Part II. The Evolution Of Symbolism.

Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.

The study of the hidden meaning in every religious and profane legend, of whatsoever nation, large or small, and preëminently in the traditions of the East, has occupied the greater portion of the present writer’s life. She is one of those who feel convinced that no mythological story, no traditional event in the folk-lore of a people, has ever, at any time, been pure fiction, but that every one of such narratives has an actual historical lining to it. In this the writer disagrees with those symbologists, however great their reputation, who find in every myth nothing more than additional proof of the superstitious bent of mind of the Ancients, and who believe that all mythologies sprang from, and are built upon, solar myths. Such superficial thinkers have been admirably disposed of by Mr. Gerald Massey, the poet and Egyptologist, in a lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern.” His pointed criticism is worthy of reproduction in this part of our work, as it echoes so well our own feelings, expressed openly so far back as 1875, when Isis Unveiled was written.

This is a very correct exposition of the lunar mythos from its astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of the divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly—if one is permitted to coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient in more than its astronomical meaning. The Moon is intimately related to the Earth, as shown in the Stanzas, and is more directly concerned with all the mysteries of our Globe than is even Venus-Lucifer, the occult sister and alter ego of the Earth.455

The untiring researches of Western, especially German, symbologists, during the last and the present centuries, have induced the most unprejudiced students, and of course every Occultist, to see that without the help of symbology—with its seven departments, of which the moderns know nothing—no ancient Scripture can ever be correctly understood. Symbology must be studied from every one of its aspects, for each nation had its own peculiar methods of expression. In short, no Egyptian papyrus, no Indian olla, no Assyrian tile, no Hebrew scroll, should be read and interpreted literally.

This every scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey alone are sufficient to convince any fair-minded Christian that to accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander. But the fact to which even the most truth-loving and truth-searching Orientalists—whether Âryanists or Egyptologists—seem to remain blind, is that every symbol on papyrus or olla is a many-faced diamond, each of whose facets not only includes several interpretations, but also relates to several sciences. [pg 324]This is instanced in the just quoted interpretation of the cat symbolizing the moon—an example of sidereo-terrestrial imagery; for the moon has with other nations many other meanings besides.

As a learned Mason and Theosophist, the late Kenneth Mackenzie, has shown in his Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, there is a great difference between emblem and symbol. The former “comprises a larger series of thoughts than a symbol, which may be said rather to illustrate some single special idea.” Hence, the symbols—lunar, or solar, for example—of several countries, each illustrating such a special idea, or series of ideas, form collectively an esoteric emblem. The latter is “a concrete visible picture or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, recognizable by those who have received certain instructions [Initiates].” To put it still plainer, an emblem is usually a series of graphic pictures viewed and explained allegorically, and unfolding an idea in panoramic views, one after the other. Thus the Purânas are written emblems. So are the Mosaic and Christian Testaments, or the Bible, and all other exoteric Scriptures. As the same authority shows:

The above enumerated societies are all comparatively modern, none dating back earlier than the Middle Ages. How much more proper, then, that the students of the oldest archaic school should be careful not to divulge secrets of far more importance to humanity (as being dangerous in ignorant hands) than any of the so-called “Masonic Secrets,” which have now become those of Polichinelle, as the French say! But this restriction can apply only to the psychological or rather psycho-physiological and cosmical significance of symbol and emblem, and even to that only partially. For though an Adept is compelled to refuse to impart the conditions and means that lead to any correlation of Elements—whether psychic or physical—which may produce harmful as well as beneficent results; yet he is ever ready to impart to the earnest student the secret of the ancient thought, in anything that has respect to history concealed under mythological symbolism, and thus to furnish a few more land-marks for a retrospective view of the past, [pg 325]in so far as it furnishes useful information with regard to the origin of man, the evolution of the Races and geognosy. And yet it is the crying complaint to-day, not only among Theosophists, but also among the few profane interested in the subject: Why do not the Adepts reveal that which they know? To this, one might answer: Why should they, since one knows beforehand that no man of Science will accept it, even as a hypothesis, much less as a theory or axiom. Have you so much as accepted or believed in the A B C of the Occult Philosophy contained in the Theosophist, Esoteric Buddhism, and other works and periodicals? Has not even the little which has been given, been ridiculed and derided, and made to face the “animal-” and “ape-theory” of Huxley and Hæckel, on the one hand, and the rib of Adam and the apple on the other? Notwithstanding such an unenviable prospect, however, a mass of facts is given in the present work, and the origin of man, the evolution of the Globe and the Races, human and animal, are as fully treated as the writer is able to treat them.

The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations. The Purânas, the Zend Avesta, and the old classics, are full of such facts; but no one has ever taken the trouble of collecting and collating them together. The reason for this is that all such events were recorded symbolically; and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our Âryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or another preconception, and still oftener, by one-sided views of the secret meaning. Yet even a parable is a spoken symbol: a fiction or a fable, as some think; an allegorical representation, we say, of life-realities, events, and facts. And just as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, such moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so a historical, real event was deduced, by those versed in the hieratic sciences, from emblems and symbols recorded in the ancient archives of the temples. The religious and esoteric history of every nation was embedded in symbols; it was never expressed literally in so many words. All the thoughts and emotions, all the learning and knowledge, revealed and acquired, of the early Races, found their pictorial expression in allegory and parable. Why? Because the spoken word has a potency not only unknown to, but even unsuspected and naturally disbelieved in, by the modern “sages.” Because sound and rhythm are closely related to the four Elements of the Ancients; and because such or another vibration in the air is sure to awaken the corresponding [pg 326]Powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case may be. No student was ever allowed to recite historical, religious, or real events of any kind, in so many unmistakable words, lest the Powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such events were narrated only during Initiation, and every student had to record them in corresponding symbols, drawn out of his own mind and examined later by his Master, before they were finally accepted. Thus by degrees was the Chinese Alphabet created, as just before it the hieratic symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language, the characters of which may be read in any language, and which, as just said, is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian alphabet of Thoth, every word has its corresponding symbol in a pictorial form. This language possesses many thousands of such symbol-letters, or logograms, each conveying the meaning of a whole word; for letters proper, or an alphabet as we understand it, do not exist in the Chinese language, any more than they did in the Egyptian, till a far later period.

Thus a Japanese who does not understand one word of Chinese, meeting with a Chinaman who has never heard the language of the former, will communicate in writing with him, and they will understand each other perfectly—because their writing is symbolical.

The explanation of the chief symbols and emblems is now attempted, as Book II, which treats of Anthropogenesis, would be most difficult to understand without a preparatory acquaintance with at least the metaphysical symbols.

Nor would it be just to enter upon an esoteric reading of symbolism, without giving due honour to one who has rendered it the greatest service in this century, by discovering the chief key to ancient Hebrew symbology, strongly interwoven with metrology, one of the keys to the once universal Mystery Language. Mr. Ralston Skinner, of Cincinnati, the author of The Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures, has our thanks. A Mystic and a Kabalist by nature, he has laboured for many years in this direction, and his efforts have certainly been crowned with great success. In his own words:

“Divine origin” does not here mean a revelation from an anthropomorphic God on a mount amidst thunder and lightning; but, as we understand it, a language and a system of science imparted to early mankind by a more advanced mankind, so much higher as to be divine in the sight of that infant humanity: by a “mankind,” in short, from other spheres; an idea which contains nothing supernatural in it, but the acceptance or rejection of which depends upon the degree of conceit and arrogance in the mind of him to whom it is stated. For, if the professors of modern knowledge would only confess that, though they know nothing of the future of the disembodied man—or rather will accept nothing—yet this future may be pregnant with surprises and unexpected revelations to them, once their Egos are rid of their gross bodies—then materialistic unbelief would have fewer chances than it has. Who of them knows, or can tell, what may happen when once the Life-Cycle of this Globe is run down, and our mother Earth herself falls into her last sleep? Who is bold enough to say that the divine Egos of our mankind—at least the elect out of the multitudes passing on to other spheres—will not become in their turn the “divine” instructors of a new mankind generated by them on a new Globe, called to life and activity by the disembodied “principles” of our Earth? All this may have been the experience of the Past, and these strange records lie embedded in the “Mystery Language” of the pre-historic ages, the language now called Symbolism.

Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.

Recent discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest down to the latest, has sprung, not only from a common source of abstract beliefs, but from one universal Esoteric, or Mystery, Language. These scholars hold the key to the universal language of old, and have turned it successfully, though only once, in the hermetically closed door leading to the Hall of Mysteries. The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the sacred Wisdom-Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language—suspected by the Mason Ragon—the language of the Hierophants, which has seven “dialects,” so to speak, each referring, and being specially appropriate, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.

The proof of this lies, to this day, in the extreme difficulty which the Orientalists in general, and the Indianists and Egyptologists in particular, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the Âryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt. This is because they will never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language which was universal and known to all nations alike in days of old, but which is now intelligible only to the few. Like the Arabic figures which are understandable to men of every nation, or like the English word and, which becomes et for the Frenchman, und for the German, and so on, yet which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign &—so all the words of that Mystery Language signified the same thing [pg 330]to each man, of whatever nationality. There have been several men of note who have tried to reëstablish such a universal and philosophical tongue, Delgarme, Wilkins, Leibnitz; but Demaimieux, in his Pasigraphie, is the only one who has proven its possibility. The scheme of Valentinius, called the “Greek Kabalah,” based on the combination of Greek letters, might serve as a model.

The many-sided facets of the Mystery Language have led to the adoption of widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals. It is these, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church; for instance, the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the Resurrection, the seven Capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The Seven Keys to the Mystery Tongue, however, having always been in the keeping of the highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity; it is only the partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of some early Church Fathers—ex-Initiates of the Temples—into the hands of the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery.

It is maintained that India—not confined to its present limits, but including its ancient boundaries—is the only country in the world which still has among her sons Adepts, who have the knowledge of all the seven sub-systems and the key to the entire system. From the fall of Memphis, Egypt began to lose these keys one by one, and Chaldæa had preserved only three in the days of Berosus. As for the Hebrews, in all their writings they show no more than a thorough knowledge of the astronomical, geometrical and numerical systems of symbolizing the human, and especially the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys.

M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of Mariette Bey, writes:

Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed only during the mysteries of Initiation. The Egyptian priests had forgotten much, they altered nothing. The loss of a great part of the primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants, who passed away before they had time to reveal all to their successors, mostly in the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the Secret Doctrine.

Thus, in the Chapter of the Book of the Dead, mentioned by Maspero, we find (1) Osiris saying he is Toom—the creative force in Nature, giving form to all beings, spirits and men, self-generated and self-existent—issued from Noon, the celestial river, called Father-Mother of the Gods, the primordial deity, which is Chaos or the Deep, impregnated by the unseen Spirit. (2) He has found Shoo, the solar force, on the Stairway in the City of the Eight (the two squares of Good and Evil), and he has annihilated the Children of Rebellion, the evil principles in Noon (Chaos). (3) He is the Fire and Water, Noon the Primordial Parent, and he created the Gods out of his Limbs—fourteen Gods (twice seven), seven dark and seven light Gods—the seven Spirits of the Presence of the Christians, and the seven dark Evil Spirits.

(4) He is the Law of Existence and Being, the Bennoo, or Phœnix, the Bird of Resurrection in Eternity, in whom Night follows Day, and Day Night—an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and [pg 332]human reïncarnation. For what else can this mean? “The Wayfarer who crosses millions of years is the name of one, and the Great Green [Primordial Water or Chaos] the name of the other,” one begetting millions of years in succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. (5) He speaks of the Seven Luminous Ones who follow their Lord, Osiris, who confers justice, in Amenti.

All this is now shown to have been the source and origin of Christian dogmas. That which the Jews had from Egypt, through Moses and other Initiates, was confused and distorted enough in later days; but that which the Church got from both, is still more misinterpreted.

Yet the system of the former, in this special department of symbology—the key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of generation and conception—is now proven identical with those ideas in ancient religions which have developed the phallic element of theology. The Jewish system of sacred measures, applied to religious symbols, is the same, so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of Greece, Chaldæa and Egypt, for it was adopted by the Israelites during the centuries of their slavery and captivity among the two latter nations.458 What was this system? It is the intimate conviction of the author of The Source of Measures that: “the Mosaic Books were intended, by a mode of art-speech, to set forth a geometrical and numerical system of exact science, which should serve as an origin of measures.” Piazzi Smyth believes similarly. This system and these measures are found by some scholars to be identical with those used in the construction of the Great Pyramid: but this is only partially so. “The foundation of these measures was the Parker ratio,” says Ralston Skinner, in The Source of Measures.

The author of this very extraordinary work has discovered it, he says, in the use of the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, discovered by John A. Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6561 for diameter, and 20612 for circumference. Furthermore, that this geometrical ratio was the very ancient and probably the divine origin of what have now become, through exoteric handling [pg 333]and practical application, the British linear measures, “the underlying unit of which, viz., the inch, was likewise the base of one of the royal Egyptian cubits, and of the Roman foot.”

But let us see what is said by the opponents of Prof. Piazzi Smyth’s measurements of the Pyramid.

Mr. Petrie seems to deny them, and to have made short work altogether of Piazzi Smyth’s calculations in their Biblical connection. So does Mr. Proctor, the champion “Coincidentalist” for many years past in every question of ancient arts and sciences. Speaking of “the multitude of relations independent of the Pyramid, which have turned up while the Pyramidalists have been endeavouring to connect the Pyramid with the solar system,” he says:

On this Mr. C. Staniland Wake justly observes:

They had it assuredly; and it is on this “knowledge” that the programme of the Mysteries and of the series of Initiations was based: hence, the construction of the Pyramid, the everlasting record and the indestructible symbol of these Mysteries and Initiations on Earth, as the courses of the stars are in Heaven. The cycle of Initiation was a [pg 334]reproduction in miniature of that great series of cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of the Tropical or Sidereal Year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the Sidereal Year (25,868 years), the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the Inner Man has regained the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnation.

Moses, an Initiate into the Egyptian Mystagogy, based the religious mysteries of the new nation which he created, upon the same abstract formulæ derived from this Sidereal Cycle, symbolized by the form and measurements of the Tabernacle, which he is supposed to have constructed in the Wilderness. On these data, the later Jewish High Priests constructed the allegory of Solomon’s Temple—a building which never had a real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is as much a solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif of the Masons, as Ragon has well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical Temple, the symbol of the cycle of Initiation, coincide with those of the Great Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the latter through the Tabernacle of Moses.

That our author has undeniably discovered one and even two of the keys, is fully demonstrated in the work just quoted. One has only to read it, to feel a growing conviction that the hidden meaning of the allegories and parables of both Testaments is now unveiled. But that he owes this discovery far more to his own genius than to Parker and Piazzi Smyth, is also as certain, if not more so. For, as just shown, it is not so certain whether the measures of the Great Pyramid adopted by the Biblical Pyramidalists are beyond suspicion. A proof of this is to be found in the work called The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, by Mr. F. Petrie, and also in other works written quite recently to oppose the said calculations, which their authors call “biassed.” We gather that nearly every one of Piazzi Smyth’s measurements differs from the later and more carefully made measurements of Mr. Petrie, who concludes the Introduction to his work with this sentence:

As regards the late J. A. Parker’s calculation in general, and his [pg 335]third proposition especially, we have consulted some eminent mathematicians, and this is the substance of what they say:

Parker’s reasoning rests on sentimental, rather than on mathematical, considerations, and is logically inconclusive.

Proposition III, namely, that:

—is an illustration of an arbitrary proposition, and cannot safely be relied upon in mathematical reasoning. The same observation applies, even more strongly, to Proposition VII, which states that:

Proposition IX is a remarkable example of faulty reasoning, though it is the one on which Mr. Parker’s Quadrature mainly rests. It states that:

Granting, for the sake of argument, that a triangle can be said to have a radius, in the sense in which we speak of the radius of a circle—for what Parker calls the radius of the triangle, is the radius of a circle inscribed in a triangle, and therefore not the radius of the triangle at all—and granting for the moment the other fanciful and mathematical propositions united in his premisses, why must we conclude that, if the equilateral triangle and circle are opposite in all the elements of their construction, the diameter of any defined circle is in the opposite duplicate ratio of the diameter of any given equivalent triangle? What necessary connection is there between the premisses and the conclusion? The reasoning is of a kind not known in geometry, and would not be accepted by strict mathematicians.

Whether the archaic Esoteric system originated the British inch or not, is of little consequence, however, to the strict and true metaphysician. Nor does Mr. Ralston Skinner’s esoteric reading of the Bible become incorrect, merely because the measurements of the Pyramid may not be found to agree with those of Solomon’s Temple, the [pg 336]Ark of Noah, etc., or because Mr. Parker’s Quadrature of the Circle is rejected by mathematicians. For Mr. Skinner’s reading depends primarily on the Kabalistic methods and the Rabbinical value of the Hebrew letters. But it is extremely important to ascertain whether the measures used in the evolution of the symbolic religion of the Âryans, in the construction of their temples, in the figures given in the Purânas, and especially in their chronology, their astronomical symbols, the duration of the cycles, and other computations, were, or were not, the same as those used in the Biblical measurements and glyphs. For this will prove that the Jews, unless they took their sacred cubit and measurements from the Egyptians—Moses being an Initiate of their Priests—must have got those notions from India. At any rate they passed them on to the early Christians. Hence, it is the Occultists and Kabalists who are the true heirs to the Knowledge, or the Secret Wisdom, which is still found in the Bible; for they alone now understand its real meaning, whereas profane Jews and Christians cling to the husks and dead letter thereof. That it was this system of measures which led to the invention of the God-names Elohim and Jehovah, and to their adaptation to Phallicism, and that Jehovah is a not very flattering copy of Osiris, is now demonstrated by the author of the Source of Measures. But the latter and Mr. Piazzi Smyth both seem to labour under the impression that (a) the priority of the system belongs to the Israelites, the Hebrew language being the divine language, and that (b) this universal language belongs to direct revelation!

The latter hypothesis is correct only in the sense shown in the last paragraph of the preceding Section; but we have yet to agree as to the nature and character of the divine “Revealer.” The former hypothesis as to priority will for the profane, of course depend on (a) the internal and external evidence of the revelation, and (b) on each scholar’s individual preconceptions. This, however, cannot prevent either the Theistic Kabalist, or the Pantheistic Occultist, from believing each in his way; neither of the two convincing the other. The data furnished by history are too meagre and unsatisfactory for either of them to prove to the sceptic which of them is right.

On the other hand, the proofs afforded by tradition are too constantly rejected for us to hope to settle the question in our present age. Meanwhile, Materialistic Science will be laughing at both Kabalists and Occultists indifferently. But the vexed question of priority once laid [pg 337]aside, Science, in its departments of Philology and Comparative Religion, will find itself finally taken to task, and be compelled to admit the common claim.

One by one the claims become admitted, as one Scientist after another is compelled to recognize the facts given out from the Secret Doctrine; though he rarely, if ever, recognizes that he has been anticipated in his statements. Thus, in the palmy days of Mr. Piazzi Smyth’s authority on the Pyramid of Gizeh, his theory was, that the porphyry sarcophagus of the King’s Chamber was “the unit of measure for the two most enlightened nations of the earth, England and America,” and was no better than a “corn-bin.” This was vehemently denied by us in Isis Unveiled, which had just been published at that time. Then the New York press arose in arms (the Sun and the World newspapers chiefly) against our presuming to correct or find fault with such a star of learning. In that work, we had said, that Herodotus, when treating of that Pyramid:

Our statement was laughed at in those days. We were accused of having got our ideas from the “craze” of Shaw, an English writer who had maintained that the sarcophagus had been used for the celebration of the Mysteries of Osiris, although we had never heard of that writer. And now, six or seven years later (1882), this is what Mr. Staniland Wake writes:

Had Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the narrow upward passage leading to the King’s Chamber had a “narrow gate” indeed; the same “strait gate” which “leadeth unto [pg 338]life,” or the new spiritual re-birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew;463 and that it was of this gate in the Initiation Temple, that the writer, who recorded the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking.

Thus the greatest scholars of Science, instead of pooh-poohing that supposed “farrago of absurd fiction and superstitions,” as the Brâhmanical literature is generally termed, will endeavour to learn the symbolical universal language, with its numerical and geometrical keys. But here, again, they will hardly be successful, if they share the belief that the Jewish Kabalistic system contains the key to the whole mystery; for it does not. Nor does any other Scripture at present possess it in its entirety, since even the Vedas are not complete. Every old religion is but a chapter or two of the entire volume of archaic primeval mysteries; Eastern Occultism alone being able to boast that it is in possession of the full secret, with its seven keys. Comparisons will be instituted, and as much as possible will be explained in this work; the rest is left to the student’s personal intuition. In saying that Eastern Occultism has the secret, it is not as if a “complete” or even an approximate knowledge was claimed by the writer, which would be absurd. What I know, I give out; that which I cannot explain, the student must find out for himself.

But though we may suppose that the entire cycle of the universal Mystery Language will not be mastered for centuries to come, yet even the little which has hitherto been discovered in the Bible by some scholars, is quite sufficient to demonstrate the claim—mathematically. As Judaism availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and as these two keys have now been re-discovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual speculation and hypothesis, least of all of “coincidence,” but one of a correct reading of the Biblical texts, just as anyone acquainted with arithmetic reads and verifies an addition sum. In fact, all we have said in Isis Unveiled is now found corroborated in the Egyptian Mystery, or The Source of Measures, by such readings of the Bible with the numerical and geometrical keys.

A few years longer, and this system will kill the dead-letter reading of the Bible, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing the dogmas in their real, naked meaning. And then this undeniable meaning, however incomplete, will unveil the mystery of Being, and will, moreover, entirely change the modern scientific systems of Anthropology, [pg 339]Ethnology and especially that of Chronology. The element of Phallicism, found in every God-name and narrative in the Old, and to some degree in the New, Testament, may also in time considerably change modern materialistic views on Biology and Physiology.

Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of Nature and man will, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, unveil the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of thought. The so-called phallic symbols have become offensive only because of the element of materiality and animality in them. In the beginning, such symbols were but natural, as they originated with the archaic races, which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry, were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the separation of the sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn. If later races, especially the “chosen people,” have degraded them, this does not affect the origin of the symbols. This little Semitic tribe—one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the fourth and fifth sub-races, the Mongolo-Turanian and the so-called Indo-European, after the sinking of the great Continent—could only accept its symbology in the spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived. And, perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, the symbology was not so crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. To take an instance, the glyph of Pharaoh’s daughter (the woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby-boy found floating therein in the ark of rushes, was not primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It was anticipated in the fragments found on the Babylonian tiles, in the story of King Sargon, who lived far earlier than Moses.

In his Assyrian Antiquities,464 Mr. George Smith says: “In the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik, I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon … published in my translation in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology.”465 The capital of Sargon the Babylonian Moses, “was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semites Akkad—mentioned in Genesis466 as the capital of Nimrod…. Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon.”467 Another strange “coincidence” is found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses—Zipporah.468 Of course the story is a [pg 340]clever addition by Ezra, who could not have been ignorant of the original. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows:

And now let us compare the Bible narrative in Exodus:

Mr. G. Smith then continues:

But now that Professor Sayce has had the courage to push back the dates of the Chaldean and Assyrian Kings by two thousand years more, Sargon must have preceded Moses by 2,000 years at the least. The confession is suggestive, but the figures lack a cypher or two.

Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly, that which gives us the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by him while at Babylon, and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but was re-fabricated from old materials by Ezra.

And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean and Sabæan phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah.

All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric [pg 341]works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of Biblical glyphs and numbers, as suggested by astronomical observations—Astronomy and Theology being closely connected—is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes—the last term having now passed even into our modern Botany—are known in Astronomy as Sextiles, Quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and æons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence, the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a square, a pentagon, and a hexagon, and other plane figures with various sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical symbology to be as old as the world.

Starting from this, it becomes easy to understand how Nature herself, even without the help of their divine instructors, could have taught primeval mankind the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol-language.471 Hence we find numbers and figures used as an expression and a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever the same, with certain variations only, arising from the first figures. Thus the evolution and correlation of the mysteries of Kosmos, of its growth and development—spiritual and physical, abstract and concrete—were first recorded in geometrical changes of shape. Every Cosmogony began with a circle, a point, a triangle and a square, up to number 9, when it was synthesized by the first line and a circle—the Pythagorean mystic Decad, the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire Kosmos; mysteries recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindû system than elsewhere, for him who can understand its mystic language. The numbers 3 and 4, in their combination 7, and also 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the very corner-stones of Occult Cosmogonies. This Decad and its thousand combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes it in the caves and rock-cut temples of Hindûstan and [pg 342]Central Asia; in the Pyramids and Lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Ozimandyas; in the mounds of the snow-capped Caucasian fastnesses; in the ruins of Palenque; in Easter Island; everywhere whither the foot of ancient man has ever journeyed. The 3 and the 4, the triangle and the square, or the universal male and female glyphs, showing the first aspect of the evolving deity, are stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in the Egyptian Crux Ansata. As well expressed by the author of The Source of Measures:

The Stanzas show the cross and these numbers playing a prominent part in archaic Cosmogony. Meanwhile we may profit by the evidence collected by the same author, in the section which he rightly calls the “Primordial Vestiges of these Symbols,” to show the identity of symbols and their esoteric meaning all over the globe.

Identical glyphs, numbers and esoteric symbols are found in Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Easter Island, India, Chaldæa, and Central Asia—Crucified Men, and symbols of the evolution of races from Gods—and yet behold Science repudiating the idea of a human race other than one made in our image; Theology clinging to its 6,000 years of Creation; Anthropology teaching our descent from the ape; and the Clergy tracing it from Adam 4,004 years b.c.!!

Shall one, for fear of incurring the penalty of being called a superstitious fool, and even a liar, abstain from furnishing proofs—as good as any existent—only because that day, when all the Seven Keys shall be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in the department of symbology, has not yet dawned? In the face of the crushing discoveries of Geology and Anthropology with regard to the antiquity of man, shall we—in order to avoid the usual penalty that [pg 344]awaits every one who strays outside the beaten paths of either Theology or Materialism—hold to the 6,000 years and “special creation” or accept in submissive admiration our genealogy and descent from the ape? Not so, as long as it is known that the Secret Records hold the said Seven Keys to the mystery of the genesis of man. Faulty, materialistic, and biassed as the scientific theories may be, they are a thousand times nearer the truth than the vagaries of Theology. The latter are in their death agony for every one but the most uncompromising bigot and fanatic. Or rather, some of its defenders must have lost their reason. For what can one think when, in the face of the dead-letter absurdities of the Bible, these are still publicly supported, and as fiercely as ever, and one finds the Theologians maintaining that though “the Scriptures carefully refrain [?] from making any direct contribution to scientific knowledge, they have never stumbled upon any statement which will not abide the light of Advancing Science”!!!474

Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of Science, or to cut ourselves adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, and being fully prepared to bear the consequences.

But let us see whether Science, in its materialistic speculations, and even Theology, in its death-rattle and supreme struggle to reconcile the 6,000 years since Adam with Sir Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, do not themselves unconsciously give us a helping hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its most learned votaries, finds it already impossible to account for the varieties in the human race, unless the hypothesis of the creation of several Adams be accepted. They speak of “a white Adam and a black Adam, a red Adam and a yellow Adam.”475 Were they Hindûs enumerating the rebirths of Vâmadeva, from the Linga Purâna, they could say little more. For, enumerating the repeated births of Shiva, they show him in one Kalpa of a white complexion, in another of a black colour, in still another of a red colour, after which the Kumâra becomes “four youths of a yellow colour.” This strange “coincidence,” as Mr. Proctor would say, speaks only in favour of scientific intuition, as Shiva-Kumâra simply represents, allegorically, the human Races during the genesis of man. But it has led to another intuitional phenomenon—in [pg 345]the theological ranks this time. The unknown author of Primeval Man, in a desperate effort to screen the Divine Revelation from the merciless and eloquent discoveries of Geology and Anthropology, remarking that “it would be unfortunate if the defenders of the Bible should be driven into the position of either surrendering the inspiration of Scripture, or denying the conclusions of Geologists”—finds a compromise. Nay, he devotes a thick volume to proving this fact: “Adam was not the first man476 created upon this earth.” The exhumed relics of pre-Adamic man, “instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity.”477 How so? In the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth “we [the clergy] are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies without attempting to coërce them by the fear of heresy.” This must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir Charles Lyell!

Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that Adam is the first man of our race? It was the Satanic Race and Races! “Satan [was] never in heaven, Angels and men [being] one species.” It was the pre-Adamic race of “Angels that sinned.” Satan was the “first prince of this world,” we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he remained on earth as a disembodied Spirit, and tempted Adam and Eve.

The retrospective glance at this Satanic “blushing bride,” in the days of Satan’s innocence, does not lose in poetry as it gains in originality. Quite the reverse. The modern Christian bride—who does not often blush now-a-days before her gay modern lovers—might even derive a moral lesson from this daughter of Satan, created in the exuberant fancy of her first human biographer. These pictures—and to appreciate them at their true value they must be examined in the volume that describes them—are all suggested with a view to reconcile the infallibility of revealed Scripture with Sir Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, and other damaging scientific works. But this does not prevent truth and fact appearing at the foundation of these vagaries, which the author has not dared to sign with his own, or even a borrowed, name. For, his pre-Adamic Races—not Satanic but simply Atlantean, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter—are mentioned in the Bible, if read esoterically, as they are in the Secret Doctrine. The Seven Keys open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven great Root-Races, and of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and even the geology, of Esotericism will surely be rejected by Science, just as much as the Satanic and pre-Adamic Races, yet if the Scientists, having no other way out of their difficulties, are compelled to choose between the two, we feel certain that—Scripture notwithstanding—once the Mystery Language is approximately mastered, it is the archaic teaching that will be accepted.

Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.

Ether—this hypothetical Proteus, one of the “representative fictions” of Modern Science, which, nevertheless, was so long accepted—is one of the lower “principles” of what we call Primordial Substance (Âkâsha, in Sanskrit), one of the dreams of old, which has now again become the dream of Modern Science. It is the greatest, as it is the boldest, of the surviving speculations of ancient philosophers. For the Occultists, however, both Ether and the Primordial Substance are realities. To put it plainly, Ether is the Astral Light, and the Primordial Substance is Âkâsha, the Upâdhi of Divine Thought.

In modern language, the latter would be better named Cosmic Ideation, Spirit; the former, Cosmic Substance, Matter. These, the Alpha and the Omega of Being, are but the two facets of the one Absolute Existence. The latter was never addressed, or even mentioned, by any name in antiquity, except in allegory. In the oldest Âryan race, the Hindû, the worship of the intellectual classes at no time ever consisted in an adoration of marvellous form and art, however fervent, as with the Greeks; an adoration, which led later on to anthropomorphism. But while the Greek philosopher adored form, and the [pg 348]Hindû sage alone “perceived the true relation of earthly beauty and eternal truth”—the uneducated of every nation understood neither, at any time.

