B  - The second letter in almost all the alphabets, also the second in the Hebrew. Its symbol is a house, the form of Beth, the letter itself indicating a dwelling, a shed or a shelter. "As a compound of a root, it is constantly used for the purpose of showing that it had to do with stone; when stones at Beth-el are set up, for instance. The Hebrew value as a numeral is two. Joined with its predecessor, it forms the word Ab, the root of ‘father’, Master, one in authority, and it has the Kabalistical distinction of being the first letter in the Sacred Volume of the Law. The divine name connected with this letter is "Bakhour." (R. M. [Cyclop.]

(See also: B - Letter B, Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary, )

Yong-Grüb (Tibet, Tibetan). A state of absolute rest, the same as Paranirvana.

(See also: Yong-Grüb, Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary, )

B’ne Alhim or Beni Elohim (Hebrew, Jewish). "Sons of God ", literally or more correctly "Sons of the gods", as Elohim is the plural of Eloah. A group of angelic powers referable by analogy to the Sephira Hod.

[w. w. w.]

(See also: B’ne Alhim, Beni Elohim, Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary, )

Gerald B Gardner

(1884-1964) An amateur English anthropologist and folklorist whom many consider the person most responsible for the revival of witchcraft as a Neo-Pagan religion.

After his retirement in 1936, Gardner moved to the New Forest area of England, where he became involved in an occult society, The Fellowship of Crotona. There, he said, he met a more secret group that claimed to be hereditary witches and after the last witchcraft acts were repealed in Britain in 1951, Gardner founded his own coven.

Gardnerian Wicca, one of the most important traditions of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft, which many modern Wicca groups have unknowingly assimilated, includes the Goddess as the preeminent deity, the circle as a place to contain magical energy, ritual work done in small intimate groups, and the idea that the priestess of the coven becomes the Goddess through a ceremony known as "drawing down the moon. "

(See also: Gerald B Gardner, New Age Spirituality, Body Mind and Soul)

Gerald B Gardner

(1884-1964) An amateur English anthropologist and folklorist whom many consider the person most responsible for the revival of witchcraft as a Neo-Pagan religion.

After his retirement in 1936, Gardner moved to the New Forest area of England, where he became involved in an occult society, The Fellowship of Crotona. There, he said, he met a more secret group that claimed to be hereditary witches and after the last witchcraft acts were repealed in Britain in 1951, Gardner founded his own coven.

Gardnerian Wicca, one of the most important traditions of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft, which many modern Wicca groups have unknowingly assimilated, includes the Goddess as the preeminent deity, the circle as a place to contain magical energy, ritual work done in small intimate groups, and the idea that the priestess of the coven becomes the Goddess through a ceremony known as "drawing down the moon. "

(See also: Gerald B Gardner, New Age Spirituality, Body Mind and Soul)

Buddhi (Sanskrit) (from the verbal root budh to awaken, enlighten, know)

The spiritual soul, the faculty of discriminating, the channel through which streams divine inspiration from the atman to the ego, and therefore that faculty which enables us to discern between good and evil -- spiritual conscience. The qualities of the buddhic principle when awakened are higher judgment, instant understanding, discrimination, intuition, love that has no bounds, and consequent universal forgiveness.

In the theosophical scheme, it is the sixth principle counting upwards in the human constitution: the vehicle of pure, universal spirit, hence an inseparable garment or vehicle of atman. In its essence of the highest plane of akasa or alaya, buddhi stands in the same relation to atman as, on the cosmic scale, mulaprakriti does to parabrahman.

Buddhi uses manas as its garment, and in the former are likewise stored the fruitages of the many incarnations on earth; hence buddhi is often called both the seed and flower of manas. Buddhi is truly the center of spiritual consciousness and therefore its qualities are enduring. The purer and higher part of manas must awaken, by rising to it, this essential energy that inherently resides in buddhi so that the latter may become active in a person's life. Buddha and Christ are examples of sages who had become human imbodiments of the usually latent qualities of buddhi. Buddhi becomes more or less conscious on this plane by the flowerings it draws from manas after every incarnation of the ego. "Buddhi would remain only an impersonal spirit without this element which it borrows from the human soul, which conditions and makes of it, in this illusive Universe, as it were something separate from the universal soul for the whole period of the cycle of incarnation" (Key 159-60).

"No purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle, -- or the over-soul, -- has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha)" (SD 1:17).

In the human constitution buddhi is a ray from the cosmic principle mahabuddhi or adi-buddhi, a synonym for alaya, pradhana, or the Second Logos, while akasa in its higher reaches is identic with alaya.

