|
|
|
LETTER VIII
SPECTRES OF
THE CONGO
I have been in Poland and I have been in
Serbia; but now I want to write of Belgium and of karma,* race karma, karma
old and new. (* The law of ethical causation.)
With and behind the invading Germans, urging them on to murder,
pillage and destruction, rape and burning, were not only the devils from the
outer vast, whose time for activity had come; but with and behind the German
army was a horde of undeveloped and earth-bound spirits who had suffered in
the Congo. Karma, always karma!
The world knows something about what has been done in Belgium,
something of what Germans have done there.
I have seen men, women, and little children
murdered in cold blood. I have witnessed the soul of a murdered man tearing
at a soldier who was violating the murdered man’s wife. I have seen the soul
of a mother wringing her hands as she would have wrung them on earth when
her little daughter was being maltreated by brutes who were blind with
madness. An old man out here followed a soldier for days until he saw
revenge accomplished by means of a Belgian bayonet; then as the German soul
came out he grappled with it again, and the two were torn by each other, the
soldier not knowing he had left the body and feeling that he was at grips
with an enemy still on earth.
There was much of what is called Voodoo in the Congo. Its
practitioners do not go to sleep for a long time. They go on and on in the
invisible world, making their evil preparations and weaving their spells.
They gather round spilled blood, they absorb vitality from it, and that
vitality they use to bring evil and death upon anything toward which they
direct their will.
Did you fancy that will was weakened when man lays aside the
brain? It is weakened in the sense that there is less freedom of choice; but
there is tremendous will in following a choice already set up when the
physical base of the brain was attached to the will.
But now all the evil karma of Belgium is
lived out, and she stands like a new soul in the face of time.
Another race has taken up the load that she laid down. Will that
too be expended soon, or late? Germany has woven round herself a shirt of
evil causes that will cling to her and chafe her flesh for generations. “It
must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence
cometh.”
The karma of nations is known to the Masters and Adepts.
The karma of England! Have you ever thought about the karma of
England? Granting that she has done much wrong, as all old nations have, yet
she has allowed herself to be used by the world-will. She, more than all the
other old races, has been an instrument in the unifying of the races. Did
you fancy that the British Empire was a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Did
you think the British Empire merely happened?
And now the British Empire may be used further. She may
be used in Belgium. And I do not mean the mere presence of her army in
Belgium.
It is said that the Masters, the world’s
teachers, hold back the awful karma of the world. I am trying to do a little
of holding back the awful karma of Germany.
She has disgraced the human race in Belgium. Everything that has
been believed about German outrages in Belgium is true except one thing. So
far as I know, and I have enquired of those who know more than I, German
soldiers have not cut off the hands of living Belgian children. But they
have murdered women, and outraged women, and mocked and insulted pregnant
women, and maltreated the new-made mothers of babes that they have murdered.
They have burned men alive, and they have buried men still alive.
I say that Germans have done these things. Should I say that the
forces of evil, the beings of evil, the superhuman and the once-human forces
of evil, have done these things, using as their instruments the forms of
German soldiers from which they had thrust for the moment the moral soul?
Take it whichever way you may please, for
both ways are true. The men who ravaged and destroyed Belgium were not all
obsessed, save that evil may be always an obsession.
Help to hold back the awful karma that Germany has made in
Belgium.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy
neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that
despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your
Father who is in heaven.”
March 27.
Letter IX.
|
