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tradition of magical art, a survival of Medieval European beliefs in superhuman
activities and powers both in man and nature. Among the rural and unschooled
populations this tradition assumed the form of harmless superstitions. Among
more learned peoples it issued in philosophic speculations dealing with the
spiritual energies of nature, the hidden faculties of man, such as prophecy,
tongues and ecstatic vision, and the extent and possibility of man's control
over the external world through the manipulation of a subtle ether possessing
magnetic quality. The heritage of Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Thomas Vaughn and
Roger Bacon, Agrippa von Nettesheim, the Florentine Platonists and their German,
French, and English heirs still lingered. The Christian scriptures were
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themselves replete with incidents of the supernatural, with necromancy,
witchcraft, miracles, ghost-walking, spirit messages, symbolical dreams, and the
whole armory of thaumaturgical exploits. The doctrine of Satan was itself
calculated to enliven the imagination with ideas of demoniac possession, and was
all the more credible by reason of the prevalence of insanity which was ascribed
to spirit obsession. The early nineteenth century was must closer to the Middle
Ages than our own time is, not only because education was less general, but also
because a far larger proportion of the population was agrarian instead of
metropolitan. Such cults were, however, by no means restricted to "backwoods"
sections. They were astonishingly prevalent in the larger centers. More
enlightened groups accepted a less crude form of the practices. Where knowledge
ceases superstition may begin; and the problems of life that press upon us for
solution and that are still beyond our grasp, lead the mind into every sort of
rationalization or speculation.
Perhaps more people than acknowledge God in church pews believe in the existence
of intelligences that play a part in life, whether in answer to prayer, in
suggestive dreams, in occasional vision and apparitions, in messages through
mediums, or in whatever guise; and out of such an unreflective theology arise
many of the types of superstitious philosophy. To analyze this situation in its
entirety would take us into extensive fields of folk-lore and involve every sort
of old wives' tale imaginable. The chief point is that the varieties of chimney-
corner legend and omnipresent superstition have had their origin in a larger
primitive interpretation of the facts and forces of nature. They must be
recognized as the modern progeny of ancient hylozoism and animism. In the
childhood of our culture, as well as in the childhood of the race and of the
individual, there is a close sympathy between man and nature which leads him to
ascribe living quality to the external world. Countryside fables are doubtless
the jejune remnant of what was once felt to be a vital magnetic relation between
man's spirit and the spirit of the world. They are the distorted forms of some
of the ancient rites for effecting magical intercourse between man and nature.
While it is not to be inferred that Theosophy itself was built on the material
embodied in countryside credulity, it will be seen that the native inclination
toward an animistic interpretation of phenomena was in a measure true to the
deeper theses which the new cult presented. Madame Blavatsky herself says in
Isis Unveiled that the spontaneous responsiveness of the peasant mind is likely
to lead to a closer apprehension of the living spirit of Nature than can be
attained by the sophistications of reason.
The major tendencies in the direction of Theosophy have now been enumerated. It
remains only to mention the scattering of American students before 1875 whose
researches were taking them into the realm where the fundamentals of Theosophy
itself were to be found. We refer to the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the
Kabalists, Hermeticists, Egyptologists, Assyriologists, students of the
Mysteries, of the Christian origins, of the pagan cults, and the small but
gradually increasing number of Comparative Religionists and Philologists.28
There were men of intelligence both in Europe and America, who had kept on the
track of ancient and medieval esotericism, and the opening up of Sanskrit
literature gave a decided impetus to a renaissance of research in those realms.
The material that went into Frazer's Golden Bough, Ignatius Donnelley's
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians,and many
other compendious works of the sort, was being collated out of the flotsam and
jetsam of ancient survival and assembled into a picture beginning to assume
definite outline and more than haphazard meaning. The great system of Neo-
Platonism, the Gnostics, with Apollonius of Tyana, and Philo Judaeus were coming
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