Chapter 698

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In order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind, which is better acquainted with the Greek than with Âryan philosophy, some Theosophists have made an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had Nemesis been known to the Profane in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term would be unobjectionable. As it is, Nemesis has been too much anthropomorphized by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, “from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a moral feeling rather,” says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the Gods, and is pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that “feeling” was deified, and its personification became an ever-fatal and punishing Goddess. Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, we must do so in her triple character as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the last is the Goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty, Adrasteia, the “inevitable,” represents Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dikê, is the equitable Goddess reserving her wrath for those alone who are maddened with pride, egoïsm, and impiety. (See Mesomed., Hymn. Nemes., v. 2, from Brunck, Analecta II. p. 292; quoted in Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric Goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphized in its various aspects, Karma is a highly philosophical truth, a most divine and noble expression of the primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil, and ennobles our conceptions of what divine immutable Justice ought to be, instead of degrading the unknown and unknowable Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel tyrant, which we call “Providence.”