In _Isis Unveiled_ we wrote that which we now repeat: _We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state_. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the Universe during every Cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the Divine Nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is Matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (Divine) Nature." When those circulations--which Éliphas Lévi calls "currents of the Astral Light"--in the universal Ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the Divine Spirit, our Earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The Occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the Divine Soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own Divine Spirit. We are in a barren period; the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of scepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as a hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone "philosophizes." And philosophizing alone, how can it understand the "Soul Doctrine"?
In order not to break the thread of the narrative we shall give some striking proofs of these cyclic laws in Part II, proceeding meanwhile with our explanations of Geological and Racial Cycles.
11. The Descent of the Demiurge. 12. The Lunar Gods ordered to create. 13. The Higher Gods refuse.
11. THE LORD OF THE LORDS CAME. FROM HER BODY HE SEPARATED THE WATERS, AND THAT WAS HEAVEN ABOVE, THE FIRST HEAVEN.(160)
Here tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest version, repeated in the _Purânas_, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the first it is said:
He the Lord [the God who has the form of Brahmâ], when the world had become one ocean, concluding that within the waters lay the earth, and desirous to raise it up [to separate it], created himself in another form. As in the preceding Kalpa [Manvantara] he had assumed the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the shape of a boar, etc.(161)