They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man’s own intellectual evolution. So true is it that the noblest ideal to which the religious spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch! The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the Ancients in relation to this most metaphysical subject. Otherwise—outside such Initiation—for every thinker there will be a “thus far shalt thou go and no farther” mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as unmistakably as there is one for the progress of any nation or race in its cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of Initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped, and remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic, as well as realistic, thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural product of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of each are but the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest flights of modern Western metaphysics have fallen far short of the truth. Much of current Agnostic speculation on the existence of the “First Cause” is little better than veiled Materialism—the terminology alone being different. Even so great a thinker as Mr. Herbert Spencer speaks of the “Unknowable” occasionally in terms that demonstrate the lethal influence of materialistic thought, which, like the deadly Sirocco, has withered and blighted all current ontological speculation.

For instance, when he terms the “First Cause” the “Unknowable,” a “power manifesting through phenomena,” and “an infinite eternal energy,” it is clear that he has grasped solely the physical aspect of the Mystery of Being—the Energies of Cosmic Substance only. The coeternal aspect of the One Reality, Cosmic Ideation, is absolutely omitted from consideration, and as to its Noumenon, it seems non-existent in the mind of the great thinker. Without doubt, this one-sided mode of dealing with the problem is due largely to the pernicious Western practice of subordinating Consciousness to Matter, or regarding it as a “bye-product” of molecular motion.

From the early ages of the Fourth Race, when Spirit alone was worshipped and the Mystery was made manifest, down to the last palmy days of Grecian art, at the dawn of Christianity, the Hellenes alone had dared publicly to raise an altar to the “Unknown God.” Whatever St. Paul may have had in his profound mind, when declaring to the Athenians that this “Unknown,” which they ignorantly worshipped, was the true God announced by himself—that Deity was not “Jehovah,” nor was he “the maker of the world and all things.” For it is not the “God of Israel” but the “Unknown” of the ancient and modern Pantheist that “dwelleth not in temples made with hands.”480

Divine Thought cannot be defined, nor can its meaning be explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance, in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who can do so. To say this, after having defined it as the Unknown Deity, abstract, impersonal, sexless, which must be placed at the root of every Cosmogony and its subsequent evolution, is equivalent to saying nothing at all. It is like attempting a transcendental equation of conditions, having in hand for deducing the true value of its terms only a number of unknown quantities. Its place is found in the old primitive symbolic charts, in which, as already shown, it is represented by a boundless darkness, on the ground of which appears the first central point in white—thus symbolizing coëval and coëternal Spirit-Matter making its appearance in the phenomenal world, before its first differentiation. When “the One becomes Two,” it may then be referred to as Spirit and Matter. To “Spirit” is referable every manifestation of Consciousness, reflective or direct, and of “unconscious purposiveness”—to adopt a modern expression used in Western philosophy, so-called—as evidenced in the Vital Principle, and Nature’s submission to the majestic sequence of immutable Law. “Matter” must be regarded as objectivity in its purest abstraction, the self-existing basis, whose septenary manvantaric differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the phenomena of each phase of conscious existence. During the period of Universal Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non-existent; and the variously differentiated states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again into the primary state of abstract potential objectivity.

Manvantaric impulse commences with the reäwakening of Cosmic Ideation, the Universal Mind, concurrently with, and parallel to, the primary emergence of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvantaric [pg 350]vehicle of the former—from its undifferentiated pralayic state. Then, Absolute Wisdom mirrors itself in its Ideation; which, by a transcendental process, superior to and incomprehensible by human Consciousness, results in Cosmic Energy, Fohat. Thrilling through the bosom of inert Substance, Fohat impels it to activity, and guides its primary differentiations on all the seven planes of Cosmic Consciousness. There are thus Seven Protyles—as they are now called, whereas Âryan antiquity named them the Seven Prakritis, or Natures—serving, severally, as the relatively homogeneous bases, which in the course of the increasing heterogeneity, in the evolution of the Universe, differentiate into the marvellous complexity presented by phenomena on the planes of perception. The term “relatively” is used designedly, because the very existence of such a process, resulting in the primary segregations of undifferentiated Cosmic Substance into its septenary bases of evolution, compels us to regard the Protyle of each plane as only a mediate phase assumed by Substance in its passage from abstract, into full objectivity. The term Protyle is due to Mr. Crookes, the eminent Chemist, who has given that name to pre-matter, if one may so call primordial and purely homogeneous substance, suspected, if not actually yet found, by Science in the ultimate composition of the atom. But the incipient segregation of primordial matter into atoms and molecules takes its rise subsequent to the evolution of our Seven Protyles. It is the last of these that Mr. Crookes is in search of, having recently detected the possibility of its existence on our plane.

Cosmic Ideation is said to be non-existent during pralayic periods, for the simple reason that there is no one, and nothing, to perceive its effects. There can be no manifestation of consciousness, semi-consciousness, or even “unconscious purposiveness,” except through a vehicle of Matter; that is to say, on this our plane, wherein human consciousness, in its normal state, cannot soar beyond what is known as transcendental metaphysics, it is only through some molecular aggregation, or fabric, that Spirit wells up in a stream of individual or sub-conscious subjectivity. And as Matter existing apart from perception is a mere abstraction, both of these aspects of the Absolute—Cosmic Substance and Cosmic Ideation—are mutually interdependent. In strict accuracy, to avoid confusion and misconception, the term “Matter” ought to be applied to the aggregate of objects of possible perception, and the term “Substance” to Noumena; for inasmuch as the phenomena of our plane are the creations of the perceiving Ego—the [pg 351]modifications of its own subjectivity—all the “states of matter representing the aggregate of perceived objects” can have but a relative and purely phenomenal existence for the children of our plane. As the modern Idealists would say, the coöperation of Subject and Object results in the sense-object, or phenomenon.

But this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is the same on all other planes; that the coöperation of the two, on the planes of their septenary differentiation, results in a septenary aggregate of phenomena which are likewise non-existent per se, though concrete realities for the Entities of whose experience they form a part, in the same manner as the rocks and rivers around us are real from the stand-point of a Physicist, though unreal illusions of sense from that of the Metaphysician. It would be an error to say, or even conceive, such a thing. From the stand-point of the highest metaphysics, the whole Universe, Gods included, is an Illusion (Mâyâ). But the illusion of him who is in himself an illusion differs on every plane of consciousness; and we have no more right to dogmatize about the possible nature of the perceptive faculties of an Ego on, say, the sixth plane, than we have to identify our perceptions with, or make them a standard for, those of an ant, in its mode of consciousness. Cosmic Ideation focussed in a Principle, or Upâdhi (Basis), results as the consciousness of the individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of the Upâdhi. For instance, through that known as Manas, it wells up as Mind-Consciousness; through the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state of matter) of Buddhi—resting on the experience of Manas as its Basis—as a stream of Spiritual Intuition.

The pure Object apart from consciousness is unknown to us, while living on the plane of our three-dimensional world, for we know only the mental states it excites in the perceiving Ego. And, so long as the contrast of Subject and Object endures—to wit, so long as we enjoy our five senses and no more, and do not know how to divorce our all-perceiving Ego from the thraldom of these senses—so long will it be impossible for the personal Ego to break through the barrier which separates it from a knowledge of “things in themselves,” or Substance.

That Ego, progressing in an arc of ascending subjectivity, must exhaust the experience of every plane. But not till the Unit is merged in the All, whether on this or any other plane, and Subject and Object alike vanish in the absolute negation of the Nirvânic State—negation, again, only from our plane—not until then, is scaled that peak of Omniscience, [pg 352]the Knowledge of Things-in-themselves, and the solution of the yet more awful riddle approached, before which even the highest Dhyân Chohan must bow in silence and ignorance—the Unspeakable Mystery of that which is called by the Vedântins, Parabrahman.

Therefore, such being the case, all those who have sought to give a name to the Incognizable Principle have simply degraded it. Even to speak of Cosmic Ideation—save in its phenomenal aspect—is like trying to bottle up primordial Chaos, or to put a printed label on Eternity.

What, then, is the “Primordial Substance,” that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which was the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation? Even that is the All of manifested Nature and—nothing to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day, the ever grasp-eluding Proteus in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it is in every molecule of that which, in our illusion and ignorance, we regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a thought, an emotion. In short, it is the Upâdhi, or Vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening sentences of Genesis, and in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the Purânas of India, and in the Book of the Dead of Egypt; everywhere it opens the cycle of manifestation. It is termed Chaos, and the Face of the Waters, incubated by the Spirit, proceeding from the Unknown, whatever that Spirit’s name may be.

The authors of the Sacred Scriptures in India go deeper into the origin of the evolution of things than does Thales or Job, for they say:

“From This, from this same Self, was the Ether produced,” says the Veda.481

It thus becomes evident that it is not this Ether—sprung at the fourth remove from an emanation of “Intelligence, associated with Ignorance”—which is the high Principle, the deific Entity worshipped by the Greeks and Latins under the name of “Pater, Omnipotens [pg 353]Æther,” and “Magnus Æther,” in its collective aggregate. The septenary gradation, and the innumerable sub-divisions and differences, made by the Ancients between the powers of Ether collectively—from its outward fringe of effects, with which our Science is so familiar, up to the “Imponderable Substance,” once admitted as the “Ether of Space,” but now about to be rejected—have been ever a vexing riddle for every branch of knowledge. The Mythologists and Symbologists of our day, confused by this incomprehensible glorification on the one hand, and degradation on the other, of the same deified Entity and in the same religious systems, are often driven to the most ludicrous mistakes. The Church, firm as a rock in each and all of her early errors of interpretation, has made of Ether the abode of her Satanic legions. The whole Hierarchy of the “Fallen” Angels is there; Cosmocratores, the “World Bearers,” according to Bossuet; Mundi Tenentes, the “World Holders,” as Tertullian calls them; Mundi Domini, “World Dominations,” or rather Dominators; the Curbati, or “Curved,” etc.; thus making of the stars and celestial orbs in their courses—Devils!

For it is thus that the Church has interpreted the verse: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.”482 Further, St. Paul mentions the spiritual malices (“wickedness,” in English texts), in the Air—spiritualia nequitiæ cœlestibus—the Latin texts giving various names to these “malices,” the innocent “Elementals.” But the Church is right this time, though wrong in calling them all Devils. The Astral Light, or lower Ether, is full of conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious entities; only the church has less power over them than over invisible microbes or mosquitoes.

The difference made between the seven states of Ether—itself one of the Seven Cosmic Principles, whereas the Æther of the ancients is Universal Fire—may be seen in the injunctions by Zoroaster and Psellus, respectively. The former said: “Consult it only when it is without form or figure”—absque formâ et figurâ—which means, without flames or burning coals. “When it has a form, heed it not”; teaches Psellus, “but when it is formless, obey it, for it is then sacred fire, and all it will reveal thee shall be true.”483 This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of Âkâsha, has in its turn several aspects or “principles.”

All the ancient nations deified Æther in its imponderable aspect and [pg 354]potency. Virgil calls Jupiter, Pater Omnipotens Æther, and the “Great Æther.”484 The Hindûs have also placed it among their deities, under the name of Âkâsha, the synthesis of Ether. And the author of the Homœomerian System of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless Æther, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned—an Occult teaching.

It thus becomes clear that it is from Æther, in its highest synthetic aspect, once anthropomorphized, that sprang the first idea of a personal Creative Deity. With the philosophical Hindûs the Elements are tâmasa, i.e., “unenlightened by intellect, which they obscure.”

We have now to exhaust the question of the mystical meaning of Primordial Chaos and of the Root-Principle, and show how they were connected in the ancient philosophies with Âkâsha, incorrectly translated Ether, and also with Mâyâ, Illusion, of which Îshvara is the male aspect. We shall speak further on of the Intelligent Principle, or rather of the invisible immaterial properties, in the visible and material elements, that “sprang from the Primordial Chaos.”

For “what is the primordial Chaos but Æther?”—it is asked, in Isis Unveiled. Not the modern Ether; not such as is recognized now, but such as was known to the ancient philosophers long before the time of Moses—Æther, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the germs of universal creation. The Upper Æther, or Âkâsha, is the Celestial Virgin and Mother of every existing form and being, from whose bosom, as soon as “incubated” by the Divine Spirit, are called into existence Matter and Life, Force and Action. Æther is the Aditi of the Hindûs, and it is Âkâsha. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical action are so little understood even now, that fresh facts are constantly widening the range of our knowledge. Who knows where ends the power of this protean giant—Æther; or whence its mysterious origin? Who, we mean, that denies the Spirit that works in it, and evolves out of it all visible forms?

It will be an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge among the Ancients of those sciences, which have, in our days, allied themselves in support of the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that these Ancients were far better acquainted with the fact of evolution [pg 355]itself, embracing both its physical and spiritual aspects, than we are now.

If we turn to the Ordinances of Manu, we find the prototype of all these ideas. Mostly lost, to the Western world, in their original form, disfigured by later interpolations and additions, they have, nevertheless, preserved quite enough of their ancient spirit to show its character.

“Removing the darkness, the Self-existent Lord [Vishnu, Nârâyana, etc.] became manifest; and, wishing to produce beings from his Essence, created, in the beginning, water alone. In that he cast seed. That became a Golden Egg.”

Whence this Self-existent Lord? It is called This, and is spoken of as “Darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep.” Having dwelt in that Egg for a whole Divine Year, he “who is called in the world Brahmâ,” splits that Egg in two, and from the upper portion he forms the heaven, from the lower the earth, and from the middle the sky and “the perpetual place of waters.”486

Directly following these verses, however, there is something more important for us, as it entirely corroborates our Esoteric teachings. From verse 14 to 36, evolution is given in the order described in the Esoteric Philosophy. This cannot be easily gainsaid. Even Medhâtithi, the son of Virasvâmin, and the author of the Commentary, the Manubhâsya, whose date, according to the western Orientalists, is 1,000 a.d., helps us with his remarks to the elucidation of the truth. He shows himself either unwilling to give out more, because he knew what had to be kept from the profane, or else he was really puzzled. Still, what he does give out makes the septenary principle in man and Nature plain enough.

Let us begin with Chapter I of the Ordinances, or “Laws,” after the Self-existent Lord, the Unmanifesting Logos of the Unknown “Darkness,” [pg 356]becomes manifested in the Golden Egg. It is from this Egg, from

11. “That which is the undiscrete [undifferentiated] Cause, eternal, which is and is not, from It issued that Male who is called in the world Brahmâ.”

Here, as in all genuine philosophical systems, we find even the “Egg,” or the Circle, or Zero, Boundless Infinity, referred to as “It,”487 and Brahmâ, the first Unit only, referred to as the “Male” God, i.e., the fructifying Principle. It is [circle split by vertical line], or 10 (ten), the Decad. On the plane of the Septenary, or our World, only, it is called Brahmâ. On that of the Unified Decad, in the realm of Reality, this male Brahmâ is an Illusion.

14. “From Self (Âtmanah) he created Mind, which is and is not; and from Mind, Ego-ism [Self-Consciousness] (a), the ruler (b), the Lord.”

(a) The Mind is Manas. Medhâtithi, the commentator, justly observes here that it is the reverse of this, and shows already interpolation and rearranging; for it is Manas that springs from Ahamkâra or (Universal) Self-Consciousness, as Manas in the microcosm springs from Mahat, or Mahâ-Buddhi (Buddhi, in man). For Manas is dual. As shown and translated by Colebrooke, “Mind, serving both for sense and action, is an organ by affinity, being cognate with the rest”;488 “the rest” here meaning that Manas, our Fifth Principle (the fifth, because the body was named the first, which is the reverse of the true philosophical order), is in affinity both with Âtmâ-Buddhi and with the lower Four Principles. Hence, our teaching: namely, that Manas follows Âtmâ-Buddhi to Devachan, and that the Lower Manas, that is to say, the dregs or residue of Manas, remains with Kâma Rûpa, in Limbus, or Kâma Loka, the abode of the “Shells.”

(b) Medhâtithi translates this as “the one conscious of the I,” or Ego, not “the ruler,” as do the Orientalists. Thus also they translate the following shloka:

16. “He also, having made the subtile parts of those six [the great Self and the five organs of sense], of unmeasured brightness, to enter into the elements of self (âtmamâtrâsu), created all beings.”

When, according to Medhâtithi, it ought to read mâtrâbhih instead of âtmamâtrâsu, and thus would read:

“He having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured brightness, by elements of self, created all beings.”

The latter reading must be the correct one, since He, the Self, is what we call Âtmâ, and thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of the “six.” Such is also the opinion of the editor of the Mânava Dharma Shâstra, who seems to have intuitionally entered far deeper into the spirit of the philosophy than has the translator, the late Dr. Burnell; for he hesitates little between the text of Kullûka Bhatta and the commentary of Medhâtithi. Rejecting the tanmâtra, or subtile elements, and the âtmamâtra of Kullûka Bhatta, he says, applying the principles to the Cosmic Self:

“The six appear rather to be the manas plus the five principles of ether, air, fire, water, earth; ‘having united five portions of those six with the spiritual element [the seventh] he (thus) created all existing things;’ … âtmamâtra is therefore the spiritual atom as opposed to the elementary, not reflexive ‘elements of himself’.”

Thus he corrects the translation of verse 17:

“As the subtile elements of bodily forms of this One depend on these six, so the wise call his form Sharîra.”

And he adds that “elements” mean here portions, or parts (or principles), which reading is borne out by verse 19, which says:

“This non-eternal (Universe) arises then from the Eternal, by means of the subtile elements of forms of those seven very glorious Principles (Purusha).”

Commenting upon which emendation of Medhâtithi, the editor remarks: “the five elements plus mind [Manas] and self-consciousness [Ahamkâra]489 are probably meant; ‘subtile elements,’ as before [meaning] ‘fine portions of form’ [or principles].” Verse 20 shows this, when saying of these five elements, or “fine portions of form” (Rûpa plus Manas and Self-Consciousness) that they constitute the “Seven Purusha,” or Principles, called in the Purânas the “Seven Prakritis.”

Moreover, these “five elements,” or “five portions,” are spoken of in verse 27 as “those which are called the atomic destructible portions,” and which are, therefore, “distinct from the atoms of the Nyâya.”

This creative Brahmâ, issuing from the Mundane or Golden Egg, unites in himself both the male and female principles. He is, in short, [pg 358]the same as all the creative Protologoi. Of Brahmâ, however, it could not be said, as of Dionysos, “πρωτόγονον διφυῆ τρίγονον βακχεῖον Ἅνακτα Ἄγριον ἀρρητὸν κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμορφον”—a lunar Jehovah, Bacchus truly, with David dancing nude before his symbol in the ark—because no licentious Dionysia were ever established in his name and honour. All such public worship was exoteric, and the great universal symbols were distorted universally, as those of Krishna are now by the Vallabâchâryas of Bombay, the followers of the “infant” God. But are these popular Gods the true Deity? Are they the apex and synthesis of the sevenfold creation, man included? Impossible! Each and all are one of the rungs of that septenary ladder of Divine Consciousness, Pagan as Christian. Ain Suph is said to manifest through the Seven Letters of the Name of Jehovah who, having usurped the place of the Unknown Limitless, was given by his devotees his Seven Angels of the Presence—his Seven Principles. But, indeed, they are mentioned in almost every school. In the pure Sânkhya philosophy Mahat, Ahamkâra and the five Tanmâtras are called the Seven Prakritis, or Natures, and are counted from Mahâ-Buddhi, or Mahat, down to Earth.490

Nevertheless, however disfigured by Ezra for Rabbinical purposes is the original Elohistic version, however repulsive at times is even the esoteric meaning in the Hebrew scrolls, far more so indeed than its outward veil or cloaking may be—once the Jehovistic portions are eliminated, the Mosaic Books are found full of purely Occult and priceless knowledge, especially in the first six chapters.

Read by the aid of the Kabalah, one finds a matchless temple of Occult truths, a well of deeply concealed beauty, hidden under a structure, the visible architecture of which, notwithstanding its apparent symmetry, is unable to stand the criticism of cold reason, or to reveal the age of its hidden truth, for it belongs to all the ages. There is more Wisdom concealed under the exoteric fables of the Purânas and Bible than in all the exoteric facts and science in the literature of the world, and more Occult true Science, than there is of exact knowledge in all the academies. Or, in plainer and stronger language, there is as much esoteric wisdom in some portions of the exoteric Purânas and Pentateuch, as there is of nonsense and of designedly childish fancy, when read only in the dead-letter and murderous interpretations of the great dogmatic religions, and especially of their sects.

Let anyone read the first verses of Genesis and reflect upon them. There, “God” commands another “God,” who does his bidding—even in the cautious English Protestant authorized translation of King James I.

In the “beginning”—the Hebrew language having no word to express the idea of eternity491—“God” fashions the Heaven and the Earth; and the latter is “without form and void,” while the former is in fact not Heaven, but the “Deep,” Chaos, with darkness upon its face.492

“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters,” or the Great Deep of the Infinite Space. And this Spirit is Nârâyana, or Vishnu.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament….” And “God,” the second, obeyed and “made the firmament.” “And God said let there be light.” And “there was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but, as in the Kabalah, the androgyne Adam Kadmon, or Sephira (Spiritual Light), for they are one; or, according to the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the secondary Angels, the first being the Elohim, who are the aggregate of that “fashioning” God. For to whom are those words of command addressed? And who is it who commands? That which commands is the Eternal Law, and he who obeys, the Elohim, the known quantity acting in and with x, or the coëfficient of the unknown quantity, the Forces of the One Force. All this is Occultism, and is found in the archaic Stanzas. It is perfectly immaterial whether we call these “Forces” the Dhyân Chohans, or the Auphanim as Ezekiel does.

“The one Universal Light, which to man is Darkness, is ever existent,” says the Chaldean Book of Numbers. From it proceeds periodically the Energy, which is reflected in the Deep, or Chaos, the store-house of future Worlds, and, once awakened, stirs up and fructifies the latent Forces, which are the ever present eternal potentialities [pg 360]in it. Then awake anew the Brahmâs and Buddhas—the co-eternal Forces—and a new Universe springs into being.

In the Sepher Yetzirah, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it, the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.493 “One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be Its name, which liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.”494 And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Christian Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air (the Father), the creative Element; and then number Three, Water (the Mother), proceeded from Air; Ether or Fire completes the Mystic Four, the Arbo-al.495 When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a Point [the Primordial Point, or the first Sephira, Air, or Holy Ghost,] shaped into a sacred Form, [the Ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly Man,] and covered it with a rich and splendid Garment, that is the World.496

“He maketh the Wind His messengers, flaming Fire His servants”;497 says the Yetzirah, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerized Elements, and that Spirit permeates every atom in Kosmos.

Paul calls the invisible Cosmic Beings the “Elements.” But now the Elements are degraded into, and limited to, atoms of which nothing is known so far, and which are only “children of necessity,” as is Ether also. As we said in Isis Unveiled:

Meanwhile there rages a war in modern Chemistry about terms. We are denied the right to call these substances “chemical elements,” for these are not “primordial principles of self-existing essences, out of which the universe was fashioned,” according to Plato. Such ideas associated with the word “element” were good enough for the old Greek Philosophy, but Modern Science rejects them; for, as Mr. [pg 361]William Crookes says: “they are unfortunate terms,” and experimental Science will have “nothing to do with any kind of essences except those which it can see, smell, or taste. It leaves others to the metaphysicians….” We must feel grateful even for so much!

This “Primordial Substance” is called by some Chaos. Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World, after it had been impregnated by the Spirit of that which broods over the Primeval Waters, or Chaos. It is by being reflected in it, say the Kabalists, that the brooding Principle “created” the phantasmagoria of a visible, manifested Universe. Chaos before, Ether after this “reflection,” it is still the Deity that pervades Space and all things. It is the invisible, imponderable Spirit of things, and the invisible, but only too tangible, fluid that radiates from the fingers of the healthy magnetizer, for it is Vital Electricity—Life itself. Called in derision, by the Marquis de Mirville, the “Nebulous Almighty,” it is to this day termed by the Theurgists and Occultists the “Living Fire”; and there is not a Hindû who practises at dawn a certain kind of meditation but knows its effects. It is the “Spirit of Light” and Magnes. As truly expressed by an opponent, Magus and Magnes are two branches growing from the same trunk and shooting forth the same resultants. And in this appellation of “Living Fire” we may also discover the meaning of the puzzling sentence in the Zend Avesta: there is “a Fire that gives knowledge of the future, science and amiable speech”; that is to say, which develops an extraordinary eloquence in the sibyl, the sensitive, and even some orators. Writing upon this subject, in Isis Unveiled, we said:

We now add—it is all this and much more.

This “Fire” is spoken of in all the Hindû Sacred Books, as also in the Kabalistic works. The Zohar explains it as the “White Hidden Fire, in the Risha Havurah,” the White Head, whose Will causes the fiery fluid to flow in 370 currents in every direction of the Universe. It is identical with the “Serpent that runs with 370 leaps” of the Siphrah Dtzenioutha, the Serpent, which, when the “Perfect Man,” the Metatron, is raised, that is to say, when the Divine Man indwells in the animal man, becomes three Spirits, or Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, in our Theosophical phraseology.

Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance—one of whose “principles” is Ether—are one, and include the Elements, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyân Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc. The Ether of Science—the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of Chemistry—constitutes, so to speak, the rude material, relatively, out of which the above-named Builders, following the plan traced out for them eternally in the Divine Thought, fashion the Systems in the Kosmos. They are “myths,” we are told. No more so than Ether and the Atoms, we answer. The two latter are absolute necessities of Physical Science, and the Builders are as absolute a necessity of Metaphysics. We are twitted with the objection: You never saw them. And we ask the Materialists: Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your Force? Moreover, one of the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, co-“discoverer” with Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural Selection alone accounting for the physical form of Man, admits the guiding action of “higher intelligences” as a “necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe.”498

These “higher intelligences” are the Dhyân Chohans of the Occultists.

Indeed, there are few myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have a historical as well as a scientific foundation. “Myths,” justly observes Pococke, “are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood.”

The most distinct and the one prevailing idea, found in all ancient teaching, with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first “creation” [pg 363]of our Globe with all its products, organic and inorganic—strange word for an Occultist to use!—is that the whole Kosmos has sprung from the Divine Thought. This Thought impregnates Matter, which is co-eternal with the One Reality; and all that lives and breathes evolves from the Emanations of the One Immutable, Parabrahman-Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal One-Root. The former of these, in its aspect of the Central Point turned inward, so to say, into regions quite inaccessible to human intellect, is Absolute Abstraction; whereas, in its aspect as Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal Root of all, it gives one at least some hazy comprehension of the Mystery of Being.

But the fragments of the cosmogonical systems that have reached us are now rejected as absurd fables. Nevertheless, Occult Science—which has survived even the Great Flood that submerged the Antediluvian Giants and with them their very memory, save the record preserved in the Secret Doctrine, the Bible and other Scriptures—still holds the Key to all the world problems.

Let us, then, apply this Key to the rare fragments of long-forgotten Cosmogonies, and by means of their scattered portions endeavour to reestablish the once Universal Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine. The Key fits them all. No one can seriously study ancient philosophies without perceiving that the striking similitude of conception in all of them, in their exoteric form very frequently, and in their hidden spirit invariably, is the result of no mere coincidence, but of a concurrent design; and that, during the youth of mankind, there was but one language, one knowledge, one universal religion, when there were no churches, no creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself. And, if it is shown that already in those early ages which are shut out from our sight by the exuberant growth of tradition, human religious thought developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe; then, it becomes evident that that thought, born under whatever latitude, in the cold North or the burning South, in the East or West, was inspired by the same revelations, and that man was nurtured under the protecting shadow of the same Tree of Knowledge.

Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.

These three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has defined it: “Space, the all-containing uncontained, is the primary embodiment of simple Unity … boundless extension.”508 But, he asks again: “boundless extension of what?”—and makes the correct reply: “The Unknown Container of All, the Unknown First Cause.” This is a most correct definition and answer; most esoteric and true, from every aspect of Occult Teaching.

Space, which, in their ignorance and with their iconoclastic tendency to destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have proclaimed “an abstract idea” and a “void,” is, in reality, the Container and the Body of the Universe in its Seven Principles. It is a Body of limitless extent, whose Principles, in Occult phraseology—each being in its turn a septenary—manifest in our phenomenal World only the grossest fabric of their sub-divisions. “No one has ever seen the Elements in their fulness,” the Doctrine teaches. We have to search for our Wisdom in the original expressions and synonyms of the primeval peoples. Even the Jews, the latest of these, show the same idea, in their Kabalistic teachings, when they speak of the seven-headed Serpent of Space, called the “Great Sea.”

Now Wind, Air and Spirit have ever been synonymous in every nation. Pneuma (Spirit) and Anemos (Wind), with the Greeks, Spiritus [pg 366]and Ventus, with the Latins, were convertible terms, even if dissociated from the original idea of the Breath of Life. In the “Forces” of Science we see but the material effect of the spiritual effect of one or other of the four primordial Elements, transmitted to us by the Fourth Race just as we shall transmit Æther, or rather its gross sub-division, in its fulness to the Sixth Root-Race.

Chaos was called senseless by the Ancients, because—Chaos and Space being synonymous—it represented and contained in itself all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made Æther, the fifth Element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek philosophers was not its Dregs, although indeed they knew more than Science does now of these Dregs (Ether), which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many Forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Âkâsha of the Hindûs; the Ether accepted in Physics is but one of its sub-divisions, on our plane, the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as its good effects.

Seeing that the Essence of Æther, or the Unseen Space, was considered divine, as being the supposed Veil of Deity, it was regarded as the Medium between this life and the next. The Ancients considered that when the directing active Intelligences—the Gods—retired from any portion of Æther in our Space, or the four realms which they superintend, then that particular region was left in the possession of evil, so called by reason of the absence from it of good.

“Nature abhors Vacuum” said the Peripatetics, who though Materialists in their way, comprehended perhaps why Democritus, with his instructor Leucippus, taught that the first principles of all things contained in the Universe were Atoms and a Vacuum. The latter means simply latent Force or Deity, which, before its first manifestation—when it became Will, communicating the first impulse to these Atoms—was the great Nothingness, Ain Suph, or No-Thing; and, therefore, to every sense, a Void, or Chaos.

This Chaos, however, became the “Soul of the World,” according to Plato and the Pythagoreans. According to Hindû teaching, Deity, in the shape of Æther or Âkâsha, pervades all things. It was called, therefore, by the Theurgists the “Living Fire,” the “Spirit of Light,” and sometimes “Magnes.” According to Plato, the highest Deity itself built the Universe in the geometrical form of the dodecahedron, and its “First-Begotten” was born of Chaos and Primordial Light—the Central Sun. This First-Born, however, was only the aggregate of the Host of the Builders, the first Constructive Forces, who are called in ancient Cosmogonies, the Ancients, born of the Deep or Chaos, and the First Point. He is the Tetragrammaton, so-called, at the head of the Seven lower Sephiroth. This was also the belief of the Chaldeans. Philo, the Jew, speaking very flippantly of the first instructors of his ancestors, writes as follows:

Chaos, Theos, Kosmos are but the three symbols of their synthesis—Space. One can never hope to solve the mystery of this Tetraktys, by holding to the dead-letter even of the old philosophies as now extant. But even in these, Chaos, Theos, Kosmos and Space are identified in all Eternity, as the One Unknown Space, the last word on which will never, perhaps, be known, before our Seventh Round. Nevertheless, the allegories and metaphysical symbols about the primeval and perfect Cube, are remarkable, even in the exoteric Purânas.