(See also: Buddhi, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Blood The vital fluid circulating through the heart, arteries, and veins, supplying nutritive materials to all parts of the body, and receiving elements of waste for later discharge from the system. Occultism enlarges upon the truism that the blood is the life, by relating it to the spiritual and psychic life-forces circulating in the solar system. Blavatsky says

that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those life currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. . . .

"Thus, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system, of which the Sun is the heart -- the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body -- during the manvantaric solar period, or life; . . . Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ be made visible . . . then every one would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second -- due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood" (SD 1:531, 541-2).

The analogy is seen in these streams of solar living fire stepped down into vital electricity on earth, and also in the psychic and astral-physical currents of lunar life which influence generation and all terrestrial growth. In chemical composition, the plasma or fluid part of the blood is said to be identical with that of primordial sea water, ocean water having since become more concentrated.

The blood is actively protean in representing on this plane the streams of higher vitality manifesting in body, soul, and spirit. Thus, its pranic oxygen is the agent of the solar fire; its white and red corpuscles represent the psychic life-force and the red kamic energies, all acting together in their material forms. The leucocytes or white corpuscles are formed in the lymphatic glands, in the spleen, and in bone marrow. They correspond in a sense to the lunar chhayas or builders of the ethereal forms of the second and early third root-races which "needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no feeding" (SD 1:609). These spherical ameboid cells have both the primordial, changeable pudding-bag form and the autogenerative type of propagation. Their relation to the formation of the red cells typifies that of the early astral forms which, gradually becoming physicalized, evolved into the red-blooded, bisexual, manas-endowed beings of the later third root-race. The red cells, without autogenerative nuclei, are born in special leucocyte cells of red bone marrow, where they are produced at the rate the effete red cells are destroyed.

In human beings the pranic life-currents become impregnated with the manasic quality conferred by the agnishvattas. The lower elements of kama-prana are used in the blood offerings and sacrifices of voodoo rites and other forms of black magic:

"Blood begets phantoms. . . . Paracelsus writes that with the fumes of blood one is enabled to call forth any spirit we desire to see; for with its emanations it will build itself an appearance, a visible body -- only this is sorcery" (IU 2:567).

The old Greeks said that a divine fluid or ichor ran in the veins of the gods. It is also our physical destiny in the far distant future to evolve into bodies without blood as we understand it, in which nobler currents of conscious life will circulate.

(See also: Blood, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Buddhi-manas (Sanskrit) (from buddhi spiritual soul + manas intellect)

The higher ego, the principle of essential self-consciousness, especially when considered as over-enlightened by the atman or self per se. Buddhi-manas is the karana-sarira (causal body), hence the immortal or spiritual self which passes intact from one incarnation to another. This higher self or ego is formed of the indissoluble union of buddhi, the sixth principle counting upwards, and the spiritual efflorescence of manas, the fifth principle. Buddhi-manas is the divine individual soul infilled with the light of the ray from the atman, and hence includes human intellect and egoic self-consciousness, in addition to all the spiritual faculties and powers inherent in the ray itself.

See also ATMA-BUDDHI-MANAS

(See also: Buddhi-manas, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Buddhakshetra buddhakshetra (Sanskrit) (from buddha awakened + kshetra field, sphere of action)

The sphere of action of an enlightened one. According to theosophy, there are four (or seven) buddhakshetras or fields in which the buddhas manifest and do their sublime work of benevolence which, counting from above, are: 1) the realms in which the dhyani-buddhas live and work; 2) the realms in which the dhyani-bodhisttvas live and work, called by Blavatsky "the domain of ideation"; 3) the realms of the manushya-buddhas, in which these work as nirmanakayas; and 4) the field of action in which the human buddhas work, the ordinary human world -- our physical globe.

Every incarnate buddha lives and works in the fourth or lowest buddhakshetra, as Gautama Buddha did; but at the same time, and more particularly when he has laid aside the physical body, he can live and work at will in the next higher buddhakshetra as a nirmanakaya; again as a dhyani-bodhisattva in his higher intermediate spiritual-psychological principle, he can at will function in the next higher buddhakshetra; while last, the dhyani-buddha within him lives and does its own sublime labor on the highest buddhakshetras as a dhyani-buddha. Here lies the true explanation of the many apparently conflicting statements made about the various kinds of buddhas and their various duties or functions, as found in the Buddhist scriptures, especially in the Mahayana writings of Central and Northern Asia.

