of his body, through the Atman, “self,” or “soul;” and the old Greeks went in search of Atmu, the Hidden one, or the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian mysteries; so the spiritualists of today believe in the capacity of the spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those they loved on earth.  And all these, Aryan Yogis, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists, affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied spirit—­the real self—­are not separated from either the Universal Soul or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their qualities, as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no limitation.  And that when this difference is once removed—­according to the Greeks and Aryans by abstract contemplation, producing the temporary liberation of the imprisoned soul, and according to spiritualists, through mediumship—­such a union between embodied and disembodied spirits becomes possible.  Thus was it that Patanjali’s Yogis, and, following in their steps, Plotinus, Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists, maintained that in their hours of ecstasy, they had been united to, or rather become as one with, God several times during the course of their lives.  This idea, erroneous as it may seem in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical.  In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that which is simply ecstatic illumination, under the head of sensuous perception.  In the case of the Yogis, who maintained their ability to see Iswara “face to face,” this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern logic of the followers of Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy.  As to the similar assumption made for their Greek followers, for a long array of Christian ecstatics, and, finally, for the last two claimants to “God-seeing” within these last hundred years—­Jacob Bohme and Swedenborg—­this pretension would and should have been philosophically and logically questioned, if a few of our great men of science, who are spiritualists, had had more interest in the philosophy than in the mere phenomenalism of spiritualism.

The Alexandrian Theosophists were divided into neophytes, initiates and masters, or hierophants; and their rules were copied from the ancient Mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to Herodotus, brought them from India.  Ammonius obligated his disciples by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines, except to those who were proved thoroughly worthy and initiated, and who had learned to regard the gods, the angels, and the demons of other peoples, according to the esoteric hyponia, or under-meaning.  “The gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude, suppose them to be,” says Epicurus.  “He is not an atheist who denies the existence of the gods, whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on these gods the opinions of the multitude.”  In his turn, Aristotle declares that of the “Divine Essence pervading the whole world of Nature, what are styled the gods are simply the first principles.”