There, also, Brahmâ is Theos, evolving out of Chaos, or the Great Deep, the Waters, over which Spirit or Space—the Spirit moving over the face of the future boundless Kosmos—is silently hovering, in the [pg 368]first hour of reäwakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta-Shesha, the great Serpent of Eternity, of which Western Theology, ignorant of the Kabalah, the only key that opens the secrets of the Bible, has made—the Devil. It is the first Triangle or the Pythagorean Triad, the “God of the three Aspects,” before it is transformed, through the perfect quadrature of the Infinite Circle, into the “four-faced” Brahmâ. “Of him who is and yet is not, from Non-Being, the Eternal Cause, is born the Being, Purusha,” says Manu, the legislator.

“In the primordial state of the creation,” says Polier’s Mythologie des Indous, “the rudimental Universe, submerged in Water, reposed in the bosom of Vishnu. Sprung from this Chaos and Darkness, Brahmâ, the Architect of the World, poised on a lotus-leaf, floated [moved] upon the waters, unable to discern anything but water and darkness.” Perceiving such a dismal state of things, Brahmâ soliloquizes in consternation: “Who am I? Whence came I?” Then he hears a voice:516 “Direct your thoughts to Bhagavat.” Brahmâ, rising from his natatory position, seats himself upon the lotus, in an attitude of contemplation, and reflects upon the Eternal, who, pleased with this evidence of piety, disperses the primeval darkness and opens his understanding. “After this Brahmâ issues from the Universal Egg [Infinite Chaos] as Light, for his understanding is now opened, and he sets himself to work. He moves on the eternal Waters, with the Spirit of God within himself; and in his capacity of Mover of the Waters he is Vishnu, or Nârâyana.”

This is, of course, exoteric; yet, in its main idea, it is as identical as possible with the Egyptian Cosmogony, which, in its opening sentences, shows Athtor,517 or Mother Night, representing Illimitable Darkness, as the Primeval Element which covered the Infinite Abyss, animated by Water and the Universal Spirit of the Eternal, dwelling alone in Chaos. Similarly in the Jewish Scriptures, the history of the creation opens with the Spirit of God and his creative Emanation—another Deity.518

The Zohar teaches that it is the Primordial Elements—the trinity of Fire, Air and Water—the Four Cardinal Points, and all the Forces of Nature, which form collectively the Voice of the Will, Memrab, or the Word, the Logos of the Absolute Silent All. “The indivisible Point, limitless and unknowable,” spreads itself over space, and thus forms a Veil, the Mûlaprakriti of Parabrahman, which conceals this Absolute Point.

In the Cosmogonies of all the nations it is the Architects, synthesized by the Demiurge, in the Bible the Elohim, or Alhim, who fashion Kosmos out of Chaos, and who are the collective Theos, male-female, Spirit and Matter. “By a series (yom) of foundations (hasoth), the Alhim caused earth and heaven to be.”519 In Genesis, it is first Alhim, [pg 370]then Jahva-Alhim, and finally Jehovah—after the separation of the sexes in the fourth chapter. It is noticeable that nowhere, except in the later, or rather the last, Cosmogonies of our Fifth Race does the ineffable and unutterable Name520—the symbol of the Unknown Deity, which was used only in the Mysteries—occur in connection with the “Creation” of the Universe. It is the Movers, the Runners, the Theoi (from θέειν to run), who do the work of formation, the Messengers of the Manvantaric Law, who have now become in Christianity simply the “Messengers” (Malachim). This seems to be also the case in Hindûism or early Brâhmanism. For in the Rig Veda, it is not Brahmâ who creates, but the Prajâpatis, the “Lords of Being,” who are also the Rishis; the term Rishi, according to Professor Mahadeo Kunte, being connected with the word to move, to lead on, applied to them in their terrestrial character, when, as Patriarchs, they lead their Hosts on the Seven Rivers.

Moreover, the very word “God,” in the singular, embracing all the Gods, or Theoi, came to the “superior” civilized nations from a strange source, one as entirely and preëminently phallic as the sincere outspokenness of the Indian Lingham. The attempt to derive God from the Anglo-Saxon synonym Good is an abandoned idea, for in no other language, from the Persian Khoda down to the Latin Deus, has an instance been found of the name for God being derived from the attribute of Goodness. To the Latin races it comes from the Âryan Dyaus (the Day); to the Slavonian, from the Greek Bacchus (Bagh-bog); and to the Saxon races directly from the Hebrew Yod, or Jod. The latter is י the number-letter 10, male and female, and Yod is the phallic hook. Hence the Saxon Godh, the Germanic Gott, and the English God. This symbolic term may be said to represent the Creator of Physical Humanity, on the terrestrial plane; but surely it had nothing to do with the Formation, or “Creation,” of either Spirit, Gods, or Kosmos?

Chaos-Theos-Kosmos, the Triple Deity, is all in all. Therefore, it is said to be male and female, good and evil, positive and negative; the whole series of contrasted qualities. When latent, in Pralaya, it is incognizable and becomes the Unknowable Deity. It can be known only in its active functions; hence as Matter-Force and living Spirit, the correlations and outcome, or the expression, on the visible plane, of the ultimate and ever-to-be unknown Unity.

In its turn this Triple Unit is the producer of the Four Primary Elements,521 which are known, in our visible terrestrial Nature, as the seven (so far the five) Elements, each divisible into forty-nine—seven times seven—sub-elements, with about seventy of which Chemistry is acquainted. Every Cosmical Element, such as Fire, Air, Water, Earth, partaking of the qualities and defects of its Primaries, is in its nature Good and Evil, Force or Spirit, and Matter, etc.; and each, therefore, is at one and the same time Life and Death, Health and Disease, Action and Reaction. They are ever forming Matter, under the never-ceasing impulse of the One Element, the Incognizable, represented in the world of phenomena by Æther. They are “the immortal Gods who give birth and life to all.”

In The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol, in treating of the structure of the Universe, it is said:

This, besides showing a strange identity with the Cosmogony of the Purânas,523 corroborates all our teachings with regard to number seven, as briefly given in Esoteric Buddhism.

The Hindûs have an endless series of allegories to express this idea. In the Primordial Chaos, before it became developed into the Sapta Samudra, or Seven Oceans—emblematical of the Seven Gunas, or conditioned Qualities, composed of Trigunas (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas)—lie latent both Amrita, or Immortality, and Visha, or Poison, Death, Evil. This is to be found in the allegorical Churning of the Ocean by the Gods. Amrita is beyond any Guna, for it is unconditioned, per se; but when once fallen into phenomenal creation, it became mixed with Evil, Chaos, with latent Theos in it, before Kosmos was evolved. Hence we find Vishnu, the personification of Eternal Law, periodically calling forth Kosmos into activity, or, in allegorical phraseology, churning out of the Primitive Ocean, or Boundless Chaos, the Amrita of Eternity, reserved only for the Gods and Devas; and in the task he has [pg 372]to employ Nâgas and Asuras, or Demons in exoteric Hindûism. The whole allegory is highly philosophical, and indeed we find it repeated in every ancient system of philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato, who having fully embraced the ideas which Pythagoras had brought from India, compiled and published them in a form more intelligible than the original mysterious numerals of the Samian Sage. Thus the Kosmos is the “Son” with Plato, having for his Father and Mother Divine Thought and Matter.524

“The Egyptians,” says Dunlap, “distinguish between an older and younger Horus; the former the brother of Osiris, the latter the son of Osiris and Isis.”525 The first is the Idea of the World remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in Darkness before the Creation of the World.” The second Horus is this Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with Matter, and assuming an actual existence.526

The Chaldean Oracles speak of the “Mundane God, eternal, boundless, young and old, of winding form.”527 This “winding form” is a figure to express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient priests were perfectly well acquainted, though the name “Astral Light” was invented by the Martinists.

Cosmolatry has the finger of scorn pointed at its superstitions by Modern Science. Science, however, before laughing at it, ought, as advised by a French savant, “to entirely remodel its own system of cosmo-pneumatological education.” Satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum! Cosmolatry, like Pantheism, in its ultimate expression, may be made to express itself in the same words in which the Purâna describes Vishnu:

Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.

The Logos, or Creative Deity, the “Word made Flesh,” of every religion, has to be traced to its ultimate source and essence. In India, it is a Proteus of 1,008 divine names and aspects in each of its personal transformations, from Brahmâ-Purusha, through the Seven Divine Rishis and Ten Semi-divine Prajâpatis (also Rishis), down to the Divine-human Avatâras. The same puzzling problem of the “One in Many,” and the Multitude in One, is found in other Pantheons; in the Egyptian, the Greek and the Chaldeo-Judaic, the latter having made confusion still more confused by presenting its Gods as euhemerizations, in the shapes of Patriarchs. And these Patriarchs are now accepted by those who reject Romulus as a myth, and are represented as living and historical Entities. Verbum satis sapienti!

In the Zohar, Ain Suph is also the One, the Infinite Unity. This was known to the very few learned Fathers of the Church, who were aware that Jehovah was no “highest” God, but a third-rate Potency. But while complaining bitterly of the Gnostics, and saying: “our Heretics hold … that Propatôr is known but to the Only-begotten Son529 [who is Brahmâ], that is to the Mind [Nous],” Irenæus failed to mention that the Jews did the same in their real secret books. Valentinus, “the profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” held that “there was a perfect Aiôn who existed before Bythos [the first Father of unfathomable nature, which is the Second Logos], called Propatôr.” It is this Aiôn who springs as a Ray from Ain Suph, which does not create, and Aiôn who creates, or through whom, rather, everything is created, or evolves. For, as the Basilidians taught, “there was a Supreme God, [pg 374]Abrasax, by whom was created Mind [Mahat, in Sanskrit; Nous, in Greek]. From Mind proceeded the Word, Logos; from the Word, Providence [Divine Light, rather]; then from it Virtue and Wisdom in Principalities, Powers, Angels, etc.” By these Angels the 365 Æons were created. “Amongst the lowest, indeed, and those who made this world, he [Basilides] sets last of all the God of the Jews, whom he denies to be God [and very rightly], affirming he is one of the Angels.”

Here, then, we find the same system as in the Purânas, wherein the Incomprehensible drops a Seed, which becomes the Golden Egg, from which Brahmâ is produced. Brahmâ produces Mahat, etc. True Esoteric Philosophy, however, speaks neither of “creation,” nor of “evolution,” in the sense in which the exoteric religions do. All these personified Powers are not evolutions from one another, but so many aspects of the one and sole manifestation of the Absolute All.

The same system as that of the Gnostic Emanations prevails in the Sephirothic aspects of Ain Suph, and, as these aspects are in Space and Time, a certain order is maintained in their successive appearances. Therefore, it becomes impossible not to take notice of the great changes that the Zohar has undergone under the handling of generations of Christian Mystics. For, even in the metaphysics of the Talmud, the Lower Face or Lesser Countenance, or Microprosopus, could never be placed on the same plane of abstract ideals as the Higher, or Greater Countenance, Macroprosopus. The latter is, in the Chaldean Kabalah, a pure abstraction, the Word or Logos, or Dabar in Hebrew; which Word, though it becomes in fact a plural number, or Words, D(a)B(a)R(i)M, when it reflects itself, or falls into the aspect of a Host of Angels, or Sephiroth—the “Number”—is still collectively One, and on the ideal plane a nought, [circle], “Nothing.” It is without form or being, “with no likeness with anything else.”530 And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who stands next God, the “Second God,” when he speaks of “the Second God, who is his [the Highest God’s] Wisdom.”531 Deity is not God. It is No-thing, and Darkness. It is nameless, and therefore called Ain Suph, the word “Ayin meaning nothing.”532 The “Highest God,” the Unmanifested Logos, is Its Son.

Nor are most of the Gnostic systems which have come down to us, mutilated as they are by the Church Fathers, anything better than the distorted shells of the original speculations. Nor were they, moreover, ever open to the public or general reader; for had their hidden meaning [pg 375]or esotericism been revealed, it would have been no more an esoteric teaching, and this could never have been. Marcus, the chief of the Marcosians, who flourished in the middle of the second century, and taught that Deity had to be viewed under the symbol of four syllables, gave out more of the esoteric truths than any other Gnostic. But even he was never well understood. For it is only on the surface or dead-letter of his Revelation that it appears that God is a Quaternary, to wit, “the Ineffable, the Silence, the Father, and Truth,” since in reality it is quite erroneous, and divulges only one more esoteric riddle. This teaching of Marcus was that of the early Kabalists and is ours. For he makes of Deity the Number 30, in four syllables, which, translated esoterically, means a Triad or Triangle, and a Quaternary or a Square, in all seven, which, on the lower plane, made the seven divine or Secret Letters of which the God-name is composed. This requires demonstration. In his Revelation, speaking of divine mysteries expressed by means of letters and numbers, Marcus narrates how the Supreme “Tetrad came down” unto him “from the region which cannot be seen nor named, in a female form, because the world would have been unable to bear her appearing in a male figure,” and revealed to him “the generation of the universe, untold before to either Gods or men.”

The first sentence already contains a double meaning. Why should the apparition of a female figure be more easily borne, or listened to, by the world than a male figure? On the face of it, this appears nonsensical. But to one who is acquainted with the Mystery Language, it is quite clear and simple. Esoteric Philosophy, or the Secret Wisdom, was symbolized by a female form, while a male figure stood for the Unveiled Mystery. Hence, the world, not being ready to receive it, could not bear it, and the Revelation of Marcus had to be given allegorically. Thus he writes:

This is as plain as ancient esoteric secresy could make it. It is as Kabalistic though less veiled than the Zohar, in which the mystic names, or attributes, are also four syllabled, twelve, forty-two, and even seventy-two syllabled words! The Tetrad shows to Marcus the Truth in the shape of a naked woman, and letters every limb of that figure, calling her head Α Ω, her neck Β Ψ, shoulders and hands Γ Χ, etc. In this, Sephira is easily recognized; the head, or Crown, Kether, being numbered 1; the brain, or Chokmah, 2; the Heart, or Intelligence, Binah, 3; and the other seven Sephiroth representing the limbs of the body. The Sephirothic Tree is the Universe, and Adam Kadmon personifies it in the West, as Brahmâ represents it in India.

Throughout, the Ten Sephiroth are represented as divided into the Three higher, or the spiritual Triad, and the lower Septenary. The true esoteric meaning of the sacred number Seven though cleverly veiled, in the Zohar, is betrayed by the double way of writing the term, “in the Beginning,” or Be-rasheeth, and Be-raishath, the latter the “Higher, or Upper Wisdom.” As shown by S. L. MacGregor Mathers535 and Isaac Myer,536 both of these Kabalists being supported by the best ancient authorities, these words have a dual and secret meaning. Braisheeth barah Elohim means, that the six, over which stands the seventh Sephira, belong to the lower material class, or, as the author says: “Seven … are applied to the Lower Creation, and Three to the Spiritual Man, the Heavenly Prototypic or First Adam.”

When the Theosophists and Occultists say that God is no Being, for It is Nothing, No-Thing, they are more reverential and religiously respectful to the Deity than those who call God He, and thus make of Him a gigantic Male.

He who studies the Kabalah will soon find the same idea in the ultimate thought of its authors, the earlier and great Hebrew Initiates, [pg 377]who got this Secret Wisdom in Babylonia from the Chaldean Hierophants, just as Moses got his in Egypt. The Zoharic system cannot very well be judged by its translations into Latin and other tongues, when all its ideas were softened and made to fit in with the views and policy of its Christian arrangers; for its original ideas are identical with those of all other religious systems. The various Cosmogonies show that the Universal Soul was considered by every archaic nation as the Mind of the Demiurgic Creator; and that it was called the Mother, Sophia, or the female Wisdom, with the Gnostics; the Sephira, with the Jews; Sarasvatî or Vâch, with the Hindûs; the Holy Ghost also being a female Principle.

Hence, the Kurios, or Logos, born from it, was, with the Greeks, the God, Mind (Nous). “Now Koros [Kurios] … signifies the pure and unmixed nature of Intellect—Wisdom,” says Plato, in Cratylus;537 and Kurios is Mercury (Mercurius, Mar-kurios), the Divine Wisdom, and “Mercury is Sol [the Sun],”538 from whom Thot-Hermes received this Divine Wisdom. While, then, the Logoi of all countries and religions are correlative, in their sexual aspects, with the female Soul of the World or the Great Deep, the Deity, from which these Two in One have their being, is ever concealed and called the Hidden One, and is connected only indirectly with “Creation,”539 as it can act only through the Dual Force emanating from the Eternal Essence. Even Æsculapius, called the “Saviour of all,” is identical, according to ancient classical writers, with the Egyptian Ptah, the Creative Intellect, or Divine Wisdom, and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis and Hercules:540 and Ptah, in one of its aspects, is the Anima Mundi; the Universal Soul of Plato; the Divine Spirit of the Egyptians; the Holy Ghost of the early Christians and Gnostics; and the Âkâsha of the Hindûs, and even, in its lower aspect, the Astral Light. For Ptah was originally the God of the Dead, he into whose bosom they were received, hence the Limbus of the Greek Christians, or the Astral Light. It was far later that Ptah was classed with the Sun-Gods, his name signifying “he who opens,” as he is shown to be the first to unveil the face of the dead mummy, to call the Soul to life in his bosom. Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed, is represented by the snake-emblem of eternity encircling a water-urn, [pg 378]with its head hovering over the “Waters,” which it incubates with its breath—another form of the one original idea of “Darkness,” with its Ray moving on the Waters, etc. As the Logos-Soul, this permutation is called Ptah; as the Logos-Creator, he becomes Imhotep, his Son, the “God of the handsome face.” In their primitive characters, these two were the first Cosmic Duad, Noot, Space or “Sky,” and Noon, the “Primordial Waters,” the Androgyne Unity, above whom was the Concealed Breath of Kneph. And all of them had the aquatic animals and plants sacred to them, the ibis, the swan, the goose, the crocodile, and the lotus.

Returning to the Kabalistic Deity, this Concealed Unity is then Ain Suph (אין סוף, τὸ πάν, τό ἄπειρον), Endless, Boundless, Non-Existent (אין), so long as the Absolute is within Oulom,541 the Boundless and Termless Time; as such, Ain Suph cannot be the Creator or even the Modeller of the Universe, nor can It be Aur (Light). Therefore Ain Suph is also Darkness. The immutably Infinite, and the absolutely Boundless, can neither will, think, nor act. To do this, it has to become Finite, and it does so by its Ray penetrating into the Mundane Egg, or Infinite Space, and emanating from it as a Finite God. All this is left to the Ray latent in the One. When the period arrives, the Absolute Will expands naturally the Force within it, according to the Law of which it is the inner and ultimate Essence. The Hebrews did not adopt the Egg as a symbol, but they substituted for it the “Duplex Heavens,” for, translated correctly, the sentence “God made the heavens and the earth” would read: “In and out of his own Essence, as a Womb [the Mundane Egg], God created the Two Heavens.” The Christians, however, have chosen the Dove, the bird and not the egg, as the symbol of their Holy Ghost.

“Whoever acquaints himself with Hud, the Mercabah and the Lahgash [secret speech or incantation], will learn the secret of secrets.” Lahgash is nearly identical in meaning with Vâch, the hidden power of the Mantras.

When the active period has arrived, from within the Eternal Essence of Ain Suph, comes forth Sephira, the Active Power, called the Primordial Point and the Crown, Kether. It is only through her that the “Un-bounded Wisdom” could give a Concrete Form to the Abstract [pg 379]Thought. Two sides of the Upper Triangle, by which the Ineffable Essence and its Manifested Body, the Universe, are symbolized, the right side and the base, are composed of unbroken lines; the third, the left side, is dotted. It is through the latter that emerges Sephira. Spreading in every direction, she finally encompasses the whole Triangle. In this emanation the triple Triad is formed. From the invisible Dew falling from the higher Uni-triad, the “Head,”—thus leaving 7 Sephiroth only—Sephira creates Primeval Waters, or in other words, Chaos takes shape. It is the first stage towards the solidification of Spirit which, through various modifications, will produce Earth. “It requires Earth and Water to make a Living Soul,” says Moses. It requires the image of an aquatic bird to connect it with Water, the female element of procreation, with the egg and the bird that fecundates it.

When Sephira emerges as an Active Power from within the Latent Deity, she is female; when she assumes the office of a Creator, she becomes a male; hence, she is androgyne. She is the “Father and Mother, Aditi,” of the Hindû Cosmogony and of the Secret Doctrine. If the oldest Hebrew scrolls had been preserved, the modern Jehovah-worshipper would have found that many and uncomely were the symbols of the “Creative God.” The frog in the moon, typical of his generative character, was the most frequent. All the birds and animals now called “unclean” in the Bible have been the symbols of this Deity, in days of old. A mask of uncleanness was placed over them, in order to preserve them from destruction, because they were so sacred. The brazen serpent is not a bit more poetical than the goose or swan, if symbols are to be accepted à la lettre.

In the words of the Zohar:

The Spiritual Substance sent forth by the Infinite Light is the First Sephira or Shekinah. Sephira, exoterically, contains all the other nine Sephiroth in her: esoterically, she contains but two, Chokmah or Wisdom, “a masculine, active potency whose divine name is Jah (יה),” and [pg 380]Binah, or Intelligence, a feminine passive potency, represented by the divine name Jehovah (יהוה); which two potencies form, with Sephira the third, the Jewish Trinity or the Crown, Kether. These two Sephiroth, called Abba, Father, and Amona, Mother, are the Duad, or the double-sexed Logos, from which issued the other seven Sephiroth. Thus, the first Jewish Triad, Sephira, Chokmah and Binah, is the Hindû Trimûrti.543 However veiled even in the Zohar, and still more in the exoteric Pantheon of India, every particular connected with one is reproduced in the other. The Prajâpatis are the Sephiroth. Ten with Brahmâ, they dwindle to seven when the Trimûrti, or the Kabalistic Triad, are separated from the rest. The seven Builders, or “Creators,” become the seven Prajâpati, or the seven Rishis, in the same order as the Sephiroth become the Creators, then the Patriarchs, etc. In both Secret Systems, the One Universal Essence is incomprehensible and inactive, in its Absoluteness, and can be connected with the Building of the Universe only in an indirect way. In both, the primeval Male-female, or Androgynous, Principle and its ten and seven Emanations—Brahmâ-Virâj and Aditi-Vâch, on the one hand; and the Elohim-Jehovah, or Adam-Adami (Adam Kadmon) and Sephira-Eve, on the other; with their Prajâpatis and Sephiroth—in their totality, represent primarily the Archetypal Man, the Protologos; and it is only in their secondary aspect that they become cosmic powers, and astronomical or sidereal bodies. If Aditi is the Mother of the Gods, Deva-Mâtri, Eve is the Mother of All Living; both are the Shakti, or Generative Power, in their female aspect, of the Heavenly Man, and they are both compound Creators. Says a Guptâ Vidyâ Sûtra:

In the beginning, a Ray, issuing from Paramârthika [the one and only True Existence], became manifested in Vyâvahârika [Conventional Existence], which was used as a Vâhana to descend with into the Universal Mother, and to cause her to expand [swell, brih].

And in the Zohar it is stated:

As the Zohar again says:

Thus the Deity is compared to a shoreless sea, to Water which is “the fountain of life.”545 “The seventh palace, the fountain of life, is the first in the order from above.”546 Hence the Kabalistic tenet on the lips of the very Kabalistic Solomon, who says in Proverbs: “Wisdom hath builded her house; it hath hewn out its seven pillars.”547

Whence, then, all this identity of ideas, if there were no primeval Universal Revelation? The few points so far brought out are like a few straws in a stack, in comparison to that which will be disclosed as the work proceeds. If we turn to the Chinese Cosmogony, the most hazy of all, even there the same idea is found. Tsi-tsai, the Self-Existent, is the Unknown Darkness, the Root of the Wu-liang-sheu, Boundless Age; Amitâbha, and Tien, Heaven, come later on. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius gives the same idea, his “straws” notwithstanding. The latter are a source of great amusement to the missionaries, who laugh at every “heathen” religion, despise and hate that of their brother Christians of other denominations, and yet one and all accept their own Genesis, literally.

If we turn to the Chaldean we find in it Anu, the Concealed Deity, the One, whose name, moreover, shows it to be of Sanskrit origin; for Anu in Sanskrit means Atom, Anîyâmsam-anîyasâm, smallest of the small, being a name of Parabrahman, in the Vedântic philosophy, in which Parabrahman is described as smaller than the smallest atom, and greater than the greatest sphere or universe, Anagrânîyas and Mahatoruvat. In the first verses of the Akkadian Genesis, as found in the cuneiform texts on the Babylonian tiles or Lateres Coctiles, and as translated by George Smith, we find Anu, the Passive Deity, or Ain Suph; Bel, the Creator, the Spirit of God, or Sephira, moving on the Face of the Waters, hence Water itself; and Hea, the Universal Soul, or Wisdom of the Three combined.

The first eight verses read as follows:

This was the Chaotic or Ante-genetic Period; the double Swan, and the Dark Swan which becomes white, when Light is created.549

The symbol chosen for the majestic ideal of the Universal Principle may perhaps seem little calculated to answer its sacred character. A goose, or even a swan, will, no doubt, be thought an unfit symbol to represent the grandeur of the Spirit. Nevertheless, it must have had some deep Occult meaning, since it figures not only in every Cosmogony and World-religion, but was also chosen by the Crusaders, among the mediæval Christians, as the Vehicle of the Holy Ghost, which was supposed to be leading the army to Palestine, to wrench the tomb of the Saviour from the hands of the Saracen. If we are to credit Professor Draper’s statement, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, the Crusaders, under Peter the Hermit, were preceded, at the head of the army, by the Holy Ghost, under the shape of a white gander in the company of a goat. Seb, the Egyptian God of Time, carries a goose on his head; Jupiter assumes the form of a swan, and so also does Brahmâ; and the root of all this is that mystery of mysteries—the Mundane Egg. One should learn the reason of a symbol before depreciating it. The dual element of Air and Water is that of the ibis, swan, goose and pelican, of crocodiles and frogs, lotus flowers and water lilies, etc.; and the result is the choice of the most unseemly symbols by the modern as much as by the ancient Mystics. Pan, the great God of Nature, was generally figured in company with aquatic birds, geese especially, and so were other Gods. If later on, with the gradual degeneration of religion, the Gods to whom geese were sacred, became priapic deities, it does not, therefore, follow that water-fowls were made sacred to Pan and other [pg 383]phallic deities, as some scoffers even of antiquity would have it,550 but that the abstract and divine power of Procreative Nature had become grossly anthropomorphized. Nor does the swan of Leda show “priapic doings and her enjoyment thereof,” as Mr. Hargrave Jennings chastely expresses it; for the myth is but another version of the same philosophical idea of Cosmogony. Swans are frequently found associated with Apollo, as they are the emblems of Water and Fire, and also of the Sun-light, before the separation of the Elements.

Our modern symbologists might profit by some remarks made by a well-known writer, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, who says:

Section VI. The Mundane Egg.

Whence this universal symbol? The Egg was incorporated as a sacred sign in the Cosmogony of every people on the earth, and was revered both on account of its form and of its inner mystery. From the earliest mental conceptions of man, it has been known as that which represented most successfully the origin and secret of Being. The gradual development of the imperceptible germ within the closed shell; the inward working, without any apparent outward interference of force, which from a latent nothing produced an active something, needing naught save heat; and which, having gradually evolved into a concrete, living creature, broke its shell, appearing to the outward senses of all as a self-generated and self-created being; all this must have been a standing miracle from the beginning.

The Secret Teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the symbolism of the prehistoric races. In the beginnings, the “First Cause” had no name. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg became the Universe. Hence Brahmâ was called Kâlahansa, the “Swan in [Space and] Time.” Becoming the Swan of Eternity, Brahmâ, at the beginning of each Mahâmanvantara, lays a Golden Egg, which typifies the great Circle, or [circle] itself a symbol for the Universe and its spherical bodies.

A second reason for the Egg having been chosen as the symbolical representation of the Universe, and of our Earth, was its form. It was a Circle and a Sphere; and the ovi-form shape of our Globe must have been known from the beginning of symbology, since it was so universally adopted. The first manifestation of the Kosmos in the form of an Egg was the most widely diffused belief of Antiquity. As Bryant [pg 385]shows,552 it was a symbol adopted among the Greeks, the Syrians, Persians, and Egyptians. In the Egyptian Ritual, Seb, the God of Time and of the Earth, is spoken of as having laid an Egg, or the Universe, an “Egg conceived at the hour of the Great One of the Dual Force.”553

Ra is shown like Brahmâ gestating in the Egg of the Universe. The Deceased is “resplendent in the Egg of the Land of Mysteries.”554 For, this is “the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”555 “It is the Egg of the great clucking Hen, the Egg of Seb, who issues from it like a hawk.”556

Among the Greeks the Orphic Egg is described by Aristophanes, and was part of the Dionysiac and other Mysteries, during which the Mundane Egg was consecrated and its significance explained; Porphyry also shows it to be a representation of the world: “Ἑρμηνεύει δὲ τὸ ὠὸν τὸν κόσμον.” Faber and Bryant have tried to show that the Egg typified the Ark of Noah—a wild belief, unless the latter is accepted as purely allegorical and symbolical. It can only have typified the Ark as a synonym of the Moon, the Argha which carries the universal seed of life; but had surely nothing to do with the Ark of the Bible. Anyhow, the belief that the Universe existed in the beginning in the shape of an Egg was general. And as Wilson says:

Hiranya, however, means “resplendent,” “shining,” rather than “golden,” as is proven by the great Indian scholar, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, in his unpublished polemics with Professor Max Müller. As said in the Vishnu Purâna:

Both in Greece and in India the first visible male Being, who united in himself the nature of either sex, abode in the Egg and issued from it. This “First-born of the World” was Dionysus, with some Greeks; [pg 386]the God who sprang from the Mundane Egg, and from whom the Mortals and Immortals were derived. The God Ra is shown, in the Book of the Dead, beaming in his Egg [the Sun], and the stars off as soon as the God Shoo [the Solar Energy] awakens and gives him the impulse.559 “He is in the Solar Egg, the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”560 The Solar God exclaims: “I am the Creative Soul of the Celestial Abyss. None sees my Nest, none can break my Egg, I am the Lord!”561

In view of this circular form, the “[vertical bar]” issuing from the “[circle],” or the Egg, or the male from the female in the androgyne, it is strange to find a scholar saying, on the ground that the most ancient Indian MSS. show no trace of it, that the ancient Âryans were ignorant of the decimal notation. The 10, being the sacred number of the Universe, was secret and esoteric, both as regards the unit and cipher, or zero, the circle. Moreover, Professor Max Müller tells that “the two words cipher and zero, which are but one, are sufficient to prove that our figures are borrowed from the Arabs.”562 Cipher is the Arabic cifron, and means “empty,” a translation of the Sanskrit sunyan, or “nought,” says the Professor.563 The Arabs had their figures from Hindûstan, and never claimed the discovery for themselves. As to the Pythagoreans, we need but turn to the ancient manuscripts of Boethius’ treatise, De Arithmetica, composed in the sixth century, to find among the Pythagorean numerals the “1” and the “0,” as the first and final figures.564 And Porphyry, who quotes from the Pythagorean Moderatus,565 says that the numerals of Pythagoras were “hieroglyphical symbols, by means whereof he explained ideas concerning the nature of things,” or the origin of the Universe.