Each one of the trikaya (three bodies or vehicles) -- the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya -- has its respective place and function on and in the three highest of the buddhakshetra: the dharmakaya is the luminous or spiritual body or vehicle in which the dhyani-buddha lives and works on the first and highest buddhakshetra; the dhyani-bodhisattva similarly lives and works in the spiritual-intellectual body or vehicle called the sambhogakaya, on the second of the buddhakshetras; while the manushya-buddha, when working in the third buddhakshetras, does so in his nirmanakaya vesture or robe, vehicle, or body. The lowest buddhakshetra is the one in which the human buddha is found clothed in his body of flesh as an incarnate being.

(See also: Buddhakshetra, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Bread and Wine "The outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace," bread and wine stand at once for the actual elements used in initiation ceremonies and for the attainments of which they are symbolic.

Taking the Bacchic Mysteries as an example, wine was given as the blood of the grape and of Bacchus, blood signifying life, and Bacchus representing the mystic Logos which "was made flesh." So the whole rite means the imparting to the candidate of the divine life by conscious union of his lower self with the god within -- a union brought about by the self-devised efforts of the lower self. In the same way, bread or grain symbolized the intellectual aspect of the attainment, intellect being the "body" of the spiritual influx.

The Christian sacrament was adopted from the pagan rite. The Protestant Churches administer the sacrament in both bread and wine as the symbol of a divine grace received by the devout participant.

The Catholic Church teaches that the sacred elements are actually transubstantiated by miraculous means into the blood and body of Christ, denying the cup or the wine to the laity, and regarding the rite as propitiatory for the sins of the participants and of mankind in general.

The old pagan rite contained the idea that partaking of the wine meant allying oneself with the vital energy of the spiritual divinity within the neophyte, and the partaking of the bread was symbolic of a similar union of the neophyte's mentality with the cosmic mind for which the bread stood.

See also SOMA; WINE

(See also: Bread and Wine, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Brahmadevas (Sanskrit) (from brahman cosmic spirit + deva god, spiritual being)

Spiritual beings who act as guardians of the human race, entities directly emanating from Brahman as spiritual-intellectual energies.

See also DHYANI-CHOHAN

(See also: Brahmadevas, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Brahman (Sanskrit) (from brih to expand)

Sometimes Brahma or Brahm. The one reality, "the impersonal, supreme and uncognizable Principle of the Universe from the essence of which all emanates, and into which all returns, which is incorporeal, immaterial, unborn, eternal, beginningless and endless. It is all-pervading, animating the highest god as well as the smallest mineral atom" (TG 62). It involves both essential consciousness and substance, and is the spiritual background of the kosmos, the Cause of all Causes, what is commonly called the Unmanifest Logos: "Brahma, the Noumenon, never rests, as IT never changes and ever IS, though IT cannot be said to be anywhere" (SD 1:374). As the fundamental cosmic fountain of consciousness and spiritual substance, Brahman is the fundamental or cosmic self which, in the case of an individual being, becomes the kshetrajna, the spiritual sun within the individual. Thus the essential self of every being or entity from cosmos to physical atom is this Brahman itself, which is the cause of the familiar saying "tat tvam asi" (you are that).

Through and from Brahman derive the various cosmic Brahmas, the expansion of the One into the many. Brahman does not put forth evolution itself nor create, but exhibits various aspects of itself by means of emanative evolution. The Hindu Puranas say that Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are the primordial energies of Brahman, the divine neuter. There is a clear distinction between the impersonal, supreme, all-pervading, immanent, beginningless, and endless cosmic principle, whose essence is consciousness-life-substance, and the various Brahmas; for these latter are the periodic manifestations of the highest energies flowing forth at the beginning of each manvantara from the neuter Brahman, and into which these various Brahmas are ingathered again when the cosmic cycle reaches its close and pralaya ensues.

Philosophically, as the supreme cosmic principle of any universe, Brahman is enclosed within its veil or sakti, called pradhana; just as Brahma is similarly infolded within its inseparable sakti called prakriti, and on a still vaster plane mulaprakriti enfolds parabrahman. We have thus: parabrahman-mulaprakriti, Brahman-pradhana, and Brahma- or Purusha-prakriti.

