Book excerpt: Epidemics in moral and physical affairs are more now more rife than ever. The seeds of vice and crime spring up and bring forth fruit with appalling rapidity and paralyzing succession. The reciprocal relations between planetary bodies and man are as perfect as those between the red blood cells, which float in a common fluid. Each body, whether planetary of human, is affected by the combined influences of all and, in its turn, affects each and all. Pythagoras’ music of the spheres is more than a mere fancy, as certain planetary aspects may disturb the æther of our planet, while others may bring about rest and harmony. Some pathological conditions have a tendency to become rapidly spreading epidemics, influenced by causes unknown to modern science. Plato says that animal man is a son of necessity. A physically pure body will strengthen the soul which, though liable to err, will always side with reason against the lusts and proclivities of the body. The rapid growth of human intellect has paralysed spiritual perceptions. It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect thrives, and mankind is quite unprepared to comprehend the awful drama of disobedience of the laws of spiritual life and those governing natural life. The Sun is the Mind and Heart of our Cosmos. Its bright spots are the blood cells of that luminary. Its coronal changes have no effect upon the earth’s climate, but the sunspots have. The connection between sunspots and epidemics affecting plants is well-established, but the karmic influence of sunspots on the fortunes of man, the living barometer, is not even suspected. The current solar cycle of sunspot activity began in December 2019 and will continue for eleven years. The fact that the current COVID-19 pandemic also began in December 2019 is no coincidence. This is further evidence of the magnetic sympathy between man and the planetary orbs that rule and guide human destinies. In Occultism atoms are called vibrations; also sound, collectively. It is the sound that produces the colour, and not the other way around. By correlating the vibrations of a sound in the proper way, a new colour can be made. Now, if the nerves of the human body thrill in synch with a low form of life, such as a virus for example, the outcome of this abnormal chromatic vibration is likely to be an infection acquired by magnetic affinity. Epidemics such as cholera, are the consequence of man’s sin, though his neglect of hygienic laws, of cleanliness and good drainage, are preventable. But there are also climatic conditions, as those in the outbreak of cholera in 1884, when the epidemic seemed confined to certain areas, following some law of atmospheric currents. Number 9 represents the earth under the influence of an evil principle. It is a digit dreaded by the ancients, for its natural depravity is awful. Influenza epidemics have a mysterious predilection for royalty. That which is now called influenza was known before as the grippe, and the latter devastated Europe centuries before the cholera made its first appearance in the so-called civilized lands. Epidemics of influenza and other respiratory tract infections are often caused by an abnormal exuberance of ozone in the air. The real ozone is the Elixir of Life. Thought is neither less material nor less objective than the elusive germs of infectious diseases — current and continuously emerging — the causes of which are such a puzzle for modern science. Since the mind of a living person can psychologize another mind at will, so can the thought of a person already dead. Mental epidemics are often caused by sorcerers who arouse the earth-bound shadows of the dead to hallucinate the minds of good men. Moral taint is as communicable as the physical. Bad companions will degrade personal magnetism and this is more pernicious than the impressions conveyed to the eye or the ear. The latter may be repelled by avoiding seeing or hearing what is bad; but the moral poison of the former, floating in the air, enwraps the sensitive and penetrates his very being. A negatively polarized man, a man of a susceptible temperament, if exposed to a current of foul emanations from some vicious person will be absorb the insidious poison until he is saturated by it. Likewise, a susceptible body will absorb pathogenic microorganisms. The two best remedies for the sensitive to have his sensitiveness destroyed, is to change his negative polarity to positive, and to avoid passivity at all costs by maintaining full control of his mind at all times. While the fear that the presence of the dead brings pollution to the living is no better than a superstition, the real cause of the religious prohibition not to handle too closely the dead and to bury them without first subjecting the bodies to the disinfectant process of fire, vultures, or nitric acid, was as beneficent in its results as it was wise, since it was the best and most necessary sanitary precaution against epidemics. The Astral Light is no light, it is a huge storehouse of human corruption and degeneracy. It gives out nothing but what it has received; it is the great terrestrial crucible, in which the vile emanations of the earth (moral, psychic, and physical, upon which the Astral Light is fed) are all converted into their subtlest essence, radiated back intensified, and then spread as epidemics — moral, psychic, and physical.