Now, if, on the one hand, the most ancient Indian MSS. show as yet no trace of decimal notation in them, and Max Müller states very clearly that until now he has found but nine letters, the initials of the Sanskrit numerals; on the other hand, we have records as ancient, to supply the wanted proof. We speak of the sculptures and the sacred [pg 387]imagery in the most ancient temples of the far East. Pythagoras derived his knowledge from India; and we find Professor Max Müller corroborating this statement, at least so far as to allow that the Neo-Pythagoreans were the first teachers of “ciphering,” among the Greeks and Romans; that they “at Alexandria, or in Syria, became acquainted with the Indian figures, and adapted them to the Pythagorean Abacus.” This cautious admission implies that Pythagoras himself was acquainted with only nine figures. Thus we might reasonably answer that, although we possess no certain proof, exoterically, that the decimal notation was known to Pythagoras, who lived at the very close of the archaic ages,566 yet we have sufficient evidence to show that the full numbers, as given by Boethius, were known to the Pythagoreans, even before Alexandria was built.567 This evidence we find in Aristotle, who says that “some philosophers hold that ideas and numbers are of the same nature, and amount to ten in all.”568 This, we believe, will be sufficient to show that the decimal notation was known among them at least as early as four centuries b.c., for Aristotle does not seem to treat the question as an innovation of the Neo-Pythagoreans.

But we know more than this; we know that the decimal system must have been used by the mankind of the earliest archaic ages, since the whole astronomical and geometrical portion of the secret sacerdotal language was built upon the number 10, or the combination of the male and female principles, and since the “Pyramid of Cheops,” so-called, is built upon measures of this decimal notation, or rather upon the digits and their combinations with the nought. Of this, however, sufficient has been said in Isis Unveiled, and it is useless to repeat it.

The symbolism of the Lunar and Solar Deities is so inextricably mixed up, that it is next to impossible to separate from each other such glyphs as the Egg, the Lotus, and the “Sacred” Animals. The Ibis, for instance, was held in the greatest veneration in Egypt. It was sacred to Isis, who is often represented with the head of that bird, and also sacred to Mercury or Thoth, who is said to have assumed its form while escaping from Typhon. There were two kinds of Ibises in Egypt, Herodotus569 tells us; one quite black, the other black and white. The former is credited with fighting and exterminating the winged serpents which came every spring from Arabia, and infested the country. [pg 388]The other was sacred to the Moon, because the latter planet is white and brilliant on her external side, dark and black on that side which she never turns to the Earth. Moreover, the Ibis kills land serpents, and makes the most terrible havoc amongst the eggs of the crocodile, and thus saves Egypt from having the Nile over-infested by those horrible saurians. The bird is credited with doing this in the moonlight, and thus being helped by Isis, whose sidereal symbol is the Moon. But the more correct esoteric truth underlying these popular myths is, that Hermes, as shown by Abenephius,570 watched over the Egyptians under the form of that bird, and taught them the Occult arts and sciences. This simply means that the ibis religiosa had, and has, “magical” properties in common with many other birds, the albatross preëminently, and the mythical white swan, the Swan of Eternity or Time, the Kâlahansa.

Were it otherwise, indeed, why should all the ancient peoples, who were no more fools than we are, have had such a superstitious dread of killing certain birds? In Egypt, he who killed an Ibis, or the Golden Hawk, the symbol of the Sun and Osiris, risked death, and could hardly escape it. The veneration of some nations for birds was such that Zoroaster, in his precepts, forbids their slaughter as a heinous crime. In our age, we laugh at every kind of divination. Yet why should so many generations have believed in divination by birds, and even in Oömancy, which is said by Suidas to have been imparted by Orpheus, who taught how, under certain conditions, to perceive in the yolk and white of an egg, that which the bird born from it would have seen around it during its short life. This Occult art, which, 3,000 years ago, demanded the greatest learning and the most abstruse mathematical calculations, has now fallen into the depths of degradation; and to-day it is the old cooks and fortune-tellers who read the future for servant-girls in search of husbands, from the white of an egg in a glass.

Nevertheless, even Christians have to this day their sacred birds; for instance, the Dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Nor have they neglected the sacred animals; and the evangelical zoölatry, with its Bull, Eagle, Dion, and Angel—in reality the Cherub, or Seraph, the fiery-winged Serpent—is as much Pagan as that of the Egyptians or the Chaldeans. These four animals are, in reality, the symbols of the four Elements, and of the four lower Principles in man. Nevertheless, they correspond physically and materially to the four constellations [pg 389]that form, so to speak, the suite or cortège of the Solar God, and which, during the winter solstice, occupy the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle. These four “animals” may be seen in many of the Roman Catholic New Testaments in which the “portraits” of the Evangelists are given. They are the animals of Ezekiel’s Mercabah.

As truly stated by Ragon:

They can be only approximately interpreted, even if one discovers three out of these seven systems, viz., the anthropological, the psychic and the astronomical. The two chief interpretations, the highest and the lowest, the spiritual and the physiological, were preserved in the greatest secrecy, until the latter fell into the dominion of the profane. Thus far, with regard only to the pre-historic Hierophants, with whom that which has now become purely—or impurely—phallic, was a science as profound and as mysterious as Biology and Physiology are now. This was their exclusive property, the fruit of their studies and discoveries. The other two were those which dealt with the Creative Gods, or Theogony, and with creative man; that is to say, with the ideal and the practical Mysteries. These interpretations were so cleverly veiled and combined, that many were those who, while arriving at the discovery of one meaning, were baffled in understanding the significance of the others, and could never unriddle them sufficiently to commit dangerous indiscretions. The highest, the first and the fourth—Theogony in relation to Anthropogony—were almost impossible to fathom. We find the proofs of this in the Jewish “Holy Writ.”

It is owing to the serpent being oviparous, that it became a symbol of Wisdom and an emblem of the Logoi, or the Self-Born. In the temple of Philæ, in Upper Egypt, an egg was artificially prepared of clay mixed with various incenses. This was hatched by a peculiar process, and a cerastes or horned viper was produced. The same was done in the Indian temples, in antiquity, in the case of the cobra. The Creative God emerges from the Egg that issues from the mouth of Kneph, as a winged Serpent, for the Serpent is the symbol of the All-Wisdom. With the Hebrews the same Deity is glyphed by the Flying or “Fiery Serpents” of Moses in the Wilderness; and with the Alexandrian Mystic she becomes the Orphio-Christos, the Logos of the Gnostics. [pg 390]The Protestants try to show that the allegory of the Brazen Serpent and of the Fiery Serpents has a direct reference to the mystery of the Christ and the Crucifixion, whereas, in truth, it has a far nearer relation to the mystery of generation, when dissociated from the Egg with the Central Germ, or the Circle with its Central Point. Protestant Theologians would have us believe their interpretation only because the Brazen Serpent was lifted on a pole! Whereas it had rather a reference to the Egyptian Egg standing upright supported by the sacred Tau; since the Egg and the Serpent are in-separable in the old worship and symbology of Egypt, and since both the Brazen and Fiery Serpents were Seraphs, the burning “Fiery” Messengers, or the Serpent Gods, the Nâgas of India. Without the Egg it was a purely phallic symbol, but when associated therewith, it related to cosmic creation. The Brazen Serpent had no such holy meaning as the Protestants would ascribe to it; nor was it, in fact, glorified above the Fiery Serpents, for the bite of which it was only a natural remedy; the symbological meaning of the word “Brazen” being the feminine principle, and that of “Fiery,” or “Gold,” the masculine principle.

It is said in Numbers that the Jews complained of the Wilderness where there was no water,571 after which “the Lord sent fiery serpents” to bite them, and then, to oblige Moses, he gave him as a remedy the Brazen Serpent on a pole for them to look at; after which “any man when he beheld the serpent of brass … lived” (?). After that the “Lord,” gathering the people together at the well of Beer, gave them water, and grateful Israel sang this song, “Spring up, O well.” When, after studying symbology, the Christian reader comes to understand the innermost meaning of these three symbols, Water, Brazen, and Serpent, and a few more, in the sense given to them in the Holy Bible, he will hardly like to connect the sacred name of his Saviour with the Brazen Serpent incident. The Seraphim (שרפים) or Fiery Winged Serpents, are no doubt connected with, and inseparable from, the idea of the “Serpent of Eternity—God,” as explained in Kenealy’s Apocalypse; but the word Cherub also meant Serpent, in one sense, though its direct meaning is different, for the Cherubim and the Persian [pg 391]Winged Griffins (Γρύπες), the guardians of the Golden Mountain, are the same, and the compound name of the former shows their character, as it is formed of kr (כר), a circle, and aub or ob (אוב), a serpent, and therefore means a “serpent in a circle.” And this settles the phallic character of the Brazen Serpent, and justifies Hezekiah for breaking it.572 Verbum satis sapienti!

In the Book of the Dead, as just shown,573 reference is often made to the Egg. Ra, the Mighty One, remains in his Egg, during the struggle between the “Children of the Rebellion” and Shoo, the Solar Energy and the Dragon of Darkness. The Deceased is resplendent in his Egg when he crosses to the Land of Mystery. He is the Egg of Seb. The Egg was the symbol of Life in Immortality and Eternity; and also the glyph of the generative matrix; whereas the Tau, which was associated with it, was only the symbol of life and birth in generation. The Mundane Egg was placed in Khoom, the Water of Space, or the feminine abstract Principle; Khoom becoming, with the “fall” of mankind into generation and phallicism, Ammon the Creative God. When Ptah, the “Fiery God,” carries the Mundane Egg in his hand, then the symbolism becomes quite terrestrial and concrete in its significance. In conjunction with the Hawk, the symbol of Osiris-Sun, the symbol is dual, and relates to both Lives—the mortal and the immortal. The engraving of a papyrus in Kircher’s Œdipus Egyptiacus,574 shows an egg floating above the mummy. This is the symbol of hope and the promise of a Second Birth for the Osirified Dead; his Soul, after due purification in the Amenti, will gestate in this Egg of Immortality, to be reborn therefrom into a new life on earth. For this Egg, in the Esoteric Doctrine, is Devachan, the Abode of Bliss; the Winged Scarabæus also being another symbol of it. The Winged Globe is but another form of the Egg, and has the same significance as the Scarabæus, the Khopiroo—from the Root khoproo, to become, to be reborn—which relates to the rebirth of man, as well as to his spiritual regeneration.

In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Æther first, and then Air, the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (Νοητὸς) Deity, the visible Universe of Matter, is born, out of the Mundane Egg.575

In the Orphic Hymns, Eros-Phanes evolves from the Divine Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” or rather the “Spirit of the Unknown Darkness”—the Divine Idea of Plato—which is said to move in Æther.576 In the Hindû Kathopanishad, [pg 392]Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, “from whose union springs the Great Soul of the World,” Mahâ-Âtmâ, Brahmâ, the Spirit of Life,577 etc.; the latter appellations being all identical with Anima Mundi, or the “Universal Soul,” the Astral Light of the Kabalist and the Occultist, or the “Egg of Darkness.” Besides this there are many charming allegories on this subject, scattered through the Sacred Books of the Brâhmans. In one place, it is the female creator who is first a germ, then a drop of heavenly dew, a pearl, and then an Egg. In such cases, of which there are too many to enumerate separately, the Egg gives birth to the four Elements within the fifth, Æther, and is covered with seven coverings, which become later on the seven upper and the seven lower worlds. Breaking in two, the shell becomes the Heaven, and the contents the Earth, the white forming the Terrestrial Waters. Then, again, it is Vishnu who emerges from within the Egg, with a Lotus in his hand. Vinatâ, a daughter of Daksha and wife of Kashyapa, “the Self-born, sprung from Time,” one of the seven “Creators” of our World, brought forth an Egg from which was born Garuda, the Vehicle of Vishnu; the latter allegory having a relation to our Earth, as Garuda is the Great Cycle.

The Egg was sacred to Isis; and therefore the priests of Egypt never ate eggs.

Isis is almost always represented holding a Lotus in one hand, and in the other a Circle and a Cross (crux ansata).

Diodorus Siculus states that Osiris was born from an Egg, like Brahmâ. From Leda’s Egg, Apollo and Latona were born, and also Castor and Pollux, the bright Gemini. And though the Buddhists do not attribute the same origin to their Founder, yet, no more than the ancient Egyptians or the modern Brâhmans, do they eat eggs, lest they should destroy the germ of life latent in them, and thereby commit sin. The Chinese believe that their First Man was born from an Egg, which Tien dropped down from Heaven to Earth into the Waters.578 This egg-symbol is still regarded by some as representing the idea of the origin of life, which is a scientific truth, though the human ovum is invisible to the naked eye. Therefore we see respect shown to it from the remotest antiquity, by the Greeks, Phœnicians, Romans, the [pg 393]Japanese, and the Siamese, the North and South American tribes, and even the savages of the remotest islands.

With the Egyptians, the Concealed God was Ammon or Mon, the “Hidden”, the Supreme Spirit. All their Gods were dual—the scientific Reality for the sanctuary; its double, the fabulous and mythical Entity, for the masses. For instance, as observed in the Section “Chaos, Theos, Kosmos,” the Elder Horus was the Idea of the World remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in Darkness before the Creation of the World”; the Second Horus was the same Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter and assuming an actual existence.579 Horus, the “Elder,” or Haroiri, is an ancient aspect of the Solar God, contemporary with Ra and Shoo; Haroiri is often mistaken for Hor (Horsusi), Son of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptians very often represented the rising Sun under the form of Hor, the Elder, rising from a full-blown Lotus, the Universe, when the solar disk is always found on the hawk-head of that God. Haroiri is Khnoom. The same with Khnoom and Ammon, both are represented as ram-headed, and both are often confused, though their functions are different. Khnoom is the “modeller of men,” fashioning men and things out of the Mundane Egg, on a potter’s wheel; Ammon-Ra, the Generator, is the secondary aspect of the Concealed Deity. Khnoom was adored at Elephanta and Philæ,580 Ammon at Thebes. But it is Emepht, the One, Supreme Planetary Principle, who blows the Egg out of his mouth, and who is, therefore, Brahmâ. The Shadow of the Deity, Kosmic and Universal, of that which broods over and permeates the Egg with its vivifying Spirit, until the Germ contained in it is ripe, was the Mystery God whose name was unpronounceable. It is Ptah, however, “he who opens,” the opener of Life and Death,581 who proceeds from the Egg of the World to begin his dual work.582

According to the Greeks, the phantom form of the Chemis (Chemi, ancient Egypt) which floats on the Ethereal Waves of the Empyrean Sphere, was called into being by Horus-Apollo, the Sun-God, who caused it to evolve out of the Mundane Egg.

The Brahmânda Purâna contains fully the mystery about Brahmâ’s Golden Egg; and this is why, perhaps, it is inaccessible to the Orientalists, [pg 394]who say that this Purâna, like the Skanda, is “no longer procurable in a collective body,” but “is represented by a variety of Khandas and Mâhâtmyas professing to be derived from it.” The Brahmânda Purâna is described as “that which has declared in 12,200 verses, the magnificence of the Egg of Brahmâ, and in which an account of the future Kalpas is contained, as revealed by Brahmâ.”583 Quite so, and much more, perchance.

In the Scandinavian Cosmogony, placed by Professor Max Müller, in point of time, as “far anterior to the Vedas,” in the poem of Wöluspa, the Song of the Prophetess, the Mundane Egg is again discovered in the Phantom-Germ of the Universe, which is represented as lying in the Ginnungagap, the Cup of Illusion, Mâyâ, the Boundless and Void Abyss. In this World’s Matrix, formerly a region of night and desolation, Nefelheim, the Mist-Place, the nebular, as it is called now, in the Astral Light, dropped a Ray of Cold Light which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible blew a scorching Wind which dissolved the frozen Waters and cleared the Mist. These Waters (Chaos), called the Streams of Eliwagar, distilling in vivifying drops, fell down and created the Earth and the Giant Ymir, who had only the “semblance of man” (the Heavenly Man), and the Cow, Audumla (the “Mother,” Astral Light or Cosmic Soul), from whose udder flowed four streams of milk—the four cardinal points; the four heads of the four rivers of Eden, etc.—which “four” are symbolized by the Cube in all its various and mystical meanings.

The Christians—especially the Greek and Latin Churches—have fully adopted the symbol, and see in it a commemoration of life eternal, of salvation and of resurrection. This is found in, and corroborated by, the time-honoured custom of exchanging “Easter Eggs.” From the Anguinum, the “Egg” of the Pagan Druid, whose name alone made Rome tremble with fear, to the red Easter Egg of the Slavonian peasant, a cycle has passed. And yet, whether in civilized Europe, or among the abject savages of Central America, we find the same archaic, primitive thought, if we will only search for it, and do not—in the haughtiness of our fancied mental and physical superiority—disfigure the original idea of the symbol.

Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.

This is the name given to the Periods called Manvantara (Manuantara, or between the Manus) and Pralaya, or Dissolution; one referring to the Active Periods of the Universe; the other to its times of relative and complete Rest, whether they occur at the end of a Day or an Age, or Life, of Brahmâ. These Periods, which follow each other in regular succession, are also called Small and Great Kalpas, the Minor and the Mahâ Kalpas; though, properly speaking, the Mahâ Kalpa is never a Day, but a whole Life or Age of Brahmâ, for it is said in the Brahma Vaivarta: “Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the Life of Brahmâ. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous.” In sober truth they are infinite; for they have never had a commencement; or, in other words, there never was a first Kalpa, nor will there ever be a last, in Eternity.

One Parârdha, or half of the existence of Brahmâ, in the ordinary acceptation of this measure of time, has already expired in the present Mahâ Kalpa; the last Kalpa was the Padma, or that of the Golden Lotus; the present one is the Varâha,584 the “Boar” Incarnation, or Avatâra.

One thing is to be especially noted by the scholar who studies the Hindû religion from the Puranâs. He must never take the statements found therein literally, and in one sense only; and those especially, which concern the Manvantaras, or Kalpas, have to be understood in their several references. Thus these Ages relate, in the same language, to both the great and the small periods, to Mahâ Kalpas and to Minor Cycles. The Matsya, or Fish Avatâra, happened before the Varâha or Boar Avatâra; the allegories, therefore, must relate to both the Padma and the present Manvantara, and also to the Minor Cycles which have occurred since the reäppearance of our Chain of Worlds and the Earth. And as the Matsya Avatâra of Vishnu and Vaivasvata’s Deluge are correctly connected with an event that happened on our Earth during this Round, it is evident that, while it may relate to pre-cosmic events, pre-cosmic in the sense of our Cosmos, or Solar System, it has reference, in our case, to a distant geological period. Not even Esoteric Philosophy can claim to know, except by analogical inference, that which took place before the reäppearance of our Solar System, and previous to the last Mahâ Pralaya. But it teaches distinctly, that after the first geological disturbance of the Earth’s axis, which ended in the sweeping down to the bottom of the seas of the whole Second Continent, with its primeval races—of which successive Continents, or “Earths,” Atlantis was the fourth—there came another disturbance owing to the axis again resuming its previous degree of inclination as rapidly as it had changed it: when the Earth was indeed once more raised out of the waters—as above, so below, and vice versâ. There were “Gods” on Earth in those days; Gods, and not men, as we know them now, says the tradition. As will be shown in Volume II, the computation of periods, in exoteric Hindûism, refers to both the great cosmic and the small terrestrial events and cataclysms, and the same may be demonstrated in respect to names. For instance, the name Yudishthira—the first king of the Sacae or Shakas, who opens the Kali Yuga Era, which has to last 432,000 years, “an actual king who lived 3,102 years b.c.”—applies also to the Great Deluge, at the time of the first sinking of Atlantis. He is the “Yudishthira,585 born on the mountain of the hundred peaks, at the extremity of the world, beyond which nobody can [pg 397]go” and “immediately after the flood.”586 We know of no “Flood” 3,102 years b.c., not even that of Noah, for, agreeably with Judæo-Christian chronology, it took place 2,349 years b.c.

This relates to an esoteric division of time and a mystery explained elsewhere, and may therefore be left aside for the present. Suffice it to remark, at this juncture, that all the efforts of imagination of the Wilfords, Bentleys, and other would-be Œdipuses of esoteric Hindû Chronology, have sadly failed. No computation of either the Four Ages, or the Manvantaras, has ever yet been unriddled by our very learned Orientalists, who have therefore cut the Gordian Knot by proclaiming the whole “a figment of the Brâhmanical brain.” So be it, and may the great scholars rest in peace! This “figment” is given at the end of the Commentaries on Stanza II of the Anthropogenesis, in Volume II, with Esoteric additions.

Let us see, however, what were the three kinds of Pralayas, and what is the popular belief about them. For once it agrees with Esotericism.

Of the Pralaya, before which fourteen Manvantaras elapse, having over them as many presiding Manus, and at whose close occurs the Incidental, or Brahmâ’s Dissolution, it is said in Vishnu Purâna, in condensed paraphrase:

There are many kinds of Pralaya, but three chief periods are specially mentioned in old Hindû books. The first of these, as Wilson shows, is called Naimittika,588 “Occasional” or “Incidental,” caused by the intervals of Brahmâ’s Days; it is the destruction of creatures, of all that lives and has a form, but not of the substance, which remains in [pg 398]statu quo till the new Dawn after that Night. The second is called Prâkritika, and occurs at the end of the Age or Life of Brahmâ, when everything that exists is resolved into the Primal Element, to be remodelled at the end of that longer Night. The third, Âtyantika, does not concern the Worlds, or the Universe, but only the Individualities of some people. It is thus the Individual Pralaya, or Nirvâna, after having reached which, there is no more future existence possible, no rebirth till after the Mahâ Pralaya. The latter Night—lasting as it does 311,040,000,000,000 years, with the possibility also of being almost doubled in the case of the lucky Jîvanmukta who reaches Nirvâna at an early period of a Manvantara—is long enough to be regarded as eternal, if not endless. The Bhâgavata Purâna589 speaks of a fourth kind of Pralaya, the Nitya, or Constant Dissolution, and explains it as the change which takes place imperceptibly in everything in this Universe from the globe down to the atom, without cessation. It is growth and decay—life and death.

When the Mahâ Pralaya arrives, the inhabitants of Svar-loka, the Upper Sphere, disturbed by the conflagration, seek refuge “with the Pitris, their Progenitors, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the various orders of Celestial Spirits and the Gods, in Mahar-loka.” When the latter is reached also, the whole of the above enumerated beings migrate in their turn from Mahar-loka, and repair to Jana-loka, “in their subtile forms, destined to become reëmbodied, in similar capacities as their former, when the world is renewed at the beginning of the succeeding Kalpa.”590

This is what we call in the Esoteric Doctrine a Solar Pralaya. When the Waters have reached the region of the Seven Rishis, and the World, our Solar System, is one Ocean, they stop. The Breath of Vishnu becomes a strong Wind, which blows for another hundred Divine Years until all clouds are dispersed. The wind is then reäbsorbed: and That—

This is “Incidental” Pralaya; what is the Elemental (Prâkritika) Dissolution? Parâshara describes it to Maitreya as follows:

This is the final Pralaya599—the Death of Kosmos; after which its Spirit rests in Nirvâna, or in That for which there is neither Day nor Night. All the other Pralayas are periodical, and follow the Manvantaras in regular succession, as the night follows the day of every human creature, animal, and plant. The Cycle of Creation of the Lives of Kosmos is run down; the energy of the Manifested “Word” having its growth, culmination, and decrease, as have all things temporary, however long their duration. The Creative Force is Eternal as noumenal; as a phenomenal manifestation, in its aspects, it has a [pg 401]beginning and must, therefore, have an end. During that interval, it has its Periods of Activity and its Periods of Rest. And these are the Days and Nights of Brahmâ. But Brahman, the Noumenon, never rests, as It never changes, but ever is, though It cannot be said to be anywhere.

The Jewish Kabalists felt the necessity of this immutability in an eternal, infinite Deity, and therefore applied the same thought to the anthropomorphic God. The idea is poetical, and very appropriate in its application. In the Zohar we read as follows:

“Before my time” is very suggestive. It shows the God of Moses to be only a temporary substitute, like Brahmâ, the male, a substitute and an aspect of That which is immutable, and which, therefore, can take no part in the Days, or Nights, nor have any concern whatever with reäction or dissolution.

While the Eastern Occultists have seven modes of interpretation, the Jews have only four; namely, the real-mystical, the allegorical, the moral, and the literal or Pashut. The latter is the key of the exoteric Churches and not worth discussion. Here are several sentences, which, read in the first, or mystical key, show the identity of the foundations of construction in every Scripture. They are given in Isaac Myer’s excellent book on the Kabalistic works, which he seems to have well studied. I quote verbatim.

The “Sephiroth of Construction” are the six Dhyân Chohans, or Manus, or Prajâpatis, synthesized by the seventh “B’raisheeth,” the First Emanation, or Logos, and who are called, therefore, the Builders of the Lower or Physical Universe, all belonging Below. These Six [6-pointed star with middle dot], whose essence is of the Seventh, are the Upâdhi, the Base or Fundamental Stone, on which the Objective Universe is built, the Noumenoi of all things. Hence they are, at the same time, the Forces of Nature; the Seven Angels of the Presence; the Sixth and Seventh Principles in Man; the spirito-psycho-physical Spheres of the Septenary Chain, the Root Races, etc. They all “depend upon the Seven Forms of the Cranium” up to the Highest. The “Second ‘Earth’ does not come into calculation,” because it is no Earth, but the Chaos, or Abyss of Space, in which rested the Paradigmatic, or Model Universe, in the Ideation of the Over-Soul, brooding over it. The term “Curse” is here very misleading, for it means simply Doom or Destiny, or that fatality which sent it forth into the objective state. This is shown by that “Earth,” under the “Curse,” being described as “without form and void,” in whose abysmal depths the “Breath” of the Elohim, or collective Logoi, produced, or so to say photographed, the first Divine Ideation of the things to be. This process is repeated after every Pralaya before the beginnings of a new Manvantara, or Period of sentient individual Being. “Thirteen depend on thirteen Forms,” refers to the thirteen Periods, personified by the thirteen Manus, with Svâyambhuva, the fourteenth—13, instead of 14, being an additional veil—those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a Mahâ Yuga, a Day of Brahmâ. These thirteen-fourteen of the objective Universe depend on the thirteen-fourteen paradigmatic, ideal Forms. The meaning of the “six thousand Years” which “hang in the first six Words,” has again to be sought in the Indian Wisdom. They refer to the primordial six (seven) “Kings of Edom,” who typify the Worlds, or Spheres, of our Chain, during the First Round, as well as the primordial men of this Round. They are the septenary pre-Adamic First Root-Race, or they who existed before the Third, Separated Race. As they were Shadows, and senseless, for they had not yet eaten of the [pg 403]fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they could not see the Parzuphim, or “Face could not see Face”; that is to say, primeval men were “unconscious.” “Therefore, the primordial (seven) Kings died,” i.e., were destroyed.602 Now, who are these Kings? They are the Kings who are the “Seven Rishis, certain (secondary) divinities, Indra [Shakra], Manu, and the Kings his Sons [who] are created and perish at one period” as Vishnu Purâna tells us.603 For the seventh “thousand,” which is not the millennium of exoteric Christianity, but that of Anthropogenesis, represents both the “Seventh Period of Creation,” that of physical man, according to Vishnu Purâna, and the Seventh Principle, both macrocosmic and microcosmic, and also the Pralaya after the Seventh Period, the Night, which has the same duration as the Day, of Brahmâ. “It was rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours.” It is in the Thirteenth (twice six and the synthesis) that everything shall be restored, and the “six shall continue.”

Thus, the author of the Qabbalah remarks quite truly that:

Such was also the firm conviction of C. W. King, the author of The Gnostics and Their Remains.

Vâmadeva Modelyar describes the coming Night most poetically. Though it is given in Isis Unveiled, it is worthy of repetition.

As the Satya Yuga is always the first in the series of the Four Ages or Yugas, so the Kali ever comes the last. The Kali Yuga now reigns supreme in India, and it seems to coincide with that of the Western Age. Anyhow, it is curious to see how prophetic in almost all things was the writer of Vishnu Purâna, when foretelling to Maitreya some of the dark influences and sins of this Kali Yuga. For after saying that the “barbarians” will be masters of the banks of the Indus, of Chandrabhâgâ and Kâshmîra, he adds:

Two persons, Devâpi, of the race of Kuru, and Maru [Moru], of the family of Ikshvâku, … continue alive throughout the Four Ages, residing at … Kalâpa.608 They will return hither, in the beginning of the Krita Age609 … Maru [Moru]610 the son of Shîghra, through the power of devotion (Yoga) is still living … and will be the restorer of the Kshattriya race of the Solar Dynasty.611

Whether right or wrong with regard to the latter prophecy, the “blessings” of Kali Yuga are well described, and fit in admirably even with that which one sees and hears in Europe and other civilized and Christian lands in the full XIXth, and at the dawn of the XXth century of our great “Era of Enlightenment.”

Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.

There are no ancient symbols without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them, their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to Nature and her Gods, and represents the Abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both Spiritual and Physical Nature. It was held as sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Âryan Hindûs, the Egyptians, and by the Buddhists after them. It was revered in China and Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who made of it a messenger, as do now the Christians, who have replaced it with the water-lily.

In the Christian religion, in every picture of the Annunciation, Gabriel, the Archangel, appears to the Virgin Mary, holding in his hand a spray of water-lilies. This spray, typifying Fire and Water, or the idea of creation and generation, symbolizes precisely the same idea as the Lotus, in the hand of the Bodhisattva who announces to Mahâ-Mâyâ, Gautama’s mother, the birth of Buddha, the world’s Saviour. Thus also, were Osiris and Horus constantly represented by the Egyptians in association with the Lotus-flower, both being Sun-Gods or Gods of Fire; just as the Holy Ghost is still typified by “tongues of fire,” in the Acts.

