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LETTER V
ASTRAL MONSTERS
Did you know that
I was near you when you crossed the North Sea more than two weeks before war
was declared, crossed to England under an irresistible, an overwhelming
impulse to get away from the continent of Europe and back to the
people of your own blood? I was near you.
But I did not remain when you were safe with your friends. I
returned to the centre of war determinism, went back to that land which,
despite all protestations to the contrary, hatched out the egg which an
irresponsible bird had laid in the region farther south.
Did I say irresponsible? Only a madman is irresponsible for his
acts. Let me say rather deluded, for not all deluded souls are mad. The hand
that slew the Austrian Archduke was used, as others have been used, by the
forces working against progress. Pity that man also, and let the law of
cause and effect deal with him as it must, for there is no favoritism in
that court and no appeal to a higher jurisdiction.
I returned to Germany. It will be necessary
in this writing to call spades, spades. If I hurt anybody’s feelings, I am
not writing to hurt anybody’s feelings. Facts are facts, and no specious
pleading can change them.
I returned to Germany. I listened to war counsels. I heard
orders given, for by a special hardening of my astral ears I can hear
what is spoken in the world of men and hear very distinctly. My astral body
is a well-lubricated though tenuous machine that answers to the lightest
touch of my will.
But do not jump to the conclusion that all astral bodies are
like mine. Remember that I am the pupil of a great Master, and that his
purposes are not his purposes but those of the law of progress which
he serves.
I saw again the monster of which I wrote
you in my second letter. They speak truth who say that the German Emperor
did hesitate to touch the spring which should open the doors of hell.
The War Lord had a certain pride in his record as a Peace Lord, and he
shivered at the responsibility that faced him while gloating in that
responsibility, which further exalted his already self-exalted ego.
Pity him too, but do not sentimentalize over him. Will is free.
In yielding his will to the evil genius he was exercising free will. But
those eyes of his were wet in the night and he did pray to the Force
he calls his God. The name of God was not only on his lips but in his inner
thoughts. God is a word that means many things to many persons.
There was also in that conclave of evil spirits many who were
not attached to individual men. There were vast elemental beings. When
Lytton wrote, in one of his occult novels, of a gigantic foot which stepped
through a gap in the magic circle drawn by a black magician in the primeval
wilderness, he referred to a fact in Nature.
Nature! You with your narrow sight have no idea of the meaning
of the term. All your studies have not taught you even the alphabet that
Nature uses. Learn that alphabet. Begin to study that language. Study
chemistry, biology, electricity, and study the mysteries of the vibrations
of matter on as many planes as you can consciously reach. The knowledge of
the future lies there. Man has only begun the conquest of Nature.
Any expression of hate which you ever
beheld in the material world was only a weak replica of the hate that was
let loose upon the earth when the hour struck last year, the hour when the
orbits of certain planetary bodies blended their influences and allowed a
free passage for beings who are generally more limited in their freedom of
movement.
The giant foot! I saw the great being to whom such a foot
belonged. It was a being of the air, but earth beings were allied with it
and monsters from the deeper circles of matter where the light of the sun
never shines.
Will you let me describe one of those beings? You need not fear
it now for it has been driven back to its lair in the bowels of the planet.
A gross bluish bag-like body, with a long fat tail covered with bristles,
arms and legs like elongated bags, and a head that was a larger and
half-submerged bag in the rolls of its monstrous neck. But the eyes! There
was no fat-like substance within them. They were wide and round and glaring
with a thousand years of malignity concentrated in a moment. Pale eyes they
were. If you dread an evil dark eye, dread more an evil pale eye. Suffering
unimaginable and hate of everything above it were expressed in the eyes of
that entity from the deep of things which from the lowest astral plane spat
and drooled its venom toward the surface of the planet. Immense it was in
size, toothless and shapeless its mouth. What the nourishment might be which
had kept it together I refrain from telling you.
Again I say, do not dread it. It cannot
reach toward the surface of the earth now. Its existence is near its term.
But the germs of astral disease which were spewed from its shapeless mouth
have been multiplying in spite of all the efforts of those who know how to
cope with such things.
The beings of the air are not filthy, however evil they may be,
and few of them are really evil—few in proportion to those who are amiable
or indifferent to man.
The more revengeful of the beings of fire may yet make
themselves felt; for sporadic efforts will still be made, though the great
struggle is won in the invisible regions.
Stay where you are for the time. A danger still threatens Europe
beyond the danger of armies. Wait—and pray. For prayer is an astral force
and its effects, being in the higher astral, are far-reaching.
Wait—and pray.
March 15.
Letter VI.
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