Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

Page 89

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certain balancing up or compensation in kāma-loka and devachan, in order that complete justice may be done even to the fleeting personality.
The working out in detail of collective karma would carry us far beyond the limits of such an elementary work as the present and far beyond the knowledge of the writer; only these fragmentary hints can at present be offered to the student. For precise understanding a long study of individual cases would be necessary, traced through many thousands of years. Speculation on these matters is idle; it is patient observation that is needed.
There is, however, one other aspect of collective karma on which some word may fitly be said; the relation between men's thoughts and deeds and the aspects of external nature. On this obscure subject Mme. Blavatsky has the following:
Following Plato, Aristotle explained that the term oToLYeia (elements] was understood only as meaning the incorporeal princi. ples placed at each of the four great divisions of our cosmical world, to supervise them. Thus, no more than Christians do Pagans adore and worship the Elements and the imaginary) cardinal points, but the “Gods " that respectively rule over them. For the Church, there are two kinds of Sidereal Beings, Angels and Devils. For the Kabalist and Occultist there is one class, and neither Occultist nor Kabalist makes any difference between the “Rectors of Light” and the “Rectores Tenebrarum," or Cosmocratores, whom the Roman Church imagines and discovers in the “Rectors of Light," as soon as any one of them is called by another name than the one she addresses him by. It is not the Rector, or Mahārājah, who punishes or rewards, with