It had, and still has, its mystic meaning, which is identical in every nation on earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones.612 With the Hindûs, the Lotus is the emblem of the productive power of Nature, through the agency of Fire and Water, or Spirit and Matter. “O Thou [pg 407]Eternal! I see Brahm, the Creator, enthroned in thee above the Lotus!” says a verse in the Bhagavad Gîtâ. And Sir W. Jones shows, as already noted in the Stanzas, that the seeds of the Lotus, even before they germinate, contain perfectly-formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what they will become one day, as perfected plants. The Lotus, in India, is the symbol of prolific Earth and, what is more, of Mount Meru. The four Angels or Genii of the four quarters of Heaven, the Mahârâjahs of the Stanzas, stand each on a Lotus. The Lotus is the two-fold type of the Divine and Human Hermaphrodite, being so to say, of dual sex.

With the Hindûs, the Spirit of Fire or Heat—which stirs up, fructifies, and develops into concrete form, from its ideal prototype, everything which is born of Water, or Primordial Earth—evolved Brahmâ. The Lotus-flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu’s navel, the God who rests in the Waters of Space on the Serpent of Infinity, is the most graphic symbol ever yet made. It is the Universe evolving from the Central Sun, the Point, the ever-concealed Germ. Lakshmî, who is the female aspect of Vishnu, and who is also called Padma, the Lotus, in the Râmâyana, is likewise shown floating on a Lotus-flower, at the “Creation,” and during the “Churning of the Ocean” of Space, as also springing from the “Sea of Milk,” like Venus-Aphrodite from the Foam of the Ocean.

sings an English Orientalist and poet, Sir Monier Williams.

The underlying idea, in this symbol, is very beautiful, and, furthermore, shows an identical parentage in all the religious systems. Whether as the Lotus or water-lily, it signifies one and the same philosophical idea; namely, the Emanation of the Objective from the Subjective, Divine Ideation passing from the abstract into the concrete, or visible form. For, as soon as Darkness, or rather that which is “Darkness” for ignorance, has disappeared in its own realm of Eternal Light, leaving behind itself only its Divine Manifested Ideation, the Creative Logoi have their understanding opened, and they see in the Ideal World, hitherto concealed in the Divine Thought, the archetypal forms of all, and proceed to copy and build, or fashion, upon these models, forms evanescent and transcendent.

At this stage of Action, the Demiurge is not yet the Architect. [pg 408]Born in the Twilight of Action, he has yet to first perceive the Plan, to realize the Ideal Forms, which lie buried in the Bosom of Eternal Ideation, just as the future lotus-leaves, the immaculate petals, are concealed within the seed of that plant.

In Esoteric Philosophy the Demiurge, or Logos, regarded as the Creator, is simply an abstract term, an idea, like the word “army.” As the latter is the all-embracing term for a body of active forces, or working units—soldiers, so is the Demiurge the qualitative compound of a multitude of Creators or Builders. Burnouf, the great Orientalist, seized the idea perfectly, when he said that Brahmâ does not create the Earth, any more than the rest of the Universe.

In a chapter of the Book of the Dead, called “Transformation into the Lotus,” the God, figured as a head emerging from this flower, exclaims:

The lotus-idea may be traced even in the Elohistic first chapter of Genesis, as stated in Isis Unveiled. It is to this idea that we must look for the origin and explanation of the verse in the Jewish Cosmogony which reads: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth … the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.”614 In all the primitive religions, the Creative God is the “Son of the Father,” that is to say, his Thought made visible; and before the Christian era, from the Trimûrti of the Hindûs down to the three Kabalistic Heads of the scriptures, as explained by the Jews, the Triune Godhead of each nation was fully defined and substantiated, in its allegories.

Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern peoples. But when applied to practical and exoteric worship, which had also its esoteric symbology, the Lotus, in time, became the carrier and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever escaped having the sexual element in it; and to this day it soils the moral beauty of the root idea of symbology. The [pg 409]following is quoted from the same Kabalistic MS. which we have already cited on several occasions:

This is a correct rendering of the underlying ideas of old, of the purely pantheistic conceptions, impersonal and reverential, of the archaic philosophers of the prehistoric ages. It is not so, however, when applied to sinful humanity, to the gross ideas attached to personality. Therefore, no pantheistic philosopher would fail to find the remarks that follow the above, and which represent the anthropomorphism of Judean symbology, other than dangerous for the sacredness of true religion, and fitting only for our materialistic age, which is the direct outcome and result of that anthropomorphic character. For this is the key-note to the entire spirit and essence of the Old [pg 410]Testament, as the MS. states, treating of the symbolism of the art-speech of the Bible:

No such thought, “carried to the extreme,” ever existed among the old primitive Âryans. This is proven by the fact that, in the Vedic period, their women were not placed apart from men in penetralia, or Zenanas. This seclusion began when the Mahommedans—the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism, after Christian ecclesiasticism—had conquered the land and gradually enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindûs. The pre- and post-Vedic woman was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the religious symbology of the early Âryans. The idea and application are purely Semitic. This is corroborated by the writer of the said intensely learned and Kabalistic revelation, when he closes the above-quoted passages by adding:

Most decidedly not. Rather never give a thought to it and leave it for ever nameless, as the early Pantheists did, than degrade the sacredness of that Ideal of Ideals, by dragging down its symbols into such [pg 411]anthropomorphic forms! Here again one perceives the immense chasm between Âryan and Semitic religious thought, the two opposite poles, Sincerity and Concealment. With the Brâhmans, who have never invested the natural procreative functions of mankind with an “original sin” element, it is a religious duty to have a son. A Brâhman, in days of old, having accomplished his mission of human creator, retired to the jungle, and passed the rest of his days in religious meditation. He had accomplished his duty to nature, as mortal man and its co-worker, and henceforth gave all his thoughts to the spiritual and immortal portion of himself, regarding the terrestrial as a mere illusion, an evanescent dream—which, indeed it is. With the Semite, it was different. He invented a temptation of flesh in a garden of Eden, and showed his God—esoterically, the Tempter and the Ruler of Nature—cursing for ever an act, which was in the logical programme of that Nature.619 All this exoterically, as in the cloak and dead-letter of Genesis and the rest. At the same time, esoterically, he regarded the supposed sin and fall as an act so sacred, as to choose the organ, the perpetrator of the original sin, as the fittest and most sacred symbol to represent that God, who is shown as branding its entering into function as disobedience and everlasting sin!

Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind! And this paradoxical element, minus its innermost significance, has now passed entirely into Christian theology and dogma!

Whether the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the Hebrew Testament, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, while the others remained ignorant of the secret, is for posterity to decide. One thing, at any rate, is certain. As the Esotericism of the New Testament agrees perfectly with that of the Hebrew Mosaic Books; and since, at the same time, a number of purely Egyptian symbols and Pagan dogmas in general—the Trinity, for example—have been copied by, and incorporated into, the Synoptics and St. John, it becomes evident that the identity of those symbols was known to the writers of the New Testament, whoever they may have been. They must have been also aware of the priority of the Egyptian Esotericism, since they have adopted several symbols which typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs, in their outward and inward meaning, and which are not to be [pg 412]found in the Jewish Canon. One of these is the water-lily in the hands of the Archangel, in the early representations of his appearance to the Virgin Mary; and these symbolical images are preserved to this day in the iconography of the Greek and Roman Churches. Thus Water, Fire and the Cross, as well as the Dove, the Lamb and other Sacred Animals, with all their combinations, esoterically yield an identical meaning, and must have been accepted as an improvement upon Judaism pure and simple.

For the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin are purely Âryan, though they became common property during the branching off of the Fifth Race. To give an example; letters, as well as numbers, were all mystic, whether in combination, or taken separately. The most sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or androgyne, and is made to symbolize Water in its origin, the Great Deep. It is a mystic letter in all languages, Eastern and Western, and stands as a glyph for the waves, thus [three triangles]. In the Âryan Esotericism, as in the Semitic, this letter has always stood for the Waters. In Sanskrit, for instance, Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac, means a Crocodile, or rather an aquatic monster associated always with Water. The letter Ma is equivalent to, and corresponds with, the number 5, which is composed of a Binary, the symbol of the two sexes separated, and of the Ternary, the symbol of the Third Life, the progeny of the Binary. This, again, is often symbolized by a Pentagon, the latter being a sacred sign, a divine Monogram. Maitreya is the secret name of the Fifth Buddha, and the Kalkî Avatâra of the Brâhmans, the last Messiah who will come at the culmination of the Great Cycle. It is also the initial letter of the Greek Metis, or Divine Wisdom; of Mimra, the Word, or Logos; and of Mithras, the Mihr, the Monad Mystery. All these are born in, and from, the Great Deep, and are the Sons of Mâyâ, the “Mother”; in Egypt, Moot; in Greece, Minerva, Divine Wisdom; of Mary, or Miriam, Myrrha, etc., the Mother of the Christian Logos; and of Mâyâ, the Mother of Buddha. Mâdhava and Mâdhavî are the titles of the most important Gods and Goddesses of the Hindû Pantheon. Finally, Mandala is, in Sanskrit, a “Circle,” or an Orb, also the ten divisions of the Rig Veda. The most sacred names in India generally begin with this letter, from Mahat, the first manifested Intellect, and Mandara, the great mountain used by the Gods to churn the Ocean, down to Mandâkinî, the heavenly Gangâ, or Ganges, Manu, etc., etc.

Will this be called a coincidence? A strange one is it then, indeed, when we see even Moses, found in the Water of the Nile, with the symbolical consonant in his name. And Pharaoh’s daughter “called his name Moses; and she said, Because I drew him out of the Water.”620 Besides which, the Hebrew sacred name of God, applied to this letter M, is Meborach, the “Holy” or the “Blessed,” and the name for the Water of the Flood is Mbul. A reminder of the “Three Maries” at the Crucifixion, and their connection with Mare, the Sea, or Water, may close these examples. This is why, in Judaism and Christianity, the Messiah is always connected with Water, Baptism; and also with the Fishes, the sign of the Zodiac called Mînam in Sanskrit, and even with the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra, and the Lotus, the symbol of the womb, or with the water-lily, which has the same signification.

In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive symbols and emblems of the objects exhumed, the oftener are Lotus-flowers and Water found in connection with the Solar Gods. The God Khnoom, the Moist Power, or Water, as Thales taught, being the principle of all things, sits on a throne enshrined in a Lotus. The God Bes stands on a Lotus, ready to devour his progeny. Thot, the God of Mystery and Wisdom, the sacred Scribe of Amenti, wearing the solar disk as head gear, sits with a bull’s head—the sacred bull of Mendes being a form of Thot—and a human body, on a full blown Lotus. Finally, it is the Goddess Hiqit, under her shape of a frog, who rests on the Lotus, thus showing her connection with water. And it is from the unpoetical shape of this frog-symbol, undeniably the glyph of the most ancient of the Egyptian Deities, that the Egyptologists have been vainly trying to unravel the mystery and functions of the Goddess. Its adoption in the Church, by the early Christians, shows that they knew it better than our modern Orientalists. The “frog or toad Goddess” was one of the chief Cosmic Deities connected with Creation, on account of this animal’s amphibious nature, and chiefly because of its apparent resurrection, after long ages of solitary life, enshrined in old walls, in rocks, etc. She not only participated in the organization of the World, together with Khnoom, but was also connected with the dogma of resurrection.621 There must have been some very profound and [pg 414]sacred meaning attached to this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoölatry, the early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad, enshrined in a Lotus-flower, or simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the Church-lamps, on which were engraved the words, “Ἐγώ εἰμι ἀναστάσις”—I am the resurrection.622 These frog-Goddesses are also found on all the mummies.

Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.

This archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most philosophical. The ancient Greeks brought it into prominence, and the modern poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night, riding in the majesty of her peerless light in Heaven, throwing all, even Hesperus, into darkness, and spreading her silver mantle over the whole Sidereal World, has ever been a favourite theme with all the poets of Christendom, from Milton and Shakespeare down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent lamp of night, with her suite of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the imagination of the profane. Until lately, Religion and Science had nought to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold chaste Moon, she, who, in the words of Shelley:

stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the Giver of Life to the whole Planetary System; the Moon is the Giver of Life to our Globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen, and she is the King. She was King Soma before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is preëminently the Deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since the last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the Pagan Temples. For such Fathers as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus, the Moon was Jehovah’s living symbol; the Giver of Life and the Giver of Death, the Disposer of Being—in our World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and life; [pg 416]with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the Goddess of Death, who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this; as the personified Moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana-Hecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps, three heads on one neck,623 like Brahmâ-Vishnu-Shiva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in the seventh day, or Sabbath, came to the Jews from antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the Moon.

It is worth the trouble of presenting, in this work, a bird’s-eye view of the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship, in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact Science, which rejects all tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Âryan Hindû religious philosophy is the more ancient—the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter—does not much matter, in this instance, as the Lunar and Solar “worship” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world; with some openly, with others—as, for instance, in Christian symbology—secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, who was the Moon in one sense, just as Osiris was the Sun, and is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the Goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubastis, which went into deep mourning on the death of the sacred cats, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in that city of mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I, and no one has better described it than Mr. Gerald Massey, in his Lectures and in The Natural Genesis. The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in their growth and decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding in the Moon, under the shape of a cat, when she was seeking, in company with other Deities, to escape the pursuit of Typhon, as related in the [pg 417]Metamorphoses of Ovid. The Moon, in Egypt, was both the “Eye of Horns” and the “Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.

The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolize the Sun and Moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is really more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, and of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, who say that:

The Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the caduceus, the crescent, or the lotus, is a glyph of the “philosophical” Mercury; but when seen with a reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanumâna filled the same office with Râma.

Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsîs, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindû mythology and history based upon, and interblended with, these two worships, but so is even the Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day, it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. Indeed, the difference between the Aryan Hindû and the Âryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindûs are proud of calling themselves Sûryavanshas and Chandravanshas, of the Solar and Lunar Dynasties. The Christians pretend to regard this as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon Solar and Lunar worship. It is vain and useless for the Protestants to exclaim against the Roman Catholics for their “Mariolatry,” based on the ancient cult of lunar Goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah, preëminently a lunar God; and when both Churches have accepted in their theologies the Sun-Christ and the Lunar Trinity.

What is known of Chaldean Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian God, Sin, called by the Greeks Deus Lunus, is very little; and that little is apt to mislead the profane student, who fails to grasp the esoteric significance of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers—for those who were initiated were pledged to silence—the Chaldeans were the worshippers of the Moon under her, and his, various names, just as were the Jews, who came after them.

In the unpublished MS. on the Art-Speech, already mentioned, [pg 418]giving a key to the formation of the ancient symbolical language, a logical raison d’être is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, forcibly becomes a proven fact in the history of religious evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient symbology. Thus, he says:

On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function, possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that “the connection between the two kinds of phenomena … became fixed in common or popular usage.” He finds it in:

This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. [pg 420]The key that opens the mystery of Theogony, or the evolution of the manvantaric Gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. There, all is mystical and divine. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a generative God, preferred to ignore the higher Hierarchies, and have made their Patriarchs of some of these zodiacal constellations and planetary Gods, thus euhemerizing the purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. The MS., from which the above is extracted, explains very clearly to what Hierarchy of Gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was; for it shows, in clear language, that which the writer has always insisted upon, namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves, was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in Nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret God of the Kabalists, Ain Suph, a conception as grand as Parabrahman in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical ideas. But it is not the Kabalah of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Shimeon Ben Yochaï, which were as metaphysical and philosophical as any could be. And how many are there among the students of the Kabalah who know anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations? Let us glance at the idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the Ever-Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.

This “double womb” also shows the duality of the idea carried from the highest or spiritual down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and limited by the Jews to the latter. With them, therefore, the number seven has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty rituals; take, for instance, their Sabbath, the seventh day sacred to their Deity, the Moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. But, with other nations, the number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of Cycles, Cosmic Planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a Boundless Whole, whose first upper Triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man. While other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this number solely in the Moon, and based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MS. just quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews, that:

This double number—male and female—is symbolized also in some well-known idols; for instance:

“Jehovah,” in its best aspect is Binah, the “Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or Holy Spirit,” and therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, than of his Father; that “Mother, being the Latin Mare,” the Sea, is here, also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or “Star of the Sea.”

The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians—the Chandravanshas or Indovanshas, the Lunar Kings, whom tradition shows reigning at Prayâga (Allahabad), ages before our era—had come from India, and brought with them the worship of their forefathers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects the Virgin Mary, the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks, with the Moon.

Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud, and loudly confess to it. In a Mémoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says:

Surely nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald Massey has said in his Lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern”:

A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything else ever did the true character of Jehovah, or YHVH, in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of Ibn Gebirol’s Kabalah, translated by Isaac Myer.

Then the author explains that the feminine Sephira, Binah, is termed by the Kabalists the Great Sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the Female Power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian Theology to be the Serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal Hé, and Eve. This Yah-hovah then, or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son—on the material plane, and in the purely physical World; Deus and Demon, at one and the same time; the Sun and Moon, Good and Evil, God and Demon.

Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if, astronomically, the Moon is one of the seven planets of the Ancient World, in Theogony she is one of the Regents thereof—with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the [pg 424]former referring to her under the name of one of their Archangels, and the latter under that of one of their Gods.

Therefore the meaning of the “fairy tale,” translated by Chwolsohn from the Arabic translation of an old Chaldean MS., of Qû-tâmy being instructed by the idol of the Moon, is easily understood. Seldenus tells us the secret, as well as Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed.633 The worshippers of the Teraphim, or the Jewish Oracles, “carved images, and claimed that the light of the principal stars [planets] permeating these through and through, the Angelic Virtues [or the Regents of the stars and planets] conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky, and called ἀλεξητήριοι, or the Tutelary Gods. Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοί, or diviners by the στοιχεῖα.634

It is such sentences, however, in the Nabathean Agriculture, which have frightened the men of Science, and made them proclaim the work “either an apocryphon, or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants metaphorically tore it to pieces; the former because “it described the worship of demons,” the latter because it was “ungodly.” Once more, all are wrong. It is not a fairy tale; and, as far as the pious Churchmen are concerned, the same worship may be shown in their Scriptures, however disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship and also the worship of the Stars and Elements can be traced, and figure in Christian Theology. These are defended by Papists, and can be stoutly denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.

Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements (Spiritus Elementorum, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων).635

But it is found now that the Planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured not only at Heliopolis by the twelve stones called “Mysteries of the Elements” (Elementorum Arcana), but also in Solomon’s Temple, and, as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at Notre Dame de Paris, where they can be seen to this day.

No symbol, even including the Sun, was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male; as, for instance, the Hindû “King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous Goddesses Diana-Luna, Ilithyia, Lucina. With the Tauri, human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar Goddess; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Colœ: Ἀρτέμιδι Ἀνάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin Goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphôs was the first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolytus wrote: Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθένων.636 This Artemis-Lochia, the Goddess that presided at conception and childbirth, is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic Deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The Goddess Τρίμορφος was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the Moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics,637 while the Orpheans explained the epithet Τρίμορφος by the three kingdoms of Nature over which she reigned. Jealous, bloodthirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the “jealous God” of the Hebrew prophets.

The whole riddle of the Solar and Lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the “Queen of Night,” that lie latent for Modern Science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern Adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the Moon was represented by the Ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic Mysteries were the Ancients than are now our modern Astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the lunar Gods and Goddesses, Nephtys or Neïth, Proserpina, Melitta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysus, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles—those of “Sons” and “Husbands” of their “Mothers”—their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system, the Gods were made to merge their functions, as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the Goddesses were identified as Wife, Mother, and Sister of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the “Sun, the [pg 426]Giver of Life,” the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, “mother,” from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all these Goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.638 Its primitive meaning, however, was Mâyâ, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as “inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “unreachable,” in the sense of illusion and unreality, as being the source and cause of spells, the personification of illusion.

In religious rites, the Moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female Goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male God in allegory and symbol, in Occult Philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Âryans, Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-Lunus and Thot-Lunus,639 were the Occult potencies of the Moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult Mystery of Mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her seven phases, in the original Esoteric division, are divided into three astronomical phenomena and four purely psychic phases. That the Moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the Moon-God—the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance—was allegorized by the Moon standing for the Genius of Evil that, for the time, triumphs over the Light and Life-giving God, the Sun; and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic were required to turn this triumph into a defeat.

It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the Third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, in which the male Moon became sacred, when, after the so-called Fall, the sexes had become separated. Deus Lunus then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to finally serve, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power for the Fourth Root Race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth, our own Race, the Lunar-solar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described æons later in the Mahâbhâratan War, which to the [pg 427]Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindûs and Occultists the historical, strife between the Sûryavanshas and the Indovanshas. Originating in the dual aspect of the Moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct Solar and Lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the Sun was for a very long time feminine and the Moon masculine; the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The Moon was called the “Lord of the Sun,” Bel-Shemesh, before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of Occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol-worship. During that period which is absent from the Mosaic books, viz., from the exile from Eden to the allegorical Flood, the Jews, with the rest of the Semites, worshipped Dayanisi, דינאישי, the “Ruler of Men,” the “Judge,” or the Sun. Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the Sun to become the “Lord God” and “Jehovah” in the Bible, yet the same Bible is full of indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah, the Sun, and Astoreth, the Moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present metaphorical element given to it. God is a “consuming fire,” appears in, and “is encompassed by fire.” It was not only in vision that Ezekiel saw the Jews “worshipping the Sun.”640 The Baal of the Israelites—the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites—was the identical “Sun-Jehovah,” and he is till now the “King of the Host of Heaven,” the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the “Queen of Heaven,” or the Moon. The “Sun of Righteousness” has only now become a metaphorical expression. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called “God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved such systems of Nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of Lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of Physiology—quite a modern science with us—Psychology, sacred Mathematics, Geometry and Metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but glyphs recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short upon a most minute and profound knowledge of Nature. As we have just said, lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it; and Soma embodies [pg 428]the triple power of the Trimûrti, though it remains unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes Soma, the Moon, produced by the Churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the Gods in another Manvantara, that is, in the pre-genetic day of our Planetary System, and the myth, which represents “the Rishis milking the Earth, whose calf was Soma, the Moon,” have a deep cosmographical meaning; for it is neither our Earth which is milked, nor was the Moon which we know the calf.641 Had our wise men of Science known as much of the mysteries of Nature as the ancient Âryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the Moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in Theogony, the Son becoming his own Father and the Mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the Ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply “the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture!”—as Renouf gravely observes.

The Ancients taught the auto-generation, so to speak, of the Gods: the One Divine Essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a Second-Self, manifested, which Second-Self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth, in an immaculate way, to everything macrocosmical and microcosmical in this Universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred Ten (10), a few pages back.

But our Orientalists, notwithstanding their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous Element in Nature, will not see it. Cramped in their researches by such ignorance, the Âryanists and Egyptologists are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes, who is supposed to be Memnon: “Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee.” And, finding the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim:

Precisely. But why throw the explanation on to an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the earlier?

This doctrine was universal, nor was it the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the Indian Avatâras are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come “to realize more clearly”642 what the “Divine Father and Son” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails to account for, and to perceive what were the functions attributed to, the feminine Principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in the Goddess Neïth, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses, when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple: “I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neïth, the great [female] producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth”—and hence is the fruit of an Immaculate Mother.

How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical—for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it—is the real distinction made between the Immaculate Virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful Mother Nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the Sun and Moon, generates and brings forth her “mind-born” Son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the Earth, the microcosmical Mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, the “First-born” (primogenitus) is indeed generated, i.e., begotten (genitus, non factus), and positively conceived and brought forth: “Virgo pariet,” explains the Latin Church. Thus does that Church drag down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “of the earth earthy,” degrades the ideal she portrays to the lowest of the anthropomorphic Goddesses of the rabble.

Truly, Neïth, Isis, Diana, etc., by whatever name she was called, was “a demiurgical Goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping on the generation of species”—the Moon, in short. Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the Moon becomes with the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,643 and both of these Goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh [pg 430]Thotmes, who stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac. The same Goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne: “The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven”; also the “Morning Star,” and the “Light of the Sea”—Stella Matutina and Lux Maris. All the Lunar Goddesses had a dual aspect; one divine, the other infernal. All were the Virgin Mothers of an immaculately born Son—the Sun. Raoul Rochette shows the Moon-Goddess of the Athenians, Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana, holding her child-son on her lap, invoked in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, the “One Mother of God,” sitting on a lion, and surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist recognizes the twelve great Gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the Apostles, or rather the Grecian Pagan prophecy thereof.

They are both right, for the Immaculate Goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older Pagan Goddesses; the number of the Apostles is that of the twelve Tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great Gods, and of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Almost every detail in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the Heathens. Semele, the Wife of Jupiter and Mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also “carried,” or made to ascend to Heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the “Queen of the World,” or the Universe, πανβασίλεια; “at the name of which,” as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal Goddesses, “all the demons tremble.”644

“Σεμέλην τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone that was found by Beger, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us, informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent “plagiarism” of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church, perpetrated by the Demon. Whether so, or vice versâ, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity between the archaic copy and the modern original.

Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when they are made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury’s remark that “the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and Venus, and that the Pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in [pg 431]honour of those Goddesses, were in a great measure transferred to the Mother of Christ,”645 the advocate of Rome answers, that such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be, and quite natural.

Verily so, since Pindar thus sings of her “assumption”: “She sits at the right hand of her Father [Jupiter], … and is more powerful than all the other (Angels or) Gods”647—a hymn likewise applied to the Virgin. St. Bernard also, quoted by Cornelius à Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise: “The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him.”648

Again the Virgin is admitted to be the Moon by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, in childbirth the verse of Virgil, “Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo,” is applied to her. “Like the Moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent saint.649

This settles the question. According to such writers as De Mirville, the more similarity there exists between the Pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The unbelieving Scientists and Academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the Satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to task. But then “they believe in nothing and reject even the Nabathean Agriculture as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “In their perverted opinion Qû-tâmy’s ‘idol of the Moon’ and the statue of the Madonna are one!” A noble Marquis, twenty-five [pg 432]years ago, wrote six huge volumes, or, as he calls them “Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of proving Roman Catholicism to be an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire Ancient World, ever since the Deluge, had, with the help of the Devil, been systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future Holy Church, which was to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co-religionist, M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum, declaring in one of his learned lectures, that neither “Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt”?

But perhaps M. Renouf intended to say that it was the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Âryans, who borrowed their ideas from the Latin Church? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship, since it all tends to show that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church is as old as the world—of Sabæanism and Astrolatry?

The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic Astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun and Moon, a worship identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “Sun-worship” of the Zoroastrians, is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as Water, Fire, Sun, Moon and Stars, and many others, is simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus, Odin got his wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline Waters of which increased his knowledge daily. “Mimir drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the World was born of Water; hence primeval Wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element.” The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “the Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things; his other eye being the Moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean.”650 But it is something more than this. Loki, the Fire-God, is said to have hidden in the Water, as well as in the Moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein. This belief that the Fire finds refuge in the Water was not limited to [pg 433]the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally adopted by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as of fire”—the breath of the Father-Sun. This Fire descends also into the Water, or the Sea—Mare, Mary. The Dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations; it was sacred to Venus, the Goddess born from the sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or Holy Spirit.

One of the most occult chapters in the Book of the Dead is that entitled, “The transformation into the God giving Light to the Path of Darkness,” wherein “Woman-Light of the Shadow” serves Thot in his retreat in the Moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested Logos of its light side; the concealed Deity or “Dark Wisdom” when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the Moon calls herself repeatedly: “The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “Woman-Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother Goddesses. As the wicked “evil” Spirits warred against the Moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without, however, being able to prevail against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Moon. Hence, also, the Moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan Theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy. The Virgin, or Madonna, stands on the mythical Satan thus symbolized, who lies crushed and powerless, under her feet. This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which, to this day in Eastern Astronomy, represent the ascending and descending nodes of the Moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the Babe in his Virgin-Mother’s arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection:

Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.

The Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of Genii, from God to man; that the relative superiority of these was decided by the degree of Light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the Serpent had to be constantly called upon and to be thanked for the signal service it had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his Being immensely by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric reason given.

It is easy to see whence is the primal idea of the dual, Janus-like character of the Serpent—the good and the bad. This symbol is one of the most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the mammal. Hence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes who think that the souls of their ancestors live under this form, and the general association of the Serpent with the Tree. The legends about the various meanings it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are allegorical, they have now passed into the class of fables based on ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when Philostratus narrates that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of Serpents in order to learn the language of all the animals, the Serpent being credited with that faculty, he certainly never meant his words to be accepted literally.651 As will be found more than once as we proceed, Serpent and Dragon were names given [pg 435]to the Wise Ones, the Initiated Adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have roasted the heart of Fafnir, the Dragon, whom he had slain, and thence to have become the wisest of men, the meaning is the same. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and magical charms; he had received the “Word” from an Initiate of the name of Fafnir, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as do many, after “passing the word.” Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics in trying to expose their “heresies.” The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for honouring the Serpent: it was because he taught the primeval men the Mysteries.652 Verily so; but they did not have Adam and Eve in the Garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is stated above. The Nâgas of the Hindû and Tibetan Adepts were human Nâgas (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the Serpent has ever been the type of consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of Immortality and Time.

The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and facts about Serpent worship, given in Mr. Gerald Massey’s Natural Genesis, are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far from covering the whole of the meanings implied. They divulge only the astronomical and physiological mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality, the Serpent was, no doubt, the “great emblem of Mystery in the Mysteries,” and was, very likely, “adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal.” It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries concerning terrestrial animal life, for as the symbol of “re-clothing and re-birth in the [universal] mysteries,” its “final phase,”653 or shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases, was not of this plane. These phases were generated in the pure realm of Ideal Light, and having accomplished the round of the whole cycle of adaptations and symbolism, the Mysteries returned from whence they had come, into the essence of immaterial causality. They belonged to the highest Gnôsis. And surely this could have never obtained its name and fame solely on account of its penetration into physiological and especially feminine functions!

As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the Tree itself; the “Tree of Life,” with which it was emblematically [pg 436]and almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a metaphysical or a physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the breaking of idols, not for truth’s sake, but to glorify the most gross matter. The revelations and interpretations in General Forlong’s Rivers of Life would have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian wisdom; and even the early Shaivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of the author of the said work. “The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that the Cross or Tau is simply a copy of the male organs in a triadic form is radically false,” writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says. But this is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern interpretations of ancient symbols. The Natural Genesis, a monumental work of research and thought, the most complete on that subject that has ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining much more than all the Symbologists who have hitherto written, does not yet go beyond the “psycho-theistic” stage of ancient thought. Nor were Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to see that their interpretations of the Tree of Life, as the Cross and Phallus, fitted the symbol only in the lowest and latest stage of the evolutionary development of the idea of the Giver of Life. It was the last and the grossest physical transformation of Nature, in animal, insect, bird and even plant; for bi-une, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction of contraries, or sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the modern Symbologists and Orientalists, from first to last, being ignorant of the real Mysteries revealed by Occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If told that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in common on this Earth, is but a passing phase, a physical means of furnishing the conditions to and producing the phenomena of life, and that it will alter with this and disappear with the next Root-Race, they would laugh at such a superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned Occultists assert this because they know it. The universe of living beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness to the various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human species and races; and the Naturalist ought to sense this truth intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate [pg 437]it. How could he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the archaic history of the Past are few and scarce, and those that men of Science come across are mistaken for finger-posts of our little era. Even so-called “universal (?) history” embraces but a tiny field in the almost boundless space of the unexplored regions of our latest, Fifth Root-Race. Hence, every fresh sign-post, every new glyph of the hoary Past that is discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on the same lines of preëxisting conceptions, and without any reference to the special cycle of thought which that particular glyph may belong to. How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!

Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly. The Tree was reversed, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the Rootless Root of All-Being. Its trunk grew and developed; crossing the planes of the Plerôma, it shot out crossways its luxuriant branches, first on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then downward till they touched the terrestrial plane. Thus, the Ashvattha Tree of Life and Being, whose destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the Bhagavadgîtâ to grow with its roots above and its branches below.654 The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the Logos; but one has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna, who, says Arjuna, is “greater than Brahman, and First Cause … the indestructible, that which is, that which is not, and what is beyond them.”655 Its boughs are Hiranyagarbha (Brahmâ or Brahman in its highest manifestations, say Shrîdhara Svâmin and Madhusûdana), the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas. The Vedas are its leaves. He only who goes beyond the roots shall never return; that is to say, shall reïncarnate no more during this Age of Brahmâ.

It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the Garden of Eden, of our Adamic Race, that this Tree became soiled by the contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of Eternity, the Heaven-Born Logos, was finally degraded. In days of old, of the Divine Dynasties on Earth, the now dreaded reptile was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss of Divine Mystery. Various were the forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols adapted to it, as it crossed the æons of Time; as from Infinite Time (Kâla) itself it fell into the space and [pg 438]time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Hindû-Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never swallows the Sun during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was sprinkled by the Waters of Life; the Great Dragon remained ever divine, so long as it was kept within the precincts of the sidereal fields. But the Tree grew and its lower boughs at last touched the Infernal Regions—our Earth. Then the Great Serpent Nidhögg—he who devours the corpses of the evil-doers in the “Hall of Misery” (human life), so soon as they are plunged into Hwergelmir, the roaring cauldron (of human passions)—gnawed the reversed World-Tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy and mighty roots, and are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk; while the Midgard Snake coiled at the bottom of the Seas, encircles the Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend herself.

The Dragons and Serpents of Antiquity are all seven-headed—one head for each Race, and “every head with seven hairs on it,” as the allegory has it. Aye, from Ananta, the Serpent of Eternity, which carries Vishnu through the Manvantara; from the original primordial Shesha, whose seven heads become “one thousand heads” in the Purânic fancy, down to the seven-headed Akkadian Serpent. This typifies the Seven Principles throughout Nature and in man; the highest or middle head being the seventh. It is not of the Mosaic, Jewish Sabbath that Philo speaks, in his Creation of the World, when saying that the world was completed “according to the perfect nature of number 6.” For:

And again:

The author of The Natural Genesis thinks that:

The author shows that it was the Goddess of the Great Bear and Mother of Time who was in Egypt from the earliest times the “Living Word,” and that Sevekh-Kronus, whose type was the Crocodile-Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word-Logos.661

The above is quite plain, but it was not the knowledge of astronomy only that led the Ancients to the process of Sevening. The primal cause goes far deeper and will be explained in its place.

The above quotations are no digressions. They are brought forward as showing (a) the reason why a full Initiate was called a Dragon, a Snake, a Nâga; and (b) that our septenary division was used by the priests of the earliest dynasties in Egypt, for the same reason, and on [pg 440]the same basis, as by us. This needs further elucidation, however. As already stated, what Mr. Gerald Massey calls the Four Genii of the four cardinal points; and the Chinese, the Black Warrior, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Azure Dragon, are called in the Secret Books, the “Four Hidden Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Celestial Nâgas.” Now, the seven-headed or septenary Dragon-Logos is shown to have, in course of time, been split up, so to speak, into four heptanomic parts or twenty-eight portions. Each week has a distinct Occult character in the lunar month; each day of the twenty-eight has its special characteristics; for each of the twelve constellations, whether separately or in combination with other signs, has an Occult influence either for good or for evil. This represents the sum of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth; yet few are those who acquire it, and still fewer are the wise men who get to the root of knowledge symbolized by the great Root-Dragon, the Spiritual Logos of these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of Dragons, and they are the “Arhats of the Four Truths of the Twenty-eight Faculties,” or attributes, and have always been so called.

The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or Magi, one had to master the science or knowledge of the periods of the Seven Rectors of the World, in whom is all wisdom. And Jamblichus is credited with another version, which does not, however, alter the meaning, for he says:

The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents. They are “charmers.” They hypnotize the bird with their eye, and man himself very often does not overcome their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.

The Crocodile is the Egyptian Dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the Sun in a Ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a Crocodile, “to show the motion of the Sun in the Moist (Space).”663 The Crocodile was, moreover, the symbol of Lower Egypt herself, the Lower being the more swampy of the two [pg 441]countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the Sun in the Ship on the Ether of Space meant that the Hermetic Matter is the principle, or basis, of Gold, or again the philosophical Sun; the Water, within which the Crocodile is swimming, is that Water, or Matter, made liquid; the Ship herself, finally, representing the Vessel of Nature, in which the Sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot, because it is the Sun which conducts the work by his action upon the Moist or Mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.

The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only during the Middle Ages. The early Christians as well as the Ophite Gnostics, had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent, the Agathodæmon and the Kakodæmon. This is demonstrated by the writings of Marcus, Valentinus, and many others, and especially in Pistis-Sophia—certainly a document of the earliest centuries of Christianity. On the marble sarcophagus of a tomb, discovered in 1852 near the Porta Pia, one sees the scene of the adoration of the Magi, “or else,” remarks the late C. W. King, in The Gnostics and their Remains, “the prototype of that scene, the ‘Birth of the New Sun’.” The mosaic floor exhibited a curious design which might have represented either Isis suckling the babe Harpocrates, or the Madonna nursing the infant Jesus. In the smaller sarcophagi that surrounded the larger one, many leaden plates rolled like scrolls were found, eleven of which can still be deciphered. The contents of these ought to be regarded as final proof of a much-vexed question, for they show that either the early Christians, up to the VIth Century, were bonâ fide Pagans, or that dogmatic Christianity was borrowed wholesale, and passed in full into the Christian Church—Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile and all.

And this “true and perfect Serpent” is the seven-lettered God who is now credited with being Jehovah, and Jesus one with him. To this seven-vowelled God the candidate for Initiation is sent by the “First Mystery,” in the Pistis-Sophia, a work earlier than St. John’s Revelation, and evidently of the same school. “The (Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered these seven vowels,” but “seal up those things which the Seven Thunders uttered, and write them not,” says Revelation. “Do ye seek after these mysteries?”—inquires Jesus in Pistis-Sophia. “No mystery is more excellent than they [the seven vowels]; for they shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights”—i.e., true Wisdom. “Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the Seven Vowels and their forty and nine Powers, and the numbers thereof.”

In India, it was the mystery of the Seven Fires and their Forty-nine Fires or aspects, or “the numbers thereof.”

These Seven Vowels are represented by the Svastika signs on the crowns of the seven heads of the Serpent of Eternity, in India, among Esoteric “Buddhists,” in Egypt, in Chaldæa, etc., and among the Initiates of every other country. They are the Seven Zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic writings, in each of which the “Mortal” leaves one of his Souls, or Principles; until arrived on the plane above all Zones, he remains as the great Formless Serpent of Absolute Wisdom, or the Deity Itself. The seven-headed Serpent has more than one signification in the arcane teachings. It is the seven-headed Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and preëminently, the Serpent of Darkness, inconceivable and incomprehensible, whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first-manifested Light—the Universal Logos.

Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.

This symbolical sentence, in its many-sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions, or rather theologies, and especially so in the light of Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan. As an “Adversary,” the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony of things in Nature, as Shadow is required to make still brighter the Eight, as Night to bring into greater relief the Day, and as Cold to make one appreciate the more the comfort of Heat, so has Satan ever existed. Homogeneity is one and indivisible. But if the homogeneous One and Absolute is no mere figure of speech, and if Heterogeneity, in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring, its bifurcous shadow or reflection, then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil. If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its Universe, whence comes Evil or D’Evil if not from the same Golden Womb of the Absolute? Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and Kakodæmon, as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!

Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of the human mind, it is but just, meanwhile, to give his due even to the proverbial Devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “God of evil.” Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same mother—Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be archaic, Wisdom passed into Philosophy. In the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; later their types were chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical cosmic phenomena—the Day and [pg 444]Night, or the Sun and Moon. Then the Hosts of the Solar and Lunar Deities were made to represent them, and the Dragon of Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light. The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B’ne Alhim, the Children of God who came to “present themselves before the Lord,” their Father.665 “The Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair.666 In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest Gods, and become Asuras only when dethroned by Brâhmanical fancy, Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one living personal God,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity. A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy and goodness were claimed. This was the first Karmic effect of abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to build, as a prop for lazy man, “a merciful Father in Heaven,” whose daily and hourly actions, as Natura Naturans, the “comely Mother but stone cold,” belie the assumption. This led to the primal twins, Osiris-Typhon, Ormazd-Ahriman, and finally Cain-Abel and the tutti quanti of contraries.

Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator, ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly by saying:

The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages, the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan appear. The first “Adversary,” in individual human form, that one meets with in old Purânic literature, is one of her greatest Rishis and Yogis—Nârada, surnamed the “Strife-maker.”

And he is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahmâ, the male. But of him later on. Who the great “Deceiver” really is, one can ascertain by searching for him, with open eyes and an unprejudiced mind, in every old Cosmogony and Scripture.

It is the anthropomorphized Demiurge, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, when separated from the collective Hosts of his Fellow-Creators, whom, so to speak, he represents and synthesizes. It is now the God of Theologies. “The wish is father to the thought.” Once upon a [pg 445]time, a philosophical symbol left to perverse human fancy; afterwards, fashioned into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.

As the Dragons and other Fallen Angels are described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the much-slandered Satan will be sufficient. The student will do well to remember that, with every people, except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite aspect, in the dual nature of the so-called Creator. This is only natural. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from Evil. As there is far more Evil than Good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include Evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to Absoluteness. The Ancients understood this so well that their philosophers, now followed by the Kabalists, defined Evil as the “lining” of God or Good; Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed, Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se; only the Shadow of Light, without which Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If Evil disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth. The “Old Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, passive before he became active. In the Syro-Chaldean Magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac in the sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio. Before its fall on earth the Serpent was Ophis-Christos, and after its fall it became Ophiomorphos-Chrestos. Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a Force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise. There would be no Life possible (in the mâyâvic sense) without Death; no regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will, and his aspiring towards that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light. Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other. Few are those Theists, believers in a Personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to their idol, asking its help and protection for the exercise of and immunity for [pg 446]their evil and cruel deeds. “Lead us not into temptation” is addressed daily to “our Father, in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by millions of Christian hearts. This they do, repeating the very words put into the mouth of their Saviour, and yet do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James, “the brother of the Lord”:

Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us, on the authority of Christ, that it is God who does so? Open any pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological sense, and forthwith you find two definitions:

Accepted literally, the teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the Occult meaning is rejected?

Between the alternative allurements, wise will be that philosopher who will be able to decide where God disappears to make room for the Devil! Therefore, when we read that “the Devil is a liar and the father of it,” that is an incarnate lie, and are also told in the same breath that Satan, the Devil, was a Son of God and the most beautiful of his Archangels, rather than believe that Father and Son are a gigantic, personified and eternal Lie, we prefer to turn to Pantheism and to Pagan philosophy for information.

Once that the key to Genesis is in our hands, the scientific and symbolical Kabalah unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the “Lord God” are identical, and so are Jehovah and Cain—that Cain who is referred to in Theology as the “murderer” and the Liar to God! Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts him to do the same in another place. Jehovah turns into the Fiery Serpents to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah informs the Brazen Serpent that heals them.

These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the Old Testament—contradictory because the two Powers are separated instead of being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing—are the echoes, distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology, of the universal and philosophical dogmas in Nature, so well understood [pg 447]by the primitive Sages. We find the same groundwork in several personifications in the Purânas, only far more ample and philosophically suggestive.

Thus Pulastya, a “Son of God,” one of the first progeny, is made the progenitor of Demons, the Râkshasas, the tempters and the devourers of men. Pishâchâ, a female Demon, is a daughter of Daksha, a “Son of God” too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pishâchas.669 The Demons, so-called in the Purânas, are very extraordinary Devils when judged from the standpoint of European and orthodox views, since all of them, Dânavas, Daityas, Pishâchas, and Râkshasas, are represented as extremely pious, following the precepts of the Vedas, some of them even being great Yogins. But they oppose the clergy and ritualism, sacrifices and forms, just as the head Yogins do to this day in India, and are no less respected for it, though they are permitted to follow neither caste nor ritual; hence all those Purânic Giants and Titans are called Devils. The missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, that the Hindû traditions are nothing better than a reflection of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulastya with Cain, and of the Râkshasas with the Cainites, the “Accursed,” the cause of the “Noachian” Deluge. (See the work of Abbé Gorresio, who “etymologizes” Pulastya’s name as meaning the “rejected,” hence Cain, if you please). Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a “dug-up place,” a “mine,” and Cain is shown, in tradition and the Bible, as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!

While it is very probable that the Gibborim, or Giants, of the Bible are the Râkshasas of the Hindûs, it is still more certain that both are Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be, no Satan could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his hatred, than the Christian Theologians are in cursing him as the father of every evil. Compare their vituperation and their opinions about the Devil with the philosophical views of the Purânic Sages and their Christ-like mansuetude. When Parâshara, whose father was devoured by a Râkshasa, was preparing himself to destroy, by magic arts, the whole race, his grandsire, Vasishtha, after showing the irate Sage, on his own confession, that there is Evil and Karma, but no “evil Spirits” speaks the following suggestive words:

Thus, every such “sacrifice” or prayer to God for help is no better than an act of Black Magic. That which Parâshara prayed for, was the destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is called a Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him, as such, to Eternal Hell. Yet, in what respect is the prayer of sovereigns and generals, who pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any better? Such a prayer is in every case Black Magic of the worst kind, concealed like a demon “Mr. Hyde” under a sanctimonious “Dr. Jekyll.”

In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of Matter and Spirit, a “struggle for life” between the two manifested Principles in Space and Time, which Principles are one per se, inasmuch as they are rooted in the Absolute. In Cosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which, being mutually inter-dependent, are necessary to each other, “in order that both should live.” If one should be arrested, the action of the other would become immediately self-destructive.

Since the personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its triple aspect, in the Old Testament, Christian Theology and the ancient Gentile attitude of thought, those who would learn more of the subject are referred to Isis Unveiled671 and the Second Part of Volume II of the present work. The subject is here touched upon, and fresh explanations are attempted, for a very good reason. Before we can approach the evolution of Physical and Divine Man, we have first to master the idea of Cyclic Evolution, to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the four Races which preceded our present Race, and to learn what were the ideas of those Titans and Giants—Giants, verily, mentally, as well as physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy which teaches the involution of Spirit into Matter, the progressive, downward cyclic descent, or active, self-conscious evolution. The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently [pg 449]divulged the secrets of Initiations, and their records are full of the “falling down of the Æons,” in their double qualification of Angelic Beings and Periods; the one the natural evolution of the other. On the other hand, Oriental traditions on both sides of the “Black Water,” the Oceans that separate the two “Easts,” are equally full of allegories about the downfall of the Plerôma, or that of the Gods and Devas. One and all, they allegorized and explained the Fall as the desire to learn and acquire knowledge—the desire to know. This is the natural sequence of mental evolution, the Spiritual becoming transmuted into the Material or Physical. The same law of descent into Materiality and of reäscent into Spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reäction having only stopped just now, in our own special Sub-race.

That which was allegorized in Pymander, perhaps ten millenniums ago, for a triune mode of interpretation, and intended for a record of an astronomical, anthropological, and even alchemical fact, namely, the allegory of the Seven Rectors breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire, was dwarfed into one material and anthropomorphic interpretation—the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The multivocal, profoundly philosophical narrative, under its poetical form of the “Marriage of Heaven with Earth,” the love of Nature for Divine Form, and the Heavenly Man enraptured with his own beauty mirrored in Nature, that is to say, Spirit attracted into Matter, has now become, under theological handling, the Seven Rectors disobeying Jehovah, self-admiration generating Satanic pride, followed by their Fall, Jehovah permitting no worship to be lost save upon himself. In short, the beautiful Planet-Angels, the glorious Cyclic Æons of the Ancients, have become synthesized in their most orthodox shape in Samael, the Chief of the Demons in the Talmud, “that Great Serpent with Twelve Wings that draws down after himself, in his Fall, the Solar System, or the Titans.” But Schemal—the alter ego and the Sabean type of Samael—in his philosophical and esoteric aspect, meant the “Year,” in its astrological evil aspect, with its twelve months or “Wings” of unavoidable evils, in Nature. In Esoteric Theogony both Schemal and Samael represented a particular divinity.672 With the Kabalists they are the “Spirit of the Earth,” the Personal God that governs it, and therefore de facto identical with Jehovah. For the Talmudists themselves admit that Samael is a god-name of one of the seven Elohim. The [pg 450]Kabalists, moreover, show the two, Schemal and Samael, as a symbolical form of Saturn, Cronus; the “Twelve Wings” standing for the twelve months, and the symbol in its collectivity representing a racial cycle. Jehovah and Saturn are also glyphically identical.

This leads, in its turn, to a very curious deduction from a Roman Catholic dogma. Many renowned writers belonging to the Latin Church admit that a difference exists, and should be made, between the Uranian Titans, the antediluvian Giants, who were also Titans, and those post-diluvian Giants, in whom the Roman Catholics persist in seeing the descendants of the mythical Ham. In clearer words, there is a difference to be made between the cosmic, primordial opposing Forces, guided by Cyclic Law, the Atlantean human Giants, and the post-diluvian great Adepts, whether of the Right or the Left-hand. At the same time they show that Michael, “the generalissimo of the fighting Celestial Host, the bodyguard of Jehovah,” as it would seem, according to de Mirville, is also a Titan, only with the adjective of “divine” before the cognomen. Thus those “Uranides” who are called everywhere “Divine Titans”—and who, having rebelled against Cronus, or Saturn, are therefore also shown to be the enemies of Samael, also one of the Elohim, and synonymous with Jehovah in his collectivity—are identical with Michael and his Host. In short, the rôles are reversed, all the combatants are confused, and no student is able to distinguish clearly which is which. Esoteric explanation may, however, bring some order into this confusion, in which Jehovah becomes Saturn, and Michael and his Army, Satan and the Rebellious Angels, owing to the indiscreet endeavours of the too faithful zealots to see a Devil in every Pagan God. The true meaning is far more philosophical, and the legend of the first “Fall” of the Angels assumes a scientific colouring when correctly understood.

Cronus stands for endless, and hence immovable Duration, without beginning, without end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space. Those Angels, Genii, or Devas, who were born to act in space and time, that is, to break through the Seven Circles of the super-spiritual planes into the phenomenal, or circumscribed, super-terrestrial regions, are said allegorically to have rebelled against Cronus, and fought the Lion who was then the one living and highest God. When Cronus, in his turn, is represented as mutilating Uranus, his father, the meaning of the allegory is very simple. Absolute Time is made to become the finite and conditioned; a portion is robbed from the whole, thus [pg 451]showing that Saturn, the Father of the Gods, has been transformed from Eternal Duration into a limited period. Cronus with his scythe cuts down even the longest and, to us, seemingly endless cycles, which, for all that, are limited in Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time! Praise the God or Gods, or flout one or both, that scythe will not tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course.

The Titans of Hesiod’s Theogony were copied in Greece from the Suras and Asuras of India. These Hesiodic Titans, the Uranides, which were once upon a time numbered as only six, have been recently discovered, in an old fragment relating to the Greek myth, to be seven, the seventh being called Phoreg. Thus their identity with the Seven Rectors is fully demonstrated. The origin of the War in Heaven and the Fall has, in our mind, to be traced unavoidably to India, and perhaps far earlier than the Purânic accounts thereof. For the Târakâmaya was in a later age, and there are accounts of three distinct Wars to be traced in almost every Cosmogony.

The first War happened in the night of time, between the Gods and (A)-suras, and lasted for the period of one Divine Year.673 On this occasion the Deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership of Hrâda. But afterwards, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the conquered Gods applied for help, the latter defeated the Asuras. In the Vishnu Purâna no interval is found between the two Wars. In the Esoteric Doctrine, however, one War takes place before the building of the Solar System; another, on Earth, at the “creation” of man; and a [pg 452]third War is mentioned as taking place at the close of the Fourth Race, between its Adepts and those of the Fifth Race; that is, between the Initiates of the “Sacred Island” and the Sorcerers of Atlantis. We shall notice the first contest, as recounted by Parâshara, and endeavour to separate the two accounts, which are purposely blended together.

It is there stated that as the Daityas and Asuras were engaged in the duties of their respective Orders (Varnas) and followed the paths prescribed by holy writ, practising also religious penance—a queer employment for Demons if they are identical with our Devils, as it is claimed—it was impossible for the Gods to destroy them. The prayers addressed by the Gods to Vishnu are curious, as showing the ideas involved in an anthropomorphic Deity. Having, after their defeat, “fled to the northern shore of the Milky Ocean [Atlantic Ocean],”674 the discomfited Gods address many supplications “to the first of Beings, the divine Vishnu,” and among others the following:

The above is quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the Purânas to adverse and erroneous criticism, by every European bigot who forms an estimate of an alien religion on mere external evidence. Any man accustomed to subject what he reads to thoughtful analysis, will see at a glance the incongruity of addressing the accepted “Unknowable,” the formless, and attributeless Absolute, such as the Vedântins define Brahman, as being “one with the Serpent-Race, double-tongued, cruel and insatiable,” thus associating the abstract with the concrete, and bestowing adjectives on that which is free from any limitations, and conditionless. Even Professor Wilson, who, after living surrounded by Brâhmans and Pandits in India for so many [pg 453]years, ought to have known better—even that scholar lost no opportunity of criticizing the Hindû Scriptures on this account. Thus, he exclaims:

Less frequent, in sober truth, than in the Mosaic Bible. But prejudice is great in the hearts of our Orientalists, especially in those of “reverend” scholars. Universal Soul is not the inert Cause of Creation or (Para) Brahman, but simply that which we call the Sixth Principle of Intellectual Kosmos, on the manifested plane of being. It is Mahat, or Mahâbuddhi, the Great Soul, the Vehicle of Spirit, the first primeval reflection of the formless Cause, and that which is even beyond Spirit. So much for Professor Wilson’s uncalled-for fling at the Purânas. As for the apparently incongruous appeal to Vishnu by the defeated Gods, the explanation is there, in the text of Vishnu Purâna, if Orientalists would only notice it. There is Vishnu as Brahmâ, and Vishnu in his two aspects, philosophy teaches. There is but one Brahman, “essentially Prakriti and Spirit.”

This ignorance is truly and beautifully expressed in the praise of the Yogins to Brahmâ, “the upholder of the earth,” when they say:

Therefore, it is not Vishnu, “the inert cause of creation,” which exercised the functions of an Active Providence, but the Universal Soul, that which, in its material aspect, Éliphas Lévi calls Astral Light. And this Soul is, in its dual aspect of Spirit and Matter, the true anthropomorphic God of the Theists; for this God is a personification of that Universal Creative Agent, both pure and impure, owing to its manifested condition and differentiation in this Mâyâvic World—God and Devil, truly. But Professor Wilson failed to see how Vishnu, in [pg 454]this character, closely resembles the Lord God of Israel, “especially in his policy of deception, temptation, and cunning.”

In the Vishnu Purâna this is made as plain as can be. For it is said there, that:

Now Garuda is the Manvantaric Cycle, as will be shown in its place. Vishnu, therefore, is the Deity in Space and Time, the peculiar God of the Vaishnavas. Such Gods are called in Esoteric Philosophy tribal or racial; that is to say, one of the many Dhyânis or Gods, or Elohim, one of whom was generally chosen for some special reason by a nation or a tribe, and thus became gradually a “God above all Gods,”678 the “highest God,” as Jehovah, Osiris, Bel, or any other of the Seven Regents.

“The tree is known by its fruit”; the nature of a God by his actions. We must either judge these actions by the dead-letter narratives, or must accept them allegorically. If we compare the two—Vishnu, as the defender and champion of the defeated Gods; and Jehovah, the defender and champion of the “chosen” people, so called by antiphrasis, no doubt, as it is the Jews who had chosen that “jealous” God—we shall find that both use deceit and cunning. They do so on the principle of “the end justifying the means,” in order to have the best of their respective opponents and foes—the Demons. Thus while, according to the Kabalists, Jehovah assumes the shape of the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden, sends Satan with a special mission to tempt Job, harasses and wearies Pharaoh with Saraï, Abraham’s wife, and “hardens” another Pharaoh’s heart against Moses, lest there should be no opportunity for plaguing his victims “with great plagues,” Vishnu is made in his Purâna to resort to a trick no less unworthy of any respectable God.

The defeated Gods addressed Vishnu as follows:

Finally the Daityas were seduced by the wily talk of Mâyâmoha, as Eve was seduced by the advice of the Serpent. They became apostates to the Vedas. As Dr. Muir translates the passage:

Whatever may be thought of the Hindûs, no enemy of theirs can regard them as fools. A people, whose holy men and sages have left to the world the greatest and most sublime philosophies that ever emanated from the minds of men, must have known the difference between right and wrong. Even a savage can discern white from black, good from bad, and deceit from sincerity and truthfulness. Those who had narrated this event in the biography of their God, must [pg 456]have seen that in this case it was that God who was the Arch-Deceiver, and the Daityas, who “never transgressed the precepts of the Vedas,” who had the sunny side in the transaction, and who were the true “Gods.” Thence there must have been, and there is a secret meaning hidden under this allegory. In no class of society, in no nation, are deceit and craft considered as divine virtues—except perhaps in the clerical classes of Theologians and modern Jesuitism.

The Vishnu Purâna,682 like all other works of this kind, passed at a later period into the hands of the Temple-Brâhmans, and the old MSS. have, no doubt, been further tampered with by sectarians. But there was a time when the Purânas were esoteric works, and so they are still for the Initiates who can read them with the key that is in their possession.

Whether the Brâhman Initiates will ever give out the full meaning of these allegories, is a question with which the writer is not concerned. The present object is to show that, while honouring the Creative Powers in their multiple forms, no philosopher could have, or ever has, accepted the allegory for its true spirit, except, perhaps, some philosophers belonging to the present “superior and civilized” Christian races. For, as shown, Jehovah is not one whit the superior of Vishnu on the plane of ethics. This is why the Occultists, and even some Kabalists, whether or not they regard those creative Forces as living and conscious Entities—and one does not see why they should not be so accepted—will never confuse the Cause with the Effect, and accept the Spirit of the Earth for Parabrahman, or Ain Suph. At all events they know well the true nature of what was called by the Greeks Father-Æther, Jupiter-Titan, etc. They know that the Soul of the Astral Light is divine, and its Body—the Light-waves on the lower planes—infernal. This Light is symbolized by the “Magic Head” in the Zohar, the Double Face on the Double Pyramid; the black Pyramid rising against a pure white ground, with a white Head and Face within its black Triangle; the White Pyramid, inverted—the reflection of the first in the dark Waters—showing the black reflection of the white Face.

This is the Astral Light, or Demon est Deus Inversus.

Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.

To thoroughly comprehend the idea underlying every ancient Cosmology necessitates the study and comparative analysis of all the great religions of antiquity; for it is only by this method that the root-idea can be made plain. Exact Science, could it soar so high, in tracing the operations of Nature to their ultimate and original sources, would call this idea the Hierarchy of Forces. The original, transcendental and philosophical conception was one. But as systems began to reflect more and more with every age the idiosyncrasies of nations, and as the latter, after separating, settled into distinct groups, each evolving along its own national or tribal groove, the main idea gradually became veiled by the overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the Forces, or rather the intelligent Powers of Nature, received divine honours to which they were hardly entitled, in others—as now in Europe and the other civilized lands—the very thought of such Forces being endowed with intelligence seems absurd, and is proclaimed unscientific. Therefore one finds relief in such statements as are found in the Introduction to Asgard and the Gods; “Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors,” edited by W. S. W. Anson, who says:

And though it is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern Esotericism to concur in the strange idea that, “the religious conceptions of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the beginnings of civilization amongst the Germanic races,”684 he is yet glad to find such truths expressed as that: “These fairy tales are not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our forefathers.”685

Precisely so. Not only their Religion, but likewise their History. For a myth, in Greek μῦθος, means oral tradition, passed from mouth to mouth from one generation to the other; and even in the modern etymology the term stands for a fabulous statement conveying some important truth; a tale of some extraordinary personage whose biography has become overgrown, owing to the veneration of successive generations, with rich popular fancy, but which is no wholesale fable. Like our ancestors, the primitive Âryans, we believe firmly in the personality and intelligence of more than one phenomenon-producing Force in Nature.

As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and the nations more or less lost sight of the Highest and One Principle of all things, and began to transfer the abstract attributes of the Causeless Cause to the caused effects, which became in their turn causative, the Creative Powers of the Universe; the great nations thus acted from fear of profaning the Idea; the smaller, because they either failed to grasp it, or lacked the power of philosophic conception needed to preserve it in all its immaculate purity. But one and all, with the exception of the latest Âryans, now become Europeans and Christians, show this veneration in their Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor,686 the most intuitional of all the translators of the Greek Fragments, shows, no nation has ever conceived the One Principle as the immediate creator of the visible Universe, for no sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built with his own hands the edifice he admires. On the testimony of Damascius in his work, On First Principles (Περὶ Πρώτων Ἀρχῶν), they referred to it as the “Unknown Darkness.” The Babylonians passed over this principle in silence. “To that God,” says Porphyry, in his On Abstinence (Περί ἀποχῆς τῶν ἐμψύχων), “who is above all things, neither external speech ought to be addressed, nor yet that which is inward.” Hesiod begins his [pg 459]Theogony with the words, “Chaos of all things was the first produced,”687 thus allowing the inference that its Cause or Producer must be passed over in reverential silence. Homer in his poems ascends no higher than Night, which he represents Zeus as reverencing. According to all the ancient theologists, and the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, Zeus, or the immediate Artificer of the Universe, is not the highest God; any more than Sir Christopher Wren in his physical, human aspect is the Mind in him which produced his great works of art. Homer, therefore, is not only silent with respect to the First Principle, but likewise with respect to those two Principles immediately posterior to the First, the Æther and Chaos of Orpheus and Hesiod, and the Bound and Infinity of Pythagoras and Plato.688 Proclus says of this Highest Principle that it is “the Unity of Unities, and beyond the first Adyta … more ineffable than all Silence, and more occult than all Essence … concealed amidst the intelligible Gods.”689

To what was written by Thomas Taylor in 1797—namely, that the “Jews appear to have ascended no higher … than the immediate Artificer of the Universe,” as “Moses introduces a darkness on the face of the deep, without even insinuating that there was any cause of its existence,”690 one might add something more. Never have the Jews in their Bible—a purely esoteric, symbolical work—so profoundly degraded their metaphorical deity as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet personal God.