(See also: Brahman, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Buddhi-taijasi (Sanskrit) In relation to the human principles, used to express the state of manas when it is bathed in the radiance of buddhi, the spiritual soul; yet its more exact significance is the radiance of buddhi itself: buddhi when actively radiating its own buddhic svabhava or characteristic. When manas becomes irradiated with buddhi-taijasi, then the human manasic faculty, the intellect, becomes suffused and infilled with spiritual discrimination and vision. It is the human soul "illuminated by the radiance of the divine soul. Therefore, Manas-taijasi may be described as radiant mind; the human reason lit by the light of the spirit; and Buddhi-Manas is the revelation of the divine plus human intellect and self-consciousness" (Key 159n).

See also TAIJASA

(See also: Buddhi-taijasi, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Bodhisattva (Sanskrit) (from bodhi wisdom + sattva essence)

He whose essence has become intelligence; exoterically, one who in one or a few more incarnations will become a buddha. Occultly, when

"a human being, has reached the state where his ego becomes conscious, fully so, of its inner divinity, becomes clothed with the buddhic ray; where, so to say, the personal man has put on the garments of inner immortality in actuality, on this earth, here and now -- that man is a Bodhisattva. His higher principles have nearly reached Nirvana. When they do so finally, such a man is a Buddha, a human Buddha, a Manushya-Buddha.

Obviously, if such a Bodhisattva were to reincarnate, in the next incarnation or in a very few future incarnations thereafter, he would be a Manushya-Buddha. A Buddha, in the esoteric teaching, is one whose higher principles can learn nothing more. They have reached Nirvana and remain there; but the spiritually awakened personal man, the Bodhisattva, the person made semi-divine to use popular language, instead of choosing his reward in the Nirvana of a less degree, remains on earth out of pity and compassion for inferior beings, and becomes what is called a Nirmanakaya . . . a Bodhisattva is the representative on earth of a Dhyani-Buddha or Celestial Buddha -- in other words one who has become an incarnation or expression of his own Divine Monad" (OG 19).

The dhyani-buddhas who each watch over one of the rounds and the great root-races on the different globes of our planetary chain, are said to send their bodhisattvas, their spiritual or human correspondents, during every round and race.

"These Dhyani Buddhas emanate, or create from themselves, by virtue of Dhyana, celestial Selves -- the super-human Bodhisattvas. These incarnating at the beginning of every human cycle on earth as mortal men, become occasionally, owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of Humanity, after which they may re-appear as Manushi (human) Buddhas" (SD 1:571).

"The exoteric teaching which says that every Dhyani-Buddha has the faculty of creating from himself, an equally celestial son -- a Dhyani-Bodhisattva -- who, after the decease of the Manushi (human) Buddha, has to carry out the work of the latter, rests on the fact that owing to the highest initiation performed by one overshadowed by the 'Spirit of Buddha' . . . a candidate becomes virtually a Bodhisattva, created such by the High Initiator" (SD 1:109).

(See also: Bodhisattva, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Bodhyanga (Sanskrit) (from bodhi wisdom + anga limb, portion, division)

Limb or division of essential wisdom; often used collectively to signify the branches of esoteric knowledge or understanding, usually enumerated as seven:

1)    smriti (memory);

2)    dharma-pravichaya (investigation -- hence correct understanding or discrimination of the Law);

3)    virya (energy);

4)    priti (spiritual joy);

5)    prasrabdhi (confidence, tranquillity);

6)    samadhi (absorption of the consciousness in a high spiritual and intellectual objective); and

7)    upeksha (absolute indifference).

Esoterically these correspond to seven states of consciousness (TG 59).

(See also: Bodhyanga, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Jacob Boehme, Jakob Bohme (1575-1624). Great German mystic philosopher, one of those individuals who, showing unusual spiritual insight due to excellent past karma, are especially watched over by the Great Lodge in preparation for future work. A shepherd as a boy, he became a shoemaker after learning to read and write.

"He was a natural clairvoyant of most wonderful powers. With no education or acquaintance with science he wrote works which are now proved to be full of scientific truths; but then, as he says himself, what he wrote upon, he 'saw it as in a great Deep in the Eternal.' He had 'a thorough view of the universe, as in a chaos,' which yet 'opened itself in him, from time to time, as in a young plant.' He was a thorough born Mystic, and evidently of a constitution which is most rare; one of those fine natures whose material envelope impedes in no way the direct, even if only occasional, intercommunion between the intellectual and the spiritual Ego.

