Esoteric Aspects of Vice

From The Key to Theosophy, chapter 9:

ENQUIRER. But "M. A. Oxon" (pen-name of William Stainton Moses) is a Spiritualist?

THEOSOPHIST. Quite so, and the only true Spiritualist I know of, though we may still disagree with him on many a minor question. Apart from this, no Spiritualist comes nearer to the occult truths than he does. Like any one of us he speaks incessantly "of the surface dangers that beset the ill-equipped, feather-headed muddler with the occult, who crosses the threshold without counting the cost."  Our only disagreement rests in the question of "Spirit Identity." Otherwise, I, for one, coincide almost entirely with him, and accept the three propositions he embodied in his address of July, 1884. It is this eminent Spiritualist, rather, who disagrees with us, not we with him.

From Spirit Teachings by William Stainton Moses, section 3, 1883.

They have decided, forsooth, that to be in communion with the world of spirit is evidence of madness; therefore, all who claim to be are mad, and consequently must be shut up within the madhouse. And because by lying statements they have succeeded in affixing the stigma, and in incarcerating the medium, they further charge on us the sin they have invented of driving our mediums to madness. Were it not ignorance, it would be blasphemy. We have brought nought but blessing to our friends. We are to them the bearers of Divine Truth. If man has chosen to attract by his evil mind and evil life congenial spirits who aggravate his wickedness, on his head be the sin. They have but tended the crop which he has already sown. He was mad already; mad in neglect of his own spirit and body; mad in that he has driven far from him the holy influences. But we deal not with such.

Far more mad indeed are those besotted drunkards whom you deem not mad. To spirit-eye there is no more fearful sight than those dens of wickedness and impurity where the evil men gather to steep their senses in oblivion, to excite the lustful and sensual passions of their debased bodies, to consort with the degraded and the impure, and to offer themselves the ready prey of the basest and worst spirits who hover around and find their gratification in living over again their bodily lives. These are dens of basest, most hideous degradation; a blot of your civilisation, a disgrace to your intelligence. 3

SM: What do you mean by living over again their base lives?

These earth-bound spirits retain much of their earthly passion and propensity. The cravings of the body are not extinct, though the power to gratify them is withdrawn. The drunkard retains his old thirst, but exaggerated; aggravated by the impossibility of slacking it. It burns within him, the unquenched desire, and urges him to frequent the haunts of his old vices, and to drive wretches like himself to further degradation. In them he lives again his old life, and drinks in satisfaction, grim and devilish, from the excesses which he causes them to commit. And so his vice perpetuates itself, and swells the crop of sin and sorrow. The besotted wretch, goaded on by agencies he cannot see, sinks deeper and deeper into the mire. His innocent wife and babe starve and weep in silent agony, and near them hovers, and over them broods, the guardian angel who has no power to reach the sodden wretch who mars their lives and breaks their hearts.

This we shadow forth to you when we tell you that the earthbound spirit lives again its life of excess of those whom it is enabled to drive to ruin. The remedy is slow, for such vices perpetuate themselves. It can only be found in the moral and material elevation of the race; in the gradual growth of purer and truer knowledge; in advanced education, in its widest and truest sense.

We have said something to you of the reasons why the voluntarily degraded souls sink until they pass the boundary beyond which restoration becomes hard. The perpetual choosing of evil and refusing of good breeds necessarily an aversion to that which is pure and good, and a craving for that which is debased. Spirits of this character have usually been incarned in bodies where the animal passions had great sway. They began by yielding to animal desires, and ended by being slaves of the body. Noble aspirations, godlike longings, desire for holiness and purity, all are quenched, and in place of spirit the body reigns supreme, dictating its own laws, quenching all moral and intellectual light, and surrounding the spirit with influences and associations of impurity. Such a spirit is in perilous case.

The guardians retire affrighted from the presence; they cannot breathe the atmosphere which surrounds it; other spirits take their place; spirits who in their earth-life had been victims to kindred vices. They live over again their earthly sensual lives, and find their gratification in encouraging the spirit to base and debasing sin. This tendency of bodily sin to reproduce itself is one of the most fearful and terrible of the consequences of conscious gross transgression of nature's laws. The spirit has found all its pleasure in bodily gratifications, and lo! when the body is dead, the spirit still hovers round the scene of its former gratifications, and lives over again the bodily life in vices of those whom it lures to sin. Round the gin-shops of your cities, dens of vice, haunted by miserable besotted wretches, lost to self-respect and sense of shame, hover the spirits who in the flesh were lovers of drunkenness and debauchery.

They lived the drunkard's life in the body; they live it over again now, and gloat with fiendish glee over the downward course of the spirit whom they are leagued to ruin. Could you but see how in spots where the vicious congregate the dark spirits throng, you would know something of the mystery of evil. It is the influence of these debased spirits which tends so much to aggravate the difficulty of retracing lost steps, which makes the descent of Avernus so easy, the return so toilsome. The slopes of Avernus are dotted with spirits hurrying to their destruction, sinking with mad haste to ruin. Each is the centre of a knot of malignant spirits, who find their joy in wrecking souls and dragging them down to their own miserable level.

Such are they who gravitate when released from the body to congenial spheres below the earth. They and their tempters find their home together in spheres where they live in hope of gratifying passions and lusts which have not faded with the loss of the means of satisfying their cravings.

In these spheres they must remain subject to the attempted influence of the missionary spirits, until the desire for progress is renewed. When the desire rises, the spirit makes its first step. It becomes amenable to holy and ennobling influence, and is tended by those pure and self-sacrificing spirits whose mission it is to tend such souls. You have among you spirits bright and noble, whose mission in the earth- life is among the dens of infamy and haunts of vice, and who are preparing for themselves a crown of glory, whose brightest jewels are self-sacrifice and love. So amongst us there are spirits who give themselves to work in the sphere of the degraded and abandoned. By their efforts many spirits rise, and when rescued from degradation, work out long and laborious purification in the probation spheres, where they are removed from influences for evil, and entrusted to the care of the pure and good. So desire for holiness is encouraged and the spirit is purified. Of the lower spheres we know little. We only know vaguely that there are separations made between degrees and sorts of vice. They that will not seek for anything that is good, that wallow in impurity and vice, sink lower and lower, until they lose conscious identity, and become practically extinct, so far as personal existence is concerned; so at least we believe.

Alas! alas! sad and sorrowful is the thought. Mercifully, such cases are rare, and spring only from deliberate rejection by the soul of all that is good and ennobling. This is the sin unto death of which Jesus told His followers; the sin against the Holy Spirit of God of which you are told. The sin, viz., of rejecting the influences of God's holy angel ministers, and of preferring the death of vice and impurity to the life of holiness and purity and love. It is the sin of exalting the animal to the extinction of the spiritual; of degrading even the corporeal; of cultivating sensual earthly lusts; of depraving even the lowest tastes; of reducing the human to the level of the lowest brute. In such the Divine essence is quenched; the baser elements are fostered, forced, developed to undue excess. They gain absolute sway, they quench the spirit, and extinguish all desire for progress. The vice perpetuates itself, and drags the wretch who has yielded himself to the animal enjoyments further and further from the path of progress, until even the animal becomes vitiated and diseased; the unhealthily stimulated passions prey on themselves; and the voice of the spirit is heard no more. Down must the soul sink, down and yet down, further and further, until it is lost in fathomless obscurity.

This is the unpardonable sin. Unpardonable, not because the Supreme will not pardon, but because the sinner chooses it to be so. Unpardonable, because pardon is impossible where sin is congenial, and penitence unfelt.