This First, or rather One, Principle was called the “Circle of Heaven,” symbolized by the hierogram of a Point within a Circle or Equilateral Triangle, the Point being the Logos. Thus, in the Rig Veda, wherein Brahmâ is not even named. Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagarbha, the “Golden Egg,” and Prajâpati (later on Brahmâ), from whom emanate all the Hierarchies of “Creators.” The Monad, or Point, is the original and is the Unit from which follows the entire numeral system. This Point is the First Cause, but That from which it emanates, or of which, rather, it is the expression, the Logos, is passed over in silence. In its turn, the universal symbol, the Point [pg 460]within the Circle, was not yet the Architect, but the Cause of that Architect; and the latter stood to it in precisely the same relation as the Point itself stood to the Circumference of the Circle, which cannot be defined, according to Hermes Trismegistus. Porphyry shows that the Monad and the Duad of Pythagoras are identical with Plato’s Infinite and Finite, in Philebus, or what Plato calls the ἄπειρον and πέρας. It is the latter only, the Mother, which is substantial, the former being the “Cause of all Unity and measure of all things”;691 the Duad, Mûlaprakriti, the Veil of Parabrahman, being thus shown to be the Mother of the Logos and, at the same time, his Daughter—that is to say, the object of his perception—the produced producer and the secondary cause of it. With Pythagoras, the Monad returns into Silence and Darkness, as soon as it has evolved the Triad, from which emanate the remaining 7 numbers of the 10 numbers which are at the base of the Manifested Universe.

In the Norse Cosmogony it is again the same.

As in the Hindû Cosmogony, the evolution of the Universe is divided into two acts, which are called in India the Prâkrita and Pâdma Creations. Before the warm rays pouring from the Home of Brightness awaken life in the Great Waters of Space, the Elements of the First Creation come into view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir, or Örgelmir (literally, Seething Clay), Primordial Matter differentiated from Chaos. Then comes the Cow Audumla, the Nourisher,693 from whom is born Buri, the Producer, whose son Bör (Born), by Bestla, the daughter of the Frost-Giants, the sons of Ymir, had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or Spirit, Will, and Holiness. This was when Darkness still reigned throughout Space, when the Ases, the Creative Powers, or Dhyân Chohans, were not yet evolved, and the Yggdrasil, the Tree of the Universe of Time and of Life, had not yet grown, and there was, as yet, no Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The Scandinavian legends of Creation, of our Earth and World, begin with Time and human Life. All that precedes it is for them Darkness, [pg 461]wherein All-Father, the Cause of all, dwells. As observed by the editor of Asgard and the Gods, though these legends have in them the idea of that All-Father, the original cause of all, “he is scarcely more than mentioned in the poems,” not, as he thinks, because before the preaching of the Gospel, the idea “could not rise to distinct conceptions of the Eternal,” but on account of its deep esoteric character. Therefore, all the Creative Gods, or Personal Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic Evolution. Zeus is born in, and out of Cronus—Time. So is Brahmâ the production and emanation of Kâla, “Eternity and Time,” Kâla being one of the names of Vishnu. Hence we find Odin, the Father of the Gods and of the Ases, as Brahmâ is the Father of the Gods and of the Asuras; and hence also the androgyne character of all the chief Creative Gods, from the second Monad of the Greeks down to the Sephira Adam Kadmon, the Brahmâ or Prajâpati-Vâch of the Vedas, and the androgyne of Plato, which is but another version of the Indian symbol.

The best metaphysical definition of primeval Theogony, in the spirit of the Vedântins, may be found in the “Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ”, by T. Subba Row. Parabrahman, the Unknown and the Incognizable, as the lecturer tells his audience:

This Logos is the Shabda Brahman of the Hindûs, which he will not even call Îshvara (the “Lord” God), lest the term should create confusion in the people’s minds. It is the Avalokiteshvara of the Buddhists, the Verbum of the Christians in its real esoteric meaning, not in its theological disfigurement.

And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of Something which is Nothing, though it is the All, by a fine simile. He compares the Logos to the Sun through which light and heat radiate, but whose energy, light and heat, exist in some unknown condition in Space and are diffused in Space only as visible light and heat, the Sun being only the agent thereof. This is the first triadic hypostasis. The quaternary is made up by the energizing light shed by the Logos.

The Hebrew Kabalists stated it in a manner which is esoterically identical with the Vedântic. Ain Suph, they taught, could not be comprehended, could not be located, nor named, though the Causeless Cause of all. Hence its name, Ain Suph, is a term of negation, “the Inscrutable, the Incognizable, and the Unnameable.” They made of it, therefore, a Boundless Circle, a Sphere, of which human intellect, with the utmost stretch, could only perceive the vault. In the words of one who has unriddled much in the Kabalistical system most thoroughly, in one of its meanings, in its numerical and geometrical esotericism:

This Great Circle, which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the Point within the Boundless Circle, is the Avalokiteshvara, the Logos, or Verbum, of which T. Subba Row speaks. But this Circle or manifested God is as unknown to us, except through its manifested Universe, as is the One, though easier, or rather more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahman, during Pralaya, as our “Ego is latent [in us] at the time of Sushupti,” or sleep, which cannot cognize Parabrahman otherwise than as Mûlaprakriti—the latter being a Cosmic Veil which is “the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter”—is thus only an organ in Cosmic Creation, through which radiate the Energy and Wisdom of Parabrahman, unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves. Moreover, as the Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahman is unknown in reality to the Logos, both Eastern Esotericism and the Kabalah, in order to bring the Logos within the range of our conceptions, have resolved the abstract synthesis into concrete images; viz., into the reflections or multiplied aspects of that Logos, or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmâ Ormazd, Osiris, Adam Kadmon, call it by any of such names you will; which aspects, or manvantaric emanations, are the Dhyân Chohans, the Elohim, the Devas, the Amshaspends, etc. Metaphysicians explain the root and germ of the latter, according to T. Subba Row, as the first manifestation of Parabrahman, “the highest trinity that we are capable of understanding,” which is Mûlaprakriti, the Veil, the Logos, and the Conscious Energy of the latter, or its Power and Light, called in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, Daiviprakriti; or “Matter, Force and the Ego, or the one root of Self, of which every other kind of self is but a manifestation or a reflection.” It is then only in this Light of consciousness, of mental and physical perception, that practical Occultism can throw the Logos into visibility by geometrical figures, which, when closely studied, will yield not only a scientific explanation of the real, objective, existence697 of the “Seven Sons of the Divine Sophia,” which is this Light of the Logos, but will show, by means of other yet undiscovered keys, that, with regard to Humanity, these “Seven Sons” and their numberless emanations, centres of energy personified, are an absolute necessity. Make away with them, and the Mystery of Being and Mankind will never be unriddled, nor even closely approached.

It is through this Light that everything is created. This Root of mental Self is also the root of physical Self, for this Light is the permutation, [pg 464]in our manifested world, of Mûlaprakriti, called Aditi in the Vedas. In its third aspect it becomes Vâch,698 the Daughter and the Mother of the Logos, as Isis is the Daughter and the Mother of Osiris, who is Horns, and Moot, the Daughter, Wife, and Mother, of Ammon, in the Egyptian Moon-glyph. In the Kabalah, Sephira is the same as Shekinah, and is, in another synthesis, the Wife, Daughter, and Mother of the Heavenly Man, Adam Kadmon, and is even identical with him, just as Vâch is identical with Brahmâ, and is called the female Logos. In the Rig Veda, Vâch is “Mystic Speech,” by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vâch is said to have “entered the Rishis.” She is “generated by the Gods”; she is the Divine Vâch, the “Queen of Gods”; and she is associated, like Sephira with the Sephiroth, with the Prajâpatis in their work of creation. Moreover, she is called the “Mother of the Vedas,” “since it is through her powers, [as Mystic Speech] that Brahmâ revealed them, and also owing to her power that he produced the Universe”; that is to say, through Speech, and words, synthesized by the “Word” and numbers.699

But when Vâch is also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha, “the God who lives in all the Kalpas,” her mâyâvic character is shown; during the Pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the One, all-devouring Ray.

But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all these personations of the female Power in Nature, or Nature the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his “Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ”; the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the Great Deep, or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable Veil between the Incognizable and the Logos of Creation. “Connecting himself through his mind with Vâch, Brahmâ [the Logos] created the Primordial Waters.” In the Katha Upanishad it is stated still more clearly:

This connects Vâch and Sephira with the Goddess Kwan-Yin, the “Merciful Mother,” the Divine Voice of the Soul, even in exoteric Buddhism, and with the female aspect of Kwan-Shai-Yin, the Logos, the Verbum of Creation, and at the same time with the Voice that speaks audibly to the Initiate, according to Esoteric Budhism. Bath Kol, the Filia Vocis, the Daughter of the Divine Voice of the Hebrews, responding from the Mercy Seat within the Veil of the Temple is—a result.

And here we may incidentally point out one of the many unjust slurs thrown by the “good and pious” missionaries in India on the religion of the land. The allegory, in the Shatapatha Brâhmana, that Brahmâ, as the Father of men, performed the work of procreation by incestuous intercourse with his own daughter Vâch, also called Sandhyâ, Twilight, and Shatarûpâ, of a hundred forms, is incessantly thrown in the teeth of the Brâhmans, as condemning their “detestable, false religion.” Besides the fact, conveniently forgotten by the Europeans, that the Patriarch Lot is shown guilty of the same crime under the human form, whereas it was under the form of a buck that Brahmâ, or rather Prajâpati, accomplished the incest with his daughter, who had that of a hind (rohit), the esoteric reading of the third chapter of Genesis shows the same. Moreover, there is certainly a cosmic, and not a physiological, meaning attached to the Indian allegory, since Vâch is a permutation of Aditi and Mûlaprakriti, or Chaos, and Brahmâ a permutation of Nârâyana, the Spirit of God entering into, and fructifying Nature; and, therefore, there is nothing phallic in the conception at all.

As already stated, Aditi-Vâch is the female Logos, or Verbum, the Word; and Sephira in the Kabalah is the same. These feminine Logoi are all correlations, in their noumenal aspect, of Light, and Sound, and Æther, showing how well-informed were the Ancients both in Physical Science, as now known to the moderns, and also as to the birth of that Science in the Spiritual and Astral spheres.

It is Sound, Speech, that again which becomes comprehensive and objective to one of our physical senses and may be brought under the laws of perception. Hence:

Thus Vâch, Shekinah, or the “Music of the Spheres” of Pythagoras, are one, if we take for our example instances in the three most (apparently) dissimilar religious philosophies in the world, the Hindû, the Greek and the Chaldean Hebrew. These personations and allegories may be viewed under four chief and three lesser aspects, or seven in all, as in Esotericism. The Parâ form is the ever subjective and latent Light and Sound, which exist eternally in the bosom of the Incognizable; when transferred into the ideation of the Logos, or its latent Light, it is called Pasyantî, and when it becomes that Light expressed, it is Madhyamâ.

Now the Kabalah gives the definition thus:

The ten Sephiroth, the Three and the Seven, are called in the Kabalah the Ten Words, dbrim (Dabarim), the Numbers and the Emanations of the Heavenly Light, which is both Adam Kadmon and Sephira, Prajâpati-Vâch, or Brahmâ. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors of creation in the Kabalah. Parabrahman cannot be known except through the luminous Point, the Logos, which knows not Parabrahman but only Mûlaprakriti. Similarly Adam Kadmon knew only Shekinah, though he was the Vehicle of Ain Suph. And, as Adam Kadmon, he is, in the Esoteric interpretation, the total of the Number Ten, the Sephiroth, himself being a Trinity, or the three attributes of the Incognizable Deity in One.702 “When the Heavenly [pg 467]Man (or Logos) first assumed the form of the Crown703 [Kether] and identified himself with Sephira, he caused Seven splendid Lights to emanate from it [the Crown],” which made in their totality Ten; so Brahmâ-Prajâpati, once he became separated from, yet identical with Vâch, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajâpatis, to issue from that Crown. In exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephira or Prajâpati; in esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10. Only when divided, in the manifested sphere, into 3 and 7, they form [circle with vertical line], the androgyne, and [circle containing an X], or the figure X manifested and differentiated.

This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the Deity, the Logos, to be the Centre of Unity and Source of Harmony. We say this Deity was the Logos, not the Monad that dwelleth in Solitude and Silence, because Pythagoras taught that Unity being indivisible is no number. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who applied for admittance into his school, that he should have already studied as a preliminary step, the sciences of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Music, which were held to be the four divisions of Mathematics.704 Again, this explains why the Pythagoreans asserted that the doctrine of Numbers, the chief of all in Esotericism, had been revealed to man by the Celestial Deities; that the World had been called forth out of Chaos by Sound, or Harmony, and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion; that the seven planets which rule the destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion and, as Censorinus says:

In the Pythagorean Theogony, the Hierarchies of the Heavenly Host and Gods were numbered, and also expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils saying:

And this, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, may at any rate lift a corner of the veil off those wondrous allegories that have been thrown over Vâch, the most mysterious of all the Brâhmanical Goddesses; she who is termed “the melodious Cow who milked forth sustenance and Water”—the Earth with all her mystic powers; and again she “who yields us nourishment and sustenance”—the physical Earth. Isis is also mystic Nature and also Earth; and her cow’s horns identify her with Vâch, who, after being recognized in her highest form as Parâ, becomes, at the lower or material end of creation, Vaikharî. Hence she is mystic, though physical, Nature, with all her magic ways and properties.

Again, as Goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi, she is Chaos, in one sense. At any rate, she is the “Mother of the Gods,” and it is from Brahmâ, Îshvara or the Logos, and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested Theogony has to start. Beyond, all is Darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyân Chohans or the Gods, the Seers, the Prophets and the Adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether as Aditi, or the Divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of the Seven Sons, the Angels of the Face, of the Deep, or the Great Green One of the Book of the Dead. Says the Book of Dzyan, or Real Knowledge, obtained through meditation:

At the beginning of every Cycle of 4,320,000, the Seven, or as some nations had it Eight, Great Gods, descend to establish the new order of things and to give the impetus to the new cycle. That eighth God was the unifying Circle, or Logos, separated and made distinct from its Host, in exoteric dogma, just as the three divine hypostases of the ancient Greeks are now considered in the Churches as three distinct personæ. As a Commentary says:

Thus we are taught that the great Pyramids were built under their direct supervision, “when Dhruva [the then Pole-star], was at his lowest culmination, and the Krittikâs [Pleiades] looked over his head [were on the same meridian but above] to watch the work of the Giants.” Thus, as the first Pyramids were built at the beginning of a Sidereal Year, under Dhruva (Alpha Polaris), it must have been over 31,000 years (31,105) ago. Bunsen was right in admitting for Egypt an antiquity of over 21,000 years, but this concession hardly exhausts truth and fact in this question. As Mr. Gerald Massey says:

Mor Isaac709 shows the ancient Syrians defining their World of the “Rulers” and “Active Gods” in the same way as the Chaldeans. The lowest World was the Sublunary—our own—watched by the Angels of the first or lower order; the one that came next in rank, was Mercury, ruled by the Archangels: then came Venus, whose Gods were the Principalities; the fourth was that of the Sun, the domain and region of the highest and mightiest Gods of our system, the solar Gods of all nations; the fifth was Mars, ruled by the Virtues; the sixth, that of Bel or Jupiter, was governed by the Dominions; the seventh, the World of Saturn, by the Thrones. These are the Worlds of Form. Above come the Four higher ones, making Seven again, since the Three highest are “unmentionable and unpronounceable.” The eighth, composed of 1,122 stars, is the domain of the Cherubs; the ninth, belonging to the walking and numberless stars on account of their [pg 470]distance, has the Seraphs; as to the tenth, Kircher, quoting Mor Isaac, says that it is composed “of invisible stars that could be taken, they said, for clouds, so massed are they in the zone that we call Via Straminis, the Milky Way”; and he hastens to explain that “these are the stars of Lucifer, engulfed with him in his terrible shipwreck.” That which comes after and beyond the ten Worlds (our Quaternary), or the Arûpa World, the Syrians could not tell. “All they knew was that it is there that begins the vast and incomprehensible Ocean of the Infinite, the abode of the True Divinity, without boundary or end.”

Champollion shows the same belief among the Egyptians. Hermes having spoken of the Father-Mother and Son, whose Spirit—collectively the Divine Fiat—shapes the Universe, says: “Seven Agents [Media] were also formed, to contain the Material [or manifested] Worlds within their respective Circles, and the action of these Agents was named Destiny.” He further enumerates seven and ten and twelve orders, but it would take too long to detail them here.

As the Rig Vidhâna together with the Brahmânda Purâna and all such works, whether describing the magic efficacy of the Rig Vedic Mantras, or the future Kalpas, are declared by Dr. Weber and others to be modern compilations “belonging probably only to the time of the Purânas,” it is useless to refer the reader to their mystic explanations; and one may as well simply quote from the archaic books utterly unknown to the Orientalists. These works explain that which so puzzles the scholars, namely that the Saptarshis, the “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmâ, are referred to in the Shatapatha Brâhmana under one set of names; in the Mahâbhârata under another set; and that the Vâyu Purâna makes even nine instead of seven Rishis, by adding the names of Bhrigu and Daksha to the list. But the same occurs in every exoteric Scripture. The Secret Doctrine gives a long genealogy of Rishis, but separates them into many classes. Like the Gods of the Egyptians, who were divided into seven, and even twelve, Classes, so are the Indian Rishis in their Hierarchies. The first three Groups are the Divine, the Cosmical and the Sublunary. Then come the Solar Gods of our System, the Planetary, the Submundane, and the purely Human—the Heroes and the Mânushi.

At present, however, we are only concerned with the Pre-cosmic, Divine Gods, the Prajâpatis, or the Seven Builders. This Group is found unmistakably in every Cosmogony. Owing to the loss of [pg 471]Egyptian archaic documents, since, according to M. Maspero, “the materials and historical data on hand to study the history of the religious evolution in Egypt are neither complete nor very often intelligible,” the ancient Hymns and inscriptions on the tombs must be appealed to, in order to have the statements brought forward from the Secret Doctrine partially and indirectly corroborated. One such shows that Osiris, like Brahmâ-Prajâpati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many other Logoi, was the chief and synthesis of the Group of “Creators” or Builders. Before Osiris became the “One” and the Highest God of Egypt, he was worshipped at Abydos as the Head, or Leader, of the Heavenly Host of the Builders belonging to the higher of the three Orders. The Hymn engraved on the votive stele of a tomb from Abydos (3rd register) addresses Osiris thus:

Coming out from the Primordial Water crowned with the Uræus, which is the serpent-emblem of Cosmic Fire, and himself the seventh over the six Primary Gods, issued from Father-Mother, Noo and Noot, the Sky, who can Osiris be, but the chief Prajâpati, the chief Sephira, the chief Amshaspend, Ormazd! That this latter Solar and Cosmic God stood, in the beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the Archangel, “whose name was secret,” is certain. This Archangel was Michael, the representative on earth of the Hidden Jewish God; in short, it is his “Face” that is said to have gone before the Jews like a “Pillar of Fire.” Burnouf says: “The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our Archangels, designate also the personifications of the Divine Virtues.”711 And these Archangels, therefore, are as certainly the Saptarshis of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to class each with its Pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris, they have all so “many names in towns and provinces.” Some of the most important, however, will be shown in their order.

One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more we study their Hierarchies and find out their identity, the more proofs we acquire that there is not one of the past or present personal Gods, known to us from the earliest days of history, that does not belong to the third stage of cosmic manifestation. In every religion we find the Concealed Deity forming the ground work; then the Ray therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic Matter, the first manifestation; then the Androgyne result, the dual Male and Female abstract Force personified, the second stage; this finally separates itself, in the third, into Seven Forces, called the Creative Powers by all the ancient religions, and the Virtues of God by the Christians. The later explanations and abstract metaphysical qualifications have not prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from worshipping these “Virtues” under the personifications and distinct names of the Seven Archangels. In the Book of Druschim,712 in the Talmud, a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct Kabalistical explanation. It says:

The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary evolution of Gods in every Theogony, if one wishes to translate the meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely metaphysical personifications of the abstract attributes of Deity, with their reflection—the Sidereal Gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction; living Entities and the models formed on that divine Prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth, or the “periphrasis of Jehovah,” are not Jehovah. It is the latter himself, with the additional titles of Adonai, Elohim, Sabbaoth, and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the Shaddai (שדי), the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too abundant figure of Jewish rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its many panels, and adopted [pg 473]as a substitute; one name of an individual Sephira being as good as another name, for those who had the secret. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the Sidereal “Sum Total,” was invented for no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and generation.713 The real secret and unpronounceable Name, the “Word that is no word,” has to be sought in the seven names of the first Seven Emanations, or the “Sons of the Fire,” in the secret Scriptures of all the great nations, and even in the Zohar, the Kabalistic lore of the smallest of all of them, viz., the Jewish. This word, composed of seven letters in every tongue, is found embodied in the architectural remains of every great sacred building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on Easter Island—part of a Continent buried under the seas nearer 4,000,000 years ago714 than 20,000—down to the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

We shall have to enter more fully into this subject later on, and to bring practical illustrations to prove the statements made in the text.

For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of what has been asserted at the beginning of this work, namely, that no Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of the Christian, has ever attributed to the One Highest Cause, the Universal Deific Principle, the immediate creation of our earth, or man, or anything connected with these. This statement holds as well for the Hebrew or Chaldean Kabalah as it does for Genesis, had the latter been ever thoroughly understood and, what is still more important, correctly [pg 474]translated.715 Everywhere there is either a Logos—a “Light shining in Darkness,” truly—or the Architect of the Worlds is esoterically in the plural number. The Latin Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to Jehovah alone, adopts a whole Kyriel of names for the working Forces of the latter, names which betray the secret. For if the said Forces had nought to do with “Creation” so-called, why call them Elohim (Alhim), a plural word; Divine Workmen and Energies (Ἐνέργειαι), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti cœlorum); and especially Supporters of the World (Κοσμοκράτορες), Governors or Rulers of the World (Rectores Mundi), Wheels of the World (Rotæ), Auphanim, Flames and Powers, Sons of God (B’ne Alhim), Vigilant Counsellors, etc.?

It is often asserted, and unjustly, as usual, that China, nearly as old a country as India, had no Cosmogony. It was unknown to Confucius, and the Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without introducing a Personal God,716 it is complained. The Yi-King, “the very essence of ancient thought and the combined work of the most venerated sages,” fails to show a distinct Cosmogony. Nevertheless, one existed, and a very distinct one. Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life717 and the Chinese Buddhists reject the idea of One Creator, accepting one Cause and its numberless effects, they are misunderstood by the believers in a Personal God. The “Great Extreme,” as the commencement of “changes” (transmigrations), is the shortest and, perhaps, the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies for those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its own sake and try to do good unselfishly without [pg 475]perpetually looking to reward and profit. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius produces “Two Figures.” These Two produce in their turn the “Four Images”; these again the “Eight Symbols.” It is complained that though the Confucianists see in them “heaven, earth and man in miniature,” we can see in them anything we like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially those of the latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals, see in these “Figures” the symbol, however rude, of a harmonious progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its Beings, both Heavenly and Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the primeval Cosmogony of Pythagoras—a contemporary of Confucius—can never fail to find in his Triad, Tetraktys and Decad, emerging from the One and solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his Christian biographer for “talking of divination,” before and after this passage, and is represented as saying:

Therefore, the “divining straws” and the “tortoise,” the “symbolic sets of lines,” and the great sage who looks at them as they become one and two, and two become four, and four become eight, and the other sets “three and six,” are laughed to scorn, only because his wise symbols are misunderstood.

So the author of the volume cited and his colleagues will no doubt scoff at the Stanzas given in our text, for they represent precisely the same idea. The old archaic map of Cosmogony is full of lines in the Confucian style, of concentric circles and dots. Yet all these represent the most abstract and philosophical conceptions of the Cosmogony of our Universe. At all events it may, perhaps, answer better to the requirements and the scientific purposes of our age, than the cosmogonical essays of St. Augustine and the Venerable Bede, though these were published over a millennium later than the Confucian.

Confucius, one of the greatest sages of the ancient world, believed [pg 476]in ancient magic, and practised it himself, “if we take for granted the statements of Kià-yü” and “he praised it to the skies in the Yi-king,” we are told by his reverend critic. Nevertheless, even in his age, 600 b.c., Confucius and his school taught the sphericity of the earth and even the heliocentric system; while, at about thrice 600 years after the Chinese philosopher, the Popes of Rome threatened and even burnt “heretics” for asserting the same. He is laughed at for speaking of the “Sacred Tortoise.” No unprejudiced person can see any great difference between a Tortoise and a Lamb as candidates for sacredness, as both are symbols and no more. The Ox, the Eagle,719 and the Lion, and occasionally the Dove are the “sacred animals” of the Western Bible; the first three are found grouped round the Evangelists; the fourth, associated with these, a human face, is a Seraph, i.e., a “fiery serpent,” the Gnostic Agathodæmon probably.

The choice is curious, and shows how paradoxical were the first Christians in their selections. For why should they have chosen these symbols of Egyptian Paganism, when the Eagle is never mentioned in the New Testament save once, when Jesus refers to it as a carrion eater,720 and in the Old Testament it is called unclean; when the Lion is made a point of comparison with Satan, both roaring for men to devour; and the Oxen are driven out of the Temple? On the other hand the Serpent, brought in as an exemplar of wisdom, is now regarded as the symbol of the Devil. The esoteric pearl of Christ’s religion, degraded into Christian theology, may indeed be said to have chosen a strange and unfitting shell to be born in and evolved from.

As explained, the Sacred Animals and the Flames or Sparks, within the Holy Four, refer to the Prototypes of all that is found in the Universe in the Divine Thought, in the Root, which is the Perfect Cube, or the Foundation of the Kosmos, collectively and individually. [pg 477]They have all an occult reference to primordial Cosmic Forms, and the first concretions, work, and evolution of Kosmos.

In the earliest Hindû exoteric Cosmogonies, it is not even the Demiurge who creates. For it is said in one of the Purânas:

It is this action “that causes each sphere to turn around itself, and all around the Sun.” After which action, “it is the Brahmândika,” the Solar and Lunar Pitris, the Dhyân Chohans, “who take charge of their respective spheres [earths and planets], to the end of the Kalpa.” The Creators are the Rishis, most of whom are credited with the authorship of the Mantras, or Hymns, of the Rig Veda. They are sometimes seven, sometimes ten, when they become Prajâpati, the Lord of Beings; then they rebecome the seven and the fourteen Manus, as the representatives of the seven and fourteen Cycles of Existence, or Days of Brahmâ, thus answering to the seven Æons, when, at the end of the first stage of Evolution, they are transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarshis; while their human Doubles appear as Heroes, Kings and Sages on this earth.

The Esoteric Doctrine of the East having thus furnished and struck the key-note, which, under its allegorical garb, is, as may be seen, as scientific as it is philosophical and poetical, every nation has followed its lead. It is from the exoteric religions that we have to dig out the root-idea before we turn to esoteric truths, lest the latter should be rejected. Furthermore, every symbol, in every national religion, may be read esoterically; and the proof of its being correctly read when transliterated into its corresponding numerals and geometrical forms, may be obtained from the extraordinary agreement of all glyphs and symbols, however much they may externally vary among themselves. For in the origin those symbols were all identical. Take, for instance, the opening sentences in various Cosmogonies; in every case it is a Circle, an Egg, or a Head. Darkness is always associated with this first symbol and surrounds it, as is shown in the Hindû, the Egyptian, the Chaldeo-Hebrew and even the Scandinavian systems. Hence black ravens, black doves, black waters and even black flames; the seventh tongue of Agni, the Fire-God being called Kâlî, the “Black,” since it was a black flickering flame. Two “black” doves flew from Egypt and, settling on the oaks of Dodona, gave their names to the Grecian Gods. Noah sends out a “black” raven after the Deluge, which [pg 478]is a symbol for the Cosmic Pralaya, after which began the real creation or evolution of our Earth and Humanity. Odin’s “black” ravens fluttered round the Goddess Saga and “whispered to her of the past and of the future.” Now what is the inner meaning of all those black birds? It is that they are all connected with the primeval Wisdom, which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of All, symbolized by the Head, the Circle or the Egg; and they all have an identical meaning and relate to the primordial Archetypal Man, Adam Kadmon, the Creative Origin of all things, which is composed of the Host of Cosmic Powers—the Creative Dhyân Chohans, beyond which all is Darkness.

Let us enquire of the wisdom of the Kabalah, even veiled and distorted as it now is, to explain in its numerical language an approximate meaning, at least of the word “raven.” This is its number value as given in the Source of Measures:

Now the secret reading of the first verse in Genesis being: “In Râsh (B’râsh) or Head, developed Gods, the Heavens and the Earth”—it is easy to comprehend the esoteric meaning of the Raven, once that the like meaning of the Flood, or Noah’s Deluge, is ascertained. Whatever the many other meanings of this emblematical allegory may be, its chief meaning is that of a new Cycle and a new Round—our Fourth Round.721 The Raven, or the Eth-h’ orebv, yields the same numerical value as the Head, and returned not to the Ark, while the Dove returned, carrying the olive-branch; when Noah, the new man of the new Race—whose prototype is Vaivasvata Manu, prepared to leave the Ark, the Womb, or Argha, of terrestrial Nature, he is the symbol of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the first three Races, [pg 479]who vanished from Earth for ever. Numerically, in the Kabalah, Jehovah, Adam, Noah, are one. At best, then, it is Deity descending on Ararat and later, on Sinai, to incarnate henceforth in man, his image, through the natural process, the mother’s womb, whose symbols are the Ark, the Mount (Sinai), etc., in Genesis. The Jewish allegory is astronomical and physiological, rather than anthropomorphic.

And here lies the abyss between the Âryan and Semitic systems, though both are built on the same foundation. As shown by an expounder of the Kabalah:

It is argued that, the primal cause being absolutely incognizable, “the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a circle with its diameter line, so as at once to carry the idea of geometry, phallicism, and astronomy”; and this was finally applied to the “signification of simply human generative organs.” Hence the whole cycle of events from Adam and the Patriarchs down to Noah is made to apply to phallic and astronomical uses, the one regulating the other, as the lunar periods, for instance. Hence, too, the Genesis of the Hebrews begins after their coming out of the Ark, and the end of the Flood, i.e., at the Fourth Race. With the Aryan people it is different.

Eastern Esotericism has never degraded the One Infinite Deity, the Container of all things, to such uses; and this is shown by the absence of Brahmâ from the Rig Veda and the modest positions occupied therein by Rudra and Vishnu, who became the powerful and great Gods, the “Infinites” of the exoteric creeds, ages later. But even they, “Creators” as they all three maybe, are not the direct “Creators” and “forefathers of men.” The latter are shown occupying a still lower scale, and are called the Prajâpatis, the Pitris, our Lunar Ancestors, etc., but never the One Infinite God. Esoteric Philosophy shows only physical man as created in the image of the Deity; which Deity, however, is only the “minor Gods.” It is the Higher-Self, the real Ego, who alone is divine and God.

Section XIII. The Seven Creations.

In Vishnu Purâna, Parâshara says to Maitreya, his pupil:

Then he proceeds to speak of two additional and very mysterious creations, variously interpreted by the commentators.

Origen, commenting upon the books written by Celsus, his Gnostic opponent—books which were all destroyed by the prudent Church Fathers—evidently answers the objections of his contradictor and reveals his system at the same time. This was clearly septenary. But the theogony of Celsus, the genesis of the stars or planets, and of sound and colour, found as an answer satire, and no more. Celsus, you see, “desiring to exhibit his learning,” speaks of a ladder of creation with seven gates, and on the top of it the eighth, ever closed. The mysteries of the Persian Mithras are explained and “musical reasons, moreover, are added.” And to these again he strives “to add a second explanation connected also with musical considerations,”725 that is to say with the seven notes of the scale, the seven Spirits of the Stars, etc.

Valentinus expatiates upon the power of the great Seven, who were summoned to bring forth this universe after Ar(r)hetos, or the Ineffable, whose name is composed of seven letters, had represented the first Hebdomad. The name Ar(r)hetos indicates the sevenfold nature [pg 481]of the One, the Logos. “The Goddess Rhea,” says Proclus, “is a Monad, Duad, and Heptad,” comprehending in herself all the Titanidæ, “who are seven.”726

The Seven Creations are found in almost every Purâna. They are all preceded by what Wilson translates as the “Indiscrete Principle,” Absolute Spirit, independent of any relation with objects of sense.

They are: (1) Mahattattva, the Universal Soul, Infinite Intellect, or Divine Mind; (2) Tanmâtras, Bhûta or Bhûtasarga, Elemental Creation the first differentiation of Universal Indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya or Aindriyaka, Organic Evolution. “These three were the Prâkrita Creations, the developments of indiscrete nature, preceded by the Indiscrete Principle”; (4) Mukhya, “the Fundamental Creation (of perceptible things) was that of inanimate bodies”;727 (5) Tairyagyonya or Tiryaksrotas, was that of animals; (6) Ûrdhvasrotas, or that of divinities(?);728 (7) Arvâksrotas, was that of man.729

This is the order given in the exoteric texts. According to esoteric teaching there are seven Primary, and seven Secondary “Creations”; the former being the Forces self-evolving from the one causeless Force; the latter showing the manifested Universe emanating from the already differentiated divine Elements.

Esoterically, as well as exoterically, all the above enumerated Creations stand for the seven periods of Evolution, whether after an Age or a Day of Brahmâ. This is the teaching par excellence of Occult Philosophy, which, however, never uses the term “creation,” nor even that of evolution, with regard to Primary “Creation”; but calls all such Forces the “aspects of the Causeless Force.” In the Bible, the seven periods are dwarfed into the six Days of Creation and the seventh Day of Rest, and the Westerns adhere to the letter. In the Hindû Philosophy, when the active Creator has produced the World of Gods, the Germs of all the undifferentiated Elements, and the Rudiments of future Senses—the World of Noumena, in short—the Universe remains unaltered for a Day of Brahmâ, a period of 4,320,000,000 years. This is the seventh passive Period, or the “Sabbath” of Eastern Philosophy, [pg 482]following six periods of active evolution. In the Shatapatha Brâhmana, Brahma (neuter), the Absolute Cause of all Causes, radiates the Gods. Having radiated the Gods, through its inherent nature, the work is interrupted. In the First Book of Manu it is said:

In the Sepher Yetzirah, the Kabalistic “Book of Creation,” the author has evidently reëchoed the words of Manu. In it the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.

And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air, the creative element; and then number Three, Water, proceeded from the Air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic Four, the Arba-il. In the Eastern doctrine, Fire is the first Element—Ether, synthesizing the whole, since it contains all of them.

In the Vishnu Purâna, the whole seven periods are given; and the progressive Evolution of the “Spirit-Soul,” and of the seven Forms of Matter, or Principles, is shown. It is impossible to enumerate them in this work. The reader is asked to peruse one of the Purânas.

Irenæus also is our witness—and a very unwilling one—that the Gnostics taught the same system, veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning. This “veiling,” however, is identical with that of the Vishnu Purâna and others. Thus Irenæus writes of the Marcosians:

Only this “likeness” and the Ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the seven creations of the Vishnu Purâna, to which two more are added, of which the eighth, termed Anugraha, “possesses both the qualities of goodness and darkness,” a Sânkhyan more than a Purânic idea. For Irenæus says again, that:

They were so “distinguished,” but not as Irenæus gives it. The Gnostics had a superior, and an inferior Hebdomad in Heaven; and a third terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. Iaô, the Mystery God and the Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen’s Chart, was the chief of these superior “Seven Heavens,”734 hence identical with the chief of the Lunar Pitris, that name being given by them to the Lunar Dhyân Chohans. “They affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and speak of them as being angels,” writes the same Irenæus; and adds that on this account they termed Iaô Hebdomas, while his mother was called Ogdoas, because, as he explains, “she preserved the number of the first begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Plerôma.”735

This “first begotten Ogdoad” was in Theogony the Second Logos, the Manifested, because it was born of the Seven-fold First Logos, hence it is the eighth on this manifested plane; and in Astrolatry, it was the Sun, Mârttânda, the eighth Son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her Seven Sons, the planets. For the Ancients have never regarded the Sun as a planet, but as a central and fixed Star. This, then, is the second Hebdomad born of the Seven-rayed One, Agni, the Sun and what not, only not the seven planets, which are Sûrya’s Brothers, not his Sons. With the Gnostics, these Astral Gods were the Sons of Ialdabaoth736 (from ilda, child, and baoth egg), the Son of Sophia Achamôth, the daughter of Sophia or Wisdom, whose region [pg 484]is the Plerôma. Ialdabaoth produces from himself these six stellar Spirits: Iaô (Jehovah), Sabaôth, Adoneus, Eloæus, Oreus, Astaphæus,737 and it is they who are the second, or inferior Hebdomad. As to the third, it is composed of the seven primeval men, the shadows of the Lunar Gods, projected by the first Hebdomad. In this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the Esoteric Doctrine, except that they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenæus, who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the “Heretics,” with regard to man being created on the sixth day, and man being created on the eighth, this relates to the mysteries of the inner man. It will become comprehensible to the reader only after he has read Volume II, and understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric Doctrine.

Ialdabaoth is a copy of Manu, who boasts:

He first creates the ten Lords of Being, the Prajâpatis, who, as verse 36 tells us, “produce seven other Manus.” Ialdabaoth boasts likewise: “I am Father and God, and there is no one above me,” he exclaims. For which his Mother coolly puts him down by saying: “Do not lie, Ialdabaoth, for the Father of all, the First Man (Anthrôpos) is above thee, and so is Anthrôpos, the Son of Anthrôpos.”739 This is a good proof that there were three Logoi—besides the Seven born of the First—one of these being the Solar Logos. And, again, who was that Anthrôpos himself, so much higher than Ialdabaoth? The Gnostic records alone can solve this riddle. In Pistis-Sophia the four-vowelled name Ieou is generally accompanied by the epithet of “the Primal, or First Man.” This shows again that the Gnôsis was but an echo of our Archaic Doctrine. The names answering to Parabrahman, to Brahmâ, and Manu, the first thinking Man, are composed of one-vowelled, three-vowelled and seven-vowelled sounds. Marcus, whose philosophy was certainly more Pythagorean than anything else, speaks of a revelation to him of the seven Heavens sounding each one vowel, as they pronounced the seven names of the seven Angelic Hierarchies.

When Spirit has permeated every minutest atom of the Seven Principles of Kosmos, then the Secondary Creation, after the above-mentioned period of rest, begins.

“The Creators [Elohim] outline in the second ‘Hour’ the shape of man,” says Rabbi Simeon in The Nuchthemeron of the Hebrews. “There are twelve hours in the day,” says the Mishna, “and it is during these that creation is accomplished.” The “twelve hours of the day” are again the dwarfed copy, the faint, yet faithful, echo of primitive Wisdom. They are like the 12,000 Divine Years of the Gods, a cyclic blind. Every Day of Brahmâ has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however, in this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 “Hours.”740 The Nuchthemeron of Apollonius of Tyana is the same thing. “The Dodecahedron lies concealed in the perfect Cube,” say the Kabalists. The mystic meaning of this is, that the twelve great transformations of Spirit into Matter—the 12,000 Divine Years—take place during the four great Ages, or the first Mahâyuga. Beginning with the metaphysical and the supra-human, it ends in the physical and purely human natures of Kosmos and Man. Eastern Philosophy can give the number of mortal years that run along the line of spiritual and physical evolutions of the seen and the unseen, if Western Science fails to do so.

Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the Secondary, that of Darkness (Matter).741 Both are found in Genesis.742 The first is the emanation of self-born Gods (Elohim); the second of physical Nature.

This is why it is said in the Zohar:

Light, however, on our plane, is Darkness in the higher spheres.

“Man and woman … on the side of the Father” (Spirit) refers to Primary Creation; and on the side of the Mother (Matter), to the Secondary. The two-fold Man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female abstract prototype and the differentiated Elohim. Man proceeds from the Dhyân Chohan, and is a “Fallen Angel,” a God in exile, as will be shown.

In India these creations were described as follows:743

(I) The First Creation: Mahattattva Creation, so-called because it was the primordial self-evolution of that which had to become Mahat, the “Divine Mind, conscious and intelligent”; esoterically, the “Spirit of the Universal Soul.”

And again:

That, then precedes the manifestation. “The first was Mahat,” says Linga Purâna; for the One (the That) is neither first nor last, but all. Exoterically, however, this manifestation is the work of the “Supreme One”—a natural effect, rather, of an Eternal Cause; or, as the Commentator says, it might have been understood to mean that Brahmâ was then created (?), being identified with Mahat, active intelligence, or the operating will of the Supreme. Esoteric Philosophy renders it the “operating Law.”

It is on the right comprehension of this tenet in the Brâhmanas and Purânas that hangs, we believe, the apple of discord between the three Vedântin Sects: the Advaita, Dvaita, and the Vishishthâdvaita. The first argues rightly that Parabrahman, having no relation, as the absolute All, to the manifested World, the Infinite having no connection with the Finite, can neither will nor create; that, therefore, Brahmâ, Mahat, Îshvara, or whatever name the Creative Power may be known by, Creative Gods and all, are simply an illusive aspect of Parabrahman in the conception of the conceivers; while the other sects identify the Impersonal Cause with the Creator, or Îshvara.

Mahat, or Mahâ-Buddhi, is, with the Vaishnavas, however, Divine Mind, in active operation, or, as Anaxagoras has it, “an ordering and disposing Mind, which was the cause of all things”—Νοῦς ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων ἀίτιος.

Wilson saw at a glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the Phœnician Môt, or Mut, who was female with the Egyptians, the Goddess Moot, the Mother, “which, like Mahat,” he says, “was the first product of the mixture(?) of Spirit and Matter, and the first rudiment of Creation.” “Ex connexione autem ejus Spiritus prodidit Môt…. Hinc … seminium omnis creaturæ et omnium rerum [pg 487]creatio,” says Brucker,744 giving it a still more materialistic and anthropomorphic colouring.

Nevertheless, the esoteric sense of the doctrine is seen, through every exoteric sentence, on the very face of the old Sanskrit texts that treat of primordial Creation.

The Nous of the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) Mind, or Mens, Mahat, operates upon Matter in the same way; it “enters into” and “agitates” it:

In the Phœnician Cosmogony also, “Spirit mixing with its own principles gives rise to creation”;745 the Orphic Triad shows an identical doctrine; for there Phanes, or Erôs, Chaos, containing crude undifferentiated Cosmic Matter, and Chronos, Time, are the three co-operating principles, emanating from the Concealed and Unknowable Point, which produce the work of “Creation.” And they are the Hindû Purusha (Phanes), Pradhâna (Chaos) and Kâla (Chronos). The good Professor Wilson does not like the idea, as no Christian clergyman, however liberal, would. He remarks that: “the mixture [of the Supreme Spirit or Soul with its own principles] is not mechanical; it is an influence or effect exerted upon intermediate agents which produce effects.” The sentence in Vishnu Purâna, “as fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the Supreme influenced the elements of creation,” the reverend and erudite Sanskritist correctly explains by: “as perfumes do not delight the mind by actual contact, but by the impression they make upon the sense of smelling, which communicates it to the mind”; adding, “the entrance of the Supreme … into Spirit, as well as Matter, is less intelligible than the view elsewhere taken of it, as the infusion of Spirit, identified with the Supreme, into Prakriti or Matter alone.” He prefers the verse in Pâdma Purâna: “He who is called the male (spirit) of Prakriti … that same divine Vishnu entered into Prakriti.” This view is certainly more akin to the plastic character of certain verses in the Bible concerning the Patriarchs, such [pg 488]as Lot and even Adam,746 and others of a still more anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to Phallicism; the Christian religion being honeycombed with it, from the first chapter of Genesis down to the Revelation.

The Esoteric Doctrine teaches that the Dhyân Chohans are the collective aggregate of Divine Intelligence or Primordial Mind, and that the first Manus, the seven “mind-born” Spiritual Intelligences, are identical with the former. Hence the Kwan-Shi-Yin, the “Golden Dragon in whom are the Seven,” of Stanza III, is the Primordial Logos, or Brahmâ, the first manifested Creative Power; and the Dhyânic Energies are the Manus, or Manu Svâyambhuva collectively. The direct connection, moreover, between the Manus and Mahat is easy to see. Manu is from the root man, to think; and thinking proceeds from the mind. It is, in Cosmogony, the Pre-nebular Period.

(II) The Second Creation, Bhûta, was of the Rudimental Principles or Tanmâtras; thence termed the Elemental Creation or Bhûtasarga. It is the period of the first breath of the differentiation of the Pre-cosmic Elements, or Matter. Bhûtâdi means the “origin of the Elements,” and precedes Bhûtasarga, the “creation,” or differentiation, of those Elements in Primordial Âkâsha, Chaos or Vacuity.747 In the Vishnu Purâna it is said to proceed along, and belong to, the triple aspect of Ahankâra, translated Egotism, but meaning rather that untranslatable term “I-am-ness,” that which first issues from Mahat, or Divine Mind; the first shadowy outline of Self-hood, for “pure” Ahankâra becomes “passionate” and finally “rudimental” or initial: it is “the origin of conscious as of all unconscious being,” though the Esoteric school rejects the idea of anything being “unconscious,” save on our plane of illusion and ignorance. At this stage of the Second Creation, the Second Hierarchy of the Manus appear, the Dhyân Chohans or Devas, who are the origin of Form (Rûpa), the Chitrashikhandinas, “Bright-crested,” or Rikshas; those Rishis who have become the informing Souls of the Seven Stars (of the Great Bear).748 In astronomical and cosmogonical language, this Creation [pg 489]relates to the Fire-Mist Period, the first stage of Cosmic Life, after its Chaotic state,749 when Atoms issue from Laya.

(III) The Third Creation: the Third or Indriya Creation was the modified form of Ahankâra, the conception of “I” (from Aham, “I”), termed the Organic Creation, or Creation of the Senses, Aindriyaka. “These three were the Prâkrita Creation, the [discrete] developments of indiscrete nature preceded by the indiscrete principle.” “Preceded by,” ought to be replaced here with “beginning with Buddhi”; for the latter is neither a discrete nor an indiscrete quantity, but partakes of the nature of both, in man as in Kosmos. A unit or human Monad on the plane of illusion, when once freed from the three forms of Ahankâra and liberated from its terrestrial Manas, Buddhi indeed becomes a continued quantity, both in duration and extension, for it is eternal and immortal. Earlier it is stated, that the Third Creation “abounding with the quality of goodness,” is termed Ûrdhvasrotas; and a page or two further the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation is referred to as “the sixth creation … or that of the divinities.” This shows plainly that earlier as well as later Manvantaras have been purposely confused, to prevent the profane from perceiving the truth. This is called “incongruity” and “contradictions” by the Orientalists. “The three creations beginning with Intelligence are elemental, but the six creations which proceed from the series of which Intellect is the first, are the work of Brahmâ.”750 Here “creations” mean everywhere stages of evolution. Mahat, “Intellect” or Mind, which corresponds with Manas, the former being on the cosmic, and the latter on the human plane, stands here, too, lower than Buddhi or supra-divine Intelligence. Therefore, when we read in Linga Purâna that “the first Creation was that of Mahat, Intellect being the first in manifestation,” we must refer that (specified) creation to the first evolution of our System or even our Earth, none of the preceding ones being discussed in the Purânas, but only occasionally hinted at.

This Creation of the first Immortals, or Devasarga, is the last of the series, and has a universal meaning; it refers, namely, to Evolution in general, and not specifically to our Manvantara, which begins with the same over and over again, thus showing that it refers to several distinct Kalpas. For it is said “at the close of the past [Pâdma] Kalpa the divine Brahmâ awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the Universe void.” Then Brahmâ is shown going once more over the “Seven Creations,” in the secondary stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective plane.

(IV) The Fourth Creation: the Mukhya or Primary, as it begins the series of four. Neither the term “inanimate” bodies nor “immovable things,” as translated by Wilson, gives a correct idea of the Sanskrit words used. Esoteric Philosophy is not alone in rejecting the idea of any atom being “inorganic,” for it is found also in orthodox Hindûism. Moreover, Wilson himself says: “All the Hindû systems consider vegetable bodies as endowed with life.”751 Charâchara, or the synonymous sthâvara and jangama, is, therefore, inaccurately rendered by “animate and inanimate,” “sentient beings” and “unconscious,” or “conscious and unconscious beings,” etc. “Locomotive and fixed” would be better, “since trees are considered to possess souls.” The Mukhya is the “creation,” or rather organic evolution, of the vegetable kingdom. In this Secondary Period, the three degrees of the elemental or rudimental kingdoms are evolved in this World, corresponding, inversely in order, to the three Prâkritic Creations, during the Primary Period of Brahmâ’s activity. As in that Period, in the words of Vishnu Purâna, “the first creation was that of Mahat or Intellect…. The second was that of the Rudimental Principles (Tanmâtras)…. The third was … the creation of the senses (Aindriyaka)”; so in this one, the order of the Elemental Forces stands thus: (1) the nascent Centres of Force, intellectual and physical; (2) the Rudimentary Principles, nerve force, so to say; and (3) nascent Apperception, which is the Mahat of the lower kingdoms, and is especially developed in the third order of Elementals; these are succeeded by the objective kingdom of minerals, in which this “apperception” is entirely latent, to re-develop only in the plants. The Mukhya Creation, then, is the middle point between the three lower and the three higher kingdoms, which represent the seven esoteric kingdoms of Kosmos, and of Earth.

(V) The Fifth Creation: the Tiryaksrotas or Tairyagyonya Creation,752 that of the “(sacred) animals,” corresponding on Earth only to the dumb animal creation. That which is meant by “animals,” in the Primary Creation, is the germ of awakening consciousness, or of “apperception,” that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive plants on Earth and more distinctly in the protistic Monera.753 On our Globe, during the First Round, animal “creation” precedes that of man, while the mammalian animals evolve from man in our Fourth Round, on the physical plane. In the First Round, the animal atoms are drawn into a cohesion of human physical form; while in the Fourth, the reverse occurs according to magnetic conditions developed during life. And this is “metempsychosis.”754 This fifth Stage of Evolution, called exoterically “Creation,” may be viewed in both the Primary and Secondary Periods, one as the spiritual and cosmic, the other as the material and terrestrial. It is archebiosis, or life-origination; “origination,” so far, of course, as the manifestation of life on all the seven planes is concerned. It is at this period of evolution that the absolutely eternal universal motion, or vibration, that which is called in Esoteric language the “Great Breath,” differentiates into the primordial, first manifested Atom. More and more, as chemical and physical sciences progress, does this Occult axiom find its corroboration in the world of knowledge; the scientific hypothesis, that even the simplest elements of matter are identical in their nature, and differ from each other only in consequence of the various distributions of atoms in the molecule or speck of substance, or of the modes of its atomic vibration, gains more ground every day.

Thus, as the differentiation of the primordial germ of life has to precede the evolution of the Dhyân Chohan of the Third Group or Hierarchy of Being in Primary Creation, before those Gods can become embodied in their first ethereal form (rûpa), so animal creation has for the same reason to precede “divine man” on Earth. And this is why we find in the Purânas, “the fifth, the Tairyagyonya Creation, was that of animals.”

(VI) The Sixth Creation: the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation, or that of [pg 492]Divinities. But these Divinities are simply the Prototypes of the First Race, the Fathers of their “mind-born” progeny with the “soft bones.” It is these who became the Evolvers of the “Sweat-born”—an expression explained in Volume II.

“Created beings,” explains the Vishnu Purâna, “although they are destroyed [in their individual forms] at the periods of dissolution, yet being affected by the good or evil acts of former existences, are never exempted from their consequences. And when Brahmâ produces the world anew, they are the progeny of his will.”

“Collecting his mind into itself [yoga-willing], Brahmâ creates the four Orders of Beings, termed Gods, Demons, Progenitors, and Men”; Progenitors here meaning the Prototypes and Evolvers of the first Root-Race of men. The Progenitors are the Pitris, and are of Seven Classes. They are said, in exoteric mythology, to be born of “Brahmâ’s side,” like Eve from the rib of Adam.

Finally, the Sixth Creation is followed, and “Creation” in general closed by:

(VII) The Seventh Creation: the evolution of the Arvâksrotas Beings, “which was … that of man.”

The “Eighth Creation” mentioned is no Creation at all: it is a “blind,” for it refers to a purely mental process, the cognition of the “Ninth Creation,” which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the Secondary, of that which was a “Creation” in the Primary (Prâkrita) Creation.755 The Eighth, then, called Anugraha, the Pratyayasarga or Intellectual Creation of the Sânkhyas,756 is “the creation of which we have a notion [in its esoteric aspect], or to which we give intellectual assent (Anugraha), in contradistinction to organic creation.” It is the correct perception of our relations to the whole range of “Gods,” and especially of those we bear to the Kumâras, the so-called “Ninth Creation,” which is in reality an aspect, or reflection, of the Sixth in our Manvantara (the Vaivasvata). “There is a ninth, the Kaumâra Creation, which is both primary and secondary,” says the Vishnu Purâna, the oldest of such texts.757 As an Esoteric text explains:

The Kumâras, are the Dhyânis, derived immediately from the Supreme Principle, who reäppear in the Vaivasvata Manu period, for the progress of mankind.758

The translator of the Vishnu Purâna corroborates it, by remarking that “these sages … live as long as Brahmâ; and they are only created by him in the First Kalpa, although their generation is very commonly, but inconsistently, introduced in the [Secondary] Vârâha, or Pâdma Kalpa.” Thus, the Kumâras are, exoterically, “the creation of Rudra or Nîlalohita, a form of Shiva, by Brahmâ … and of certain other mind-born sons of Brahmâ.” But, in the Esoteric teaching, they are the Progenitors of the true spiritual Self in the physical man, the higher Prajâpatis, while the Pitris, or lower Prajâpatis, are no more than the Fathers of the model, or type of his physical form, made “in their image.” Four (and occasionally five) are mentioned freely in the exoteric texts, three of the Kumâras being secret.

“The four Kumâras [are] the mind-born Sons of Brahmâ. Some specify seven.”759 All these seven Vaidhâtra, the patronymic of the Kumâras, the “Maker’s Sons,” are mentioned and described in Îshvara Krishna’s Sânkhya Kârikâ with the Commentary of Gaudapâdâchârya (Shankarâchvrya’s Paraguru) attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumâras, though it refrains from mentioning by name all the seven Kumâras, but calls them instead the “seven sons of Brahmâ,” which they are, as they are created by Brahmâ in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanâtana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchashikha. But these again are all aliases.

The exoteric four are Sanatkumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanâtana; and the esoteric three Sana, Kapila, and Sanatsujâta. Special attention is once more drawn to this class of Dhyân Chohans, for herein lies the mystery of generation and heredity hinted at in the Commentary on Stanza VII, in treating of the Four Orders of Angelic Beings. Volume II explains their position in the Divine Hierarchy. Meanwhile, let us see what the exoteric texts say about them.

They say little; and to him who fails to read between the lines—nothing. “We must have recourse, here, to other Purânas for the elucidation of this term,” remarks Wilson, who does not suspect for one [pg 494]moment that he is in the presence of the “Angels of Darkness,” the mythical “great enemy” of his Church. Therefore, he contrives to “elucidate” no more than that “these [Divinities] declining to create progeny, [and thus rebelling against Brahmâ], remained, as the name of the first [Sanatkumâra] implies, ever boys, Kumâras; that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their creation is called the Kaumâra.” The Purânas, however, may afford a little more light. “Being ever as he was born, he is here called a youth; and hence his name is well known as Sanatkumâra.”760 In the Shaiva Purânas, the Kumâras are always described as Yogins. The Kurma Purâna, after enumerating them, says: “These five, O Brâhmans, were Yogins, who acquired entire exemption from passion.” They are five, because two of the Kumâras fell.

So untrustworthy are some translations of the Orientalists that in the French translation of the Hari Vamsha, it is said: “The seven Prajâpati, Rudra, Skanda (his son) and Sanatkumâra proceeded to create beings.” Whereas, as Wilson shows, the original is: “These seven … created progeny; and so did Rudra, but Skanda and Sanatkumâra, restraining their power, abstained (from creation).” The “four orders of beings” are referred to sometimes as Ambhâmsi, which Wilson renders as “literally Waters” and believes it “a mystic term.” It is one, no doubt; but he evidently failed to catch the real Esoteric meaning. “Waters” and “Water” stand as the symbol for Âkâsha, the “Primordial Ocean of Space,” on which Nârâyana, the self-born Spirit, moves, reclining on that which is its progeny.761 “Water is the body of Nara; thus we have heard the name of Water explained. Since Brahmâ rests on the Water, therefore he is termed Nârâyana.”762 “Pure, Purusha created the Waters pure.” At the same time Water is the Third Principle in material Kosmos, and the third in the realm of the Spiritual: Spirit of Fire, Flame, Âkâsha, Ether, Water, Air, Earth, are the cosmic, sidereal, psychic, spiritual and mystic principles, preëminently occult, on every plane of being. “Gods, Demons, Pitris and Men,” are the four orders of beings to whom the term Ambhâmsi is applied, because they are all the product of Waters (mystically), of the Âkâshic Ocean, and of the Third principle in Nature. In the Vedas it is a synonym of Gods. Pitris and Men on Earth are the [pg 495]transformations or rebirths of Gods and Demons (Spirits) on a higher plane. Water is, in another sense, the feminine principle. Venus Aphrodite is the personified Sea, and the Mother of the God of Love, the Generatrix of all the Gods, as much as the Christian Virgin Mary is Mare, the Sea, the Mother of the Western God of Love, Mercy and Charity. If the student of Esoteric Philosophy thinks deeply over the subject, he is sure to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhâmsi, in its manifold relations to the Virgin in Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the Alchemists, and even to the “Waters of Grace” of the modern Baptist.

Of all the seven great divisions of Dhyân Chohans, or Devas, there is none with which humanity is more concerned than with the Kumâras. Imprudent are the Christian Theologians who have degraded them into Fallen Angels, and now call them Satan and Demons; as among these heavenly denizens who “refuse to create,” the Archangel Michael, the greatest patron Saint of the Western and Eastern Churches, under his double name of St. Michael and his supposed copy on earth, St. George conquering the Dragon, has to be given one of the most prominent places.

The Kumâras, the Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ-Rudra, or Shiva, mystically the howling and terrific destroyer of human passions and physical senses, which are ever in the way of the development of the higher spiritual perceptions and the growth of the inner eternal man, are the progeny of Shiva, the Mahâyogî, the great patron of all the Yogîs and Mystics of India.

Shiva-Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the Preserver; and both are the Regenerators of spiritual as well as of physical Nature. To live as a plant, the seed must die. To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity, the passions and senses of man must die before his body does. “That to live is to die and to die is to live,” has been too little understood in the West. Shiva, the Destroyer, is the Creator and the Saviour of Spiritual Man, as he is the good gardener of Nature. He weeds out the plants, human and cosmic, and kills the passions of the physical, to call to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.

The Kumâras, themselves then, being the “virgin ascetics,” refuse to create the material being Man. Well may they be suspected of a direct connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the “virgin combatant” of the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every Soul united too loosely to its immortal Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, [pg 496]refused to create just as the Kumâras did. Does not that patron Angel of the Jews preside over Saturn (Shiva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with his Father (Saturn), and called the Son of Time, Cronus, or Kâla, a form of Brahmâ (Vishnu and Shiva)? And is not Old Time of the Greeks, with its scythe and sand-glass, identical with the Ancient of Days of the Kabalists; the latter “Ancient” being one with the Hindû Ancient of Days, Brahmâ, in his triune form, whose name is also Sanat, the Ancient? Every Kumâra bears the prefix of Sanat and Sana. And Shanaishchara is Saturn, the planet Shani, the King Saturn, whose Secretary in Egypt was Thot-Hermes the first. They are thus identified both with the planet and the God (Shiva), who are, in their turn, shown to be the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal, Shiva, and Jehovah Sabbaoth, the Angel of the Face of whom is Mikael—מיכאל, “who [is] as God.” He is the patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us; and, before the Kumâras were degraded, by those who were ignorant of their very name, into Demons and Fallen Angels, the Greek Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of the Roman Catholic Church after its secession and separation from the primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their Ophiomorphos, the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the reverse aspect, symbolically, of Ophis, the Divine Wisdom or Christos. In the Talmud, Mikael is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the Seven Spirits, for the same reason that one of his many prototypes, Sanatsujâta, the chief of the Kumâras, is called Ambhâmsi, “Waters,” according to the commentary on Vishnu Purâna. Why? Because the Waters is another name of the Great Deep, the Primordial Waters of Space, or Chaos, and also means Mother, Ambâ, meaning Aditi and Akâsha, the Celestial Virgin-Mother of the visible Universe. Furthermore, the “Waters of the Flood” are also called the “Great Dragon,