It is this Ego which Jacob Boehme, like so many other untrained mystics, mistook for God; 'Man must acknowledge,' he writes, 'that his knowledge is not his own, but from God, who manifests the Ideas of Wisdom to the Soul of Man, in what measure he pleases.' Had this great Theosophist mastered Eastern Occultism he might have expressed it otherwise. He would have known then that the 'god' who spoke through his poor uncultured and untrained brain, was his own divine Ego, the omniscient Deity within himself, and that what that Deity gave out was not in 'what measure he pleased,' but in the measure of the capacities of the mortal and temporary dwelling IT informed" {TG 60}.

(See also: Jacob Boehme, Jakob Bohme, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Breath In the astral-vital organisms of living beings the breath is called prana, which also means "life." This is not limited to the respiratory functions, but includes what physiologists might call nerve currents operating in all parts of the body, of which the pulmonary diastole and systole is only a particular manifestation. Hatha yoga deals with the study and use of these functions, but before such aspects of the lower knowledge can be profitably or even safely used, the learner must have acquired self-mastery, stability, and disinterestedness of motive.

The ceaseless alternate outflowing and inflowing of cosmic life or hierarchies of lives of the one manifest reality is called the Great Breath from its analogy to physiological breathing, which implies incessant alternating motion, expansion and contraction, of life, air, wind, or spirit. The sevenfold word symbolizing the logos is said to be the evolution of the breath. Though the alternation of manvantara and pralaya conjoined are the Great Breath, the alternating motion does not cease even during the long pralayic ages.

Breath is often used in the same sense as ray, wind, spirit, pneuma, to denote an active emanation which is at once active and passive, positive and negative, donative and receptive, the principle of polarity later in cosmic evolution becoming pronounced. An instance is when the divine breath incubates the waters of space, and worlds are produced. Absolute perpetual motion is the breath of life of the one element, and is applied to fohat. In Sanskrit it is expressed among other words by asu, the true root of asura (a living or spiritual being). In Hebrew several words express it, varying according to the spiritual or grosser meaning: neshamah, ruah, or nephesh. In Greek philosophy perhaps the main word used in this sense in pneuma, equally well translated as spirit.

The plural "breaths" is used to denote spirits or forces, such as the Ah-hi, dhyani-chohans, asuras, the holy circumgyrating breaths, and the seven breaths or divisions of the Logos. There may also be right- and left-hand breaths, or breaths (winds) from the four, six, or eight directions, each having its own specific quality and functions. In general, breath stands for the air element.

(See also: Breath, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Birds Birds are regarded as originating from certain families of reptiles: "They of the long necks in the water, became the progenitors of the fowls of the air. . . . This is a point on which the teachings and modern biological speculation are in perfect accord. The missing links representing this transition process between reptile and bird are apparent to the veriest bigot, .

"So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks" (SD 2:183, 684).

Birds have always had a prominent place in symbology, associated, for instance, with the deities of the ancient pantheons, generally as celestial messengers; and with the human and spiritual souls (buddhi and manas). Sometimes the bird in symbolism represented the atman. The ancient Persians at times also symbolized the human mind-soul as a bird, Karshipta.

There are a number of reasons, mainly derivative from the life habits and characteristics of birds, which account for their selection as symbols of spiritual things, chief perhaps among these the fact that birds lay eggs, the source of new lives, whence sprang the idea of the cosmic egg appearing in and from the womb of cosmic spirit. For instance, in the Finnish Kalevala, a bird lays six golden eggs and one iron egg -- the last becoming our earth -- a clear reference to the seven globes of the planetary chain; and there was the cosmic egg of the Orphics in Greece and the hiranyagarbhas of Hindustan, etc.

Virtually all ancient religions comprised references to birds, sacred and otherwise -- for example, the phoenix, the simorgh of the ancient Persians, the ancient Egyptian ibis, golden hawk, and bennu, and Garuda and the kalahansa of ancient India. This last is the white swan of eternity, born in and from the Eternity or the Timeless: "The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, is boundless space. . ." (SD 2:293).

(See also: Birds, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Brisingamen (Icelandic) (from brising fire + men jewel)

In Norse myths the fire jewel represents the fire of enlightened intelligence in the human race, pictured as a gem which the goddess Freya wears on her bosom. She is the spiritual power imbodied in the planet Venus and the protectress of evolving, aspiring humanity.

Her gem has on more than one occasion been stolen by Loki -- the mischievous lower mind -- which brought grief to the gods, who have the well-being of humanity at heart. Once the precious gem was in grave danger: the matter-giant Trym (our physical globe earth) stole Thor's hammer of creation and destruction and hid it deep beneath the ground, and for its return he demanded that Freya become his wife. The story relates that she snorted with such fierce outrage that the gem was shattered.

(See also: Brisingamen, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)