The Cosmic Tradition

 

 

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The 'cosmic' writings are so called because they deal with the science of all the degrees of cosmic substance. This science, which is akin to the science of numbers, was unknown to the official bible exegists of the various religions. In fact, these interpreters endeavoured to introduce connections between the formless and the physical state, while neglecting the invisible degrees between them, or confusing them with one another. That is, they freely replaced the qualities of one number with another number and took formal manifestations for the non-manifested.

Pascal Themanlys, introduction to Visions of the Eternal Present, edited by Argaman in Jerusalem, 1991

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"The Tradition"

The Theons authored an extraordinary body of work, which he simply called "The Tradition".  Theon claimed that this constituted knowledge that pre-dated both the Kabbalistic and  Chaldean tradition of the West, and the Vedas of India, and from which both these latter were derived.   As I see it though, The Tradition is straight Gnostic cosmology, similiar to that of the Classical or Hellenistic Gnostics, although differing in certain respects.
The Mother's references to The Tradition are ambiguous.  Sometimes it seems as if Theon is the author; at other times as if The Tradition is something he in some way aquired or stumbled upon.

"...he formulated a tradition which he called the "cosmic tradition" and which he claimed to have  received - I don't know how - from a tradition anterior to that of the Cabala and the Vedas."

[Mother's Agenda, vol 1 (1958), p.219]

The real source of Theon's Tradition is obvious from the above passage.  It is something which Theon received.  In other words, it was a "channeled" communication.  This places it in the same category as the Chaldean Oracles, the Enochian Calls, the so- called Hopi Prophecies, the Alice Bailey/"Tibetan" material, the Seth and Ramtha material, the Ohapse and Urantia books, and indeed innumerable other spiritual and occult material of quality ranging from atrocious to (very rarely) magnificent.
What is more, the person responsible for this channelling may well have been Madame Theon, as the Mother often speaks of her clairvoyant and occult capacity.  As is so often the case with this sort of material, it is a woman who is responsible for bringing it through (the only two notable exceptions to this being the Chaldean Oracles and the Enochian material, the former produced by a father and son team in the early century after Christ (or so contemporary sources claim); the latter by the Elizabethan occultists John Dee and Edward Kelly (the latter serving as the medium)).
It is not unlikely that, having received the basic transmission, Theon proceeded to elaborate and build upon it.  Thus The Tradition is made up of (at least) two distinct strata, and this would explain any obvious inconsistencies within the work.
Sujita relates the Mother (Mirra)'s part in the composing of this extraordinary teaching.

As for the stories from the Tradition, "They are not to be taken as concrete truths, they are simply first-rate images," Mother told Satprem. "Through them I really got hold, very concretely, of the truth of what caused the world's distortion.... The essence isn't evil, but the functioning is faulty.

"The words are so childish that if you tell this story to intelligent people, they look pityingly at you; but it gives such a concrete grasp of the problem! It helped me a lot."

A slow smile spread across her face. "It was written in English and I am the one who translated it into French - into horrid French, perfectly horrid, because I put in all the words Théon had dreamed up. Then again, what words! He made a detailed description of all the faculties latent in man, and it was remarkable - but with such barbaric words! You can make up new words in English and get away with it, but in French it's utterly ridiculous. And there I was, very conscientiously putting them all in! Yet in terms of experience, it was splendid. It really was an experience - it was the account of Madame Théon's experiences in exteriorization. She had learned to do what Théon' taught me also - to speak while you are in the seventh heaven: the body goes on speaking, rather slowly, in a low voice, but it works quite well. She would speak and a friend of hers, another English woman who was their secretary - I think she knew shorthand - would note it all down as she went along. And afterwards it was made into stories, told as stories. It was all shown to Sri Aurobindo and it greatly interested him. He even adopted some of the words into his own terminology.

"The divisions and subdivisions of the being were described down to the minutest detail and with such perfect precision! I know, because I did the experience again, I did it on my own, without any preconceived ideas, the very same: going out of one body after the other, one body after the other, and so on twelve times, and my experience - apart from certain quite negligible differences, doubtless due to differences in the receiving brain - was exactly the same."

References and Links

Sujata Nahar, Mother's Chronicles, book three - Mirra the Occultist,  Institut de Recherches Évolutives, Paris
Max Théon et la philosophie cosmique by Pascal Thémanlys
Corpus Mmothra: La Tradition Cosmique- Via Antiquities of the Illuminati and Kheper blog by Jonathan Sellers (Monday, March 21, 2005), includes interesting comments on Theon and the Tradition, and reference to my essay on Theon (this section)
spiritus93 - English transaltion of volume 1 of The Cosmic Tradition.

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