The Golden Star

VISION 1

The Domains of Night

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“Behold the moulds in which the ancient persecutors of the faithful once were cast: the torturers, who with racks and gallows, fires and agonizing pains took toll of helpless victims in the name of Christ the King. There will be no release for them till all their prey in full realization descend into these regions, and with a holy kiss of pity forgive their trespasses, and take them by the hand to lead them to the Light—a merging, as it were, of consciousness of individual wrongs in universal awareness of God’s Love. Until then they must remain in unknown darkness.

“Thus love, which lies enfolded in every soul, as lotus leaves are found in perfect form within the undeveloped seeds prior to their germination, lies hidden in the breast of every brute, and only love resplendent can awaken it with gentle touch and warm it with God’s rays; luculent and clear, sent forth from the Divine Bosom. So the germs of all that is, or is to be, dwell in the darkness, the Darkness that Breathes over the slumbering Waters of Life, replete with latent Spirit.”

And then the ghostly troop began to fade away, and with it faded out the cavern and the rocks and crags, and faintly grew a phosphorescent glimmer that brought a dimly shining light upon the scene. A far-away tumult was heard that grew louder every moment—a rumbling noise approaching from the distance, a sound of shouting and of distant guns. And in the gloom appeared a mighty host of dim-seen shapes that struggled, fell, and rose again in flight; pursued by yelling hordes, barbaric. And sullen men of threatening mien on horseback led the army of pursuers; the War-Lords and the Captains of the fighting hordes; with mighty thunder of the drums of strife and clashing cymbals, sabres, spears; all calling to the festival of death and carnage. With blaring bugles, sounding the attack, retreat, enflanking movements, urging to the foul baptism of blood and mud, where gushing torrents of life’s essence drain away in greedy earth, and kindly Man is made into a beast of brutal slaughter.

The sickle of a pale, wan moon shimmered over a field of battle that stretched for miles around, and corpses piled and wounded bled and groaned in agony, as if that sickle of the moon were symbol grim of Death’s sharp scythe, whose harvest grew as still the War-Lords cast their baleful, calculating glances round and gave gruff orders; and lurid flames of guns and cannons blazed upon the mowed down ranks and ranks of fathers, brothers, lovers, sons, destroyed in unappeasing greed. Bewildered victims; fighting, killing for an unknown cause their kindred from another land, who, too, the victims are and the aggressors, at behoof of powerful masters, mad for gain and personal glory, which they cannot take away when Death calls loud their names and leads them to the land sinister, where with his grisly companies he reigns in nameless terror.

And every drop of blood the War-Lords spill must surely be redeemed somehow; with tears, or golden deeds of goodness; with pain and loss, with fasting and with prayer, with full awareness of the duty to one’s brother, and with Service—endless—till all the stains are wiped away.

And as the din of strife arose and died away in whispering sounds, as if a million trees had shed their leaves that rustled in a wind of death, the Messenger and his companions stood in silence; watching that dread vision of useless agony; for victory and defeat alike are empty dreams.

Neteru-Hem turned to Ma-u and Ma-uti and said:

“The thoughts of good and evil are like Light and Darkness which are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind, and it has been told that Darkness adopted Illumination in order to make itself visible; and that Light is Matter, and Darkness Pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis is subjective and absolute Light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal and is simply an Illusion. So it is taught in the tenets of Eastern Occultism. But there is more to it than that and many of the teachings and holy books are masses of contradiction. In the Gospel of John, it says that ‘the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.’ One explanation is that the word ‘darkness’ does not apply to man’s spiritual eyesight, but indeed to Darkness, the Absolute, that cannot cognize transient Light, however transcendent to human eyes. We have here a mix-up of the principles of darkness from which sprang the material Kosmos with all its inhabitants, and this Darkness represents the material light as known to mortals, in contradistinction to the mortal concept of darkness, which represents sin and ignorance.

“But there is a Greater Light, transcending all human concepts of Light and the Darkness of Chaos, and that is the ultimate goal of all that is created in the material and the non-material.

“When we read in the archaic narrative that the radiant child, Bright Face, Son of Dark Space, emerges from the depths of the Great Dark Waters and shines forth as the Sun, and that He is the blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom, lifting the Veil, shutting out the Above, leaving the Below to be seen as the great Illusion, we must sense that BOTH that Above and Below are Illusions. Illusions so Supreme that the human mind and the human brain—its instrument here below—cannot conceive their Glory; much less the immeasurably greater Glory that IS beyond these Illusions. The awareness of this can only come by divine inspiration, under the guidance of those who are sent to bring a glimpse of the true Light to mortals. A sensing of the Un-nameable Great Thought behind the concealed Deity called Darkness, the Unfathomable Darkness, the Whirlwind, the Black Goose, or the Black Swan—all symbols of the temporary Manu, or God, of which fourteen reign supreme during one Day of Brahmâ; or of Brahmâ Himself, the Emanation of the Primordial Ray, the Vehicle of the Divine Ray, which otherwise could not manifest Itself in the Universe.

“It is said that Father–Mother spin a web, whose upper end is fastened to Spirit, the Light of the One Darkness, and the lower one to its shadowy end, Matter. And this web is the garment by which man conceives God, as the Poet Goethe has said. Darkness is also called the Mother-Space, and the Mother of the Gods—Deva-Mâtri—as from Her Cosmic Matrix all the heavenly bodies of our system (Sun and Planets) were born. Therefore, we may consider that Darkness to be a physical, material darkness, just as the light—or its illusion to our physical senses—is a physical, material Light. This will become still more apparent when we learn that the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the fabric of Darkness.”

“Is it permitted to ask what happens when the hundred Years of Days and Nights of Brahmâ are over?” asked Ma-u.

“When that vast period is ended, my son, then all those spirits who have fulfilled the Laws of Love and Service will reach the threshold of the ‘UNknown Darkness,’ which, to them, will be the Great Day of Light; and for a period of time equal to One Hundred Years of Days and Nights of Brahmâ will they be absorbed in that Day; a time of rest and rejoicing after great travail.”

So the Messenger and his companions crossed that great field of the battle of the shades of warriors and presently they reached a village of small, mean houses, huddled close together. Every house was closely shuttered and as they passed they saw the glare of anxious eyes within the cracks of doors and shutters. As the three passed along, one or two doors were softly pulled ajar, and when Ma-u turned round he saw the weird forms of thin old men, with shapes like attenuated goats and long and narrow wrinkled faces, with inquisitive pointed noses and little glaring eyes. Thin wisps of white hair hung lankly from their mean and shrunken skulls, and claw-like hands were gripping for support against the lintels of their doors, as, staring, they followed with cunning looks the Messenger and our friends.

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