliefs were allowed to grow up in the minds of the profane masses. Inoffensive and innocent in their incipient stage—like a historical event arranged in the form of a fairy tale, adapted for and comprehensible to the child’s mind—in those distant ages such beliefs could be allowed to grow and make the popular faith without any danger to the more philosophical and abstruse truths taught in the sanctuaries. Logical and scientific observation of the phenomena in Nature, which alone leads man to the knowledge of eternal truths—provided he approaches the threshold of observation unbiassed by preconception and sees with his spiritual eye before he looks at things from their physical aspect—does not lie within the province of the masses. The marvels of the One Spirit of Truth, the ever-concealed and inaccessible Deity, can be unravelled and assimilated only through Its manifestations by the secondary “Gods,” Its acting powers. While the One and Universal Cause has to remain for ever in abscondito, Its manifold action may be traced through the effects in Nature. The latter alone being comprehensible and manifest to average mankind, the Powers causing those effects were allowed to grow in the imagination of the populace. Ages later in the Fifth, the Aryan, Race some unscrupulous priests began to take advantage of the too-easy beliefs of the people in every country, and finally raised those secondary Powers to the rank of God and Gods, thus succeeding in isolating them altogether from the One Universal Cause of all causes. [There were no Brâhmans as a hereditary caste in days of old. In those long-departed ages a man became a Brâhman through personal merit and Initiation. Gradually, however, despotism crept in, and the son of a Brâhman was created a Brâhman by right of protection first, then by that of heredity. The rights of blood replaced those of real merit, and thus arose the body of Brâhmans which was soon changed into a powerful caste.]
(Page 262) Henceforward the knowledge of the primeval truths remained entirely in the hands of the Initiates.
The Mysteries had their weak points and their defects, as every institution welded with the human element must necessarily have. Yet Voltaire has characterised their benefits in a few words:

In the chaos of popular superstitions there existed an institution which has ever prevented man from falling into absolute brutality: it was that of the Mysteries.

Verily, as Ragon puts it of Masonry;
Its temple has Time for duration, the Universe for space . . . .”Let us divide that we may rule,” have said the crafty; “Let us unite to resist,” have said the first Masons.[Des Initiations Anciennes et Modernes. “The mysteries,” says Ragon, “were the gift of India.” In this he is mistaken, for the Âryan race had brought the mysteries of Initiation from Atlantis. Nevertheless he is right in saying that the mysteries preceded all civilisations, and that by polishing the mind and morals of the peoples they served as a base for all the laws—civil, political, and religious.]
Or rather, the Initiates whom the Masons have never ceased to claim as their primitive and direct Masters. The first and fundamental principle of moral strength and power is association and solidarity of thought and purpose. “The Sons of Will and Yoga” united in the beginning to resist the terrible and ever-growing iniquities of the left-hand Adepts, the Atlanteans. This led to the foundation of still more Secret Schools, temples of learning, and of Mysteries inaccessible to all except after the most terrible trials and probations.
Anything that might be said of the earliest Adepts and their divine Masters would be regarded as fiction. It is necessary, therefore, if we would know something of the primitive Initiates to judge of the tree by its fruits; to examine the bearing and the work of their successors in the Fifth Race as reflected in the works of the classic writers and the great philosophers. How were Initiation and the Initiates regarded during some 2,000 years by the Greek and Roman writers? Cicero informs his readers in very clear terms. He says:

An Initiate must practise all the virtues in his power: justice, fidelity, liberality, modesty, temperance; these virtues cause men to forget the talents that he may lack. [ De Off.,i.e. 33.]

Ragon says"

When the Egyptian priests said: “All for the people, nothing through the people,” they were right: in an ignorant nation truth must be revealed only to trustworthy persons . . . .We have seen in our days, “all through the people, nothing for the people,” a false and dangerous system. The real axiom ought to be: “All for the people and with the people.” [ Des Initiations, p22.]