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Adepts of the Five Elements

Excerpts

Adepts of the Five Elements
David Anrias
(London: Routledge & Sons, 1933)

Excerpt from the Chapter:

The Changing Age

[21] Inevitably there must be a period of transition between any two cycles [the passing Pisces cycle and the Aquarian cycle], when the only possible [page 22] course is to adopt methods of occult instruction combining as far as possible the old with the new. Therefore the training of the first Western group of occult students was largely coloured by Indian methods, and comprised strict instructions to be rigidly adhered to.

After Madame Blavatsky’s death, Dr. Annie Besant endeavoured to maintain this same Indian discipline, which she herself had quickly mastered and scrupulously carried out in everyday life, despite the fact that she was freely mingling with people in the outside world. How far this was achieved through strength of will and how far through reverting to congenial customs associated with her immediate past life as an Indian, it is impossible to say. It soon became evident to the White Lodge that whilst an Indian initiate functioning through a Western body might quickly dominate that body through the old Indian higher vehicles retained for the purpose, it was all but impossible for the average Western occult student to maintain the old Eastern standards of physical purity under modern conditions.

Other difficulties also arose. The Secret Doctrine was the chief object of group-study, but the higher mental body of the average bewildered Western student was usually discovered to be [23] insufficiently equipped for the task. Likewise early meditation on an empty stomach, often between 6 and 7 a.m., although comparatively easily sustained in India, where both long custom and climatic conditions were favourable seemed all but impossible in the West.

About 1912 the Adepts who had sponsored the Theosophical Society realised that what was possible for an initiate possessing a powerful will as well as the means of creating her own surrounding conditions, was not feasible for the average Western pupil still hampered by past karma or a delicate body.

Therefore these particular Masters effected a transference of occult force, hitherto wholly confined to the higher mental plane, to the lower mental, and later to the astral plane by means of group ceremonial magic.

Naturally this transference of force involved a great sacrifice on Their part, (ftn. 1) and required the co-operation of another Adept, who had been’ associated with purely Western methods of occult [24] training through several centuries, having retained a physical body suited to this particular type of work.

As the reason for the aforementioned change of policy was never explained, many members imagining that it implied failure to maintain the original standards inaugurated by H. P. Blavatsky, resigned from the Society. Those who had joined it at a period when occult study pure and simple was de rigueur, left it, largely because their karma was not of the kind that could be worked out through ceremonial and the group-karma which this form of activity inevitably entails.

For the benefit of those unconversant with the technicalities of astrology, I must here point out that the element water rules the emotional or astral plane, with which ceremonial magic is closely associated. Henceforth the Theosophical Society, unconsciously for the most part, embarked upon a minor cycle demanding activities in connection with this emotional or watery element,[25] which, strange to say, predominated over all the others in the horoscope of its founding in November, 1875. (2) This astrological fact had been viewed with misgiving by some of the Adepts, who, nevertheless, with Their far-seeing eyes, saw that it would afford immediate opportunities for growth for certain types of egos.(3)

1. "Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise that while the knowledge of a Master is as regards you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to solve . . .Hence the possibility of miscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake. . . . When, then a Master volunteers to serve as what may literally be called the scapegoat of a new spiritual movement He takes up a karma whose whole course He is unable to see."-- Annie Besant, London, Lectures of 1907.
"For if one sees the Theosophical Society aright, it is as one of the builders of that coming time, the civilization of the. Sixth Root Race, with the experiments that will go before it in the Sixth and Seventh sub-races of the Fifth. For these experiments take long in the making, and, as a great teacher once said: Time is no object with us."-Ibid.

2. " ’Is the West ready for a movement of this sort again? Can it be carried on in such an environment without doing more harm than the good which it is capable of accomplishing?’ And so much discussion arose . . . and most were against it, and declared the time was not ripe ; . . . as the question of time is always one of the most complicated questions for Those who have to deal with the great law of cycles and the evolution of man, it was felt that it was possible that the effort might succeed, even although the time was not quite ripe, the clock had not h quite struck the hour." --London Lectures of 1907, by Annie Besant, page 126.

3. The horoscope of the Theosophical Society is given in the appendix to this book, together with that of Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, Krishnamurti and H. P. Blavatsky, in specific relation to it.


Excerpt from the Chapter:

Adepts of the Water

[39] By an extraordinary concatenation, these forces involving the element water, hitherto associated with the previous Age, were also utilised to herald a new Era, for about this period Dr. Annie Besant proclaimed Krishnamurti as the potential medium of the World Teacher.

That these forces of the old line and the new might possibly conflict with each other was never seriously considered. It was almost universally assumed that in some miraculous fashion "new wine could be poured into old bottles" without ultimate disaster. How Krishnamurti, whose horoscope was polarised chiefly towards the future, would be likely to react to the various activities of the Society based exclusively upon the past, was a question for the astrologer alone; by everyone else it was taken for granted that he would somehow evolve a teaching wholly new and stimulating, whilst at the same time never athwart the existing ceremonial régime, which by 1925, the year when the Jupiterian conjunction was at full strength, was completely dominating the Society.

[40] Because the horoscope of the Theosophical Society consists of planets forming opposition and square aspects to each other from the four fixed signs and the four elements, thereby creating a cross in the heavens, it is an exceedingly interesting one and has a special application to the subject of this book, i.e., the conflict of the elements at certain periods of man's evolution on this planet.

This horoscope is a very powerful one, inevitably affecting in varying degrees each individual occult student as he joins the Society. What the precise effects are, depends, of course, on whether the mutual aspects between his own nativity and that of the society are benefic or otherwise.

The nativity of Dr. Besant, for instance, formed many benefic aspects to that of the Society, her Jupiter and Uranus vitalising and inspiring numerous physical plane activities through their conjunction to the ascendant and mid-heaven respectively. These aspects expanded the Society in a physical sense and at the same time stimulated Dr. Besant's own spiritual development on every plane.

With Krishnamurti the opposite was the case, his planets either forming a conjunction with the [41] original cross from fixed signs, thereby enhancing its original difficulties, or else falling in the twelfth house, the house of self-undoing and introspection.

It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion to the astrological student that the future was not likely to materialise as anticipated by the majority.


Excerpt from the Chapter:

Krishnamurti's Horoscope in Relation to the Society

[100] Yet in spite of all the conflict involved, his remarkable personality created a new self-conscious current of thought within the Society, through the sextile which his Moon, in the intuitive sign Sagittarius, forms to the cusp of the radical ninth house ruled by Aquarius, the sign of the New Age. Through this aspect he escaped out of immediate difficulties into a state of consciousness wholly impersonal, from which problems, both psychological and material, pressing enough for the majority, appear as mere fantasies. Nevertheless, the fact that the sign Scorpio rules the house of the future in Krishnamurti's own map and contains Saturn and Uranus, the latter afflicted, is an indication that in his next life he may become involved in those very psychological problems which he has either evaded or ignored in this incarnation.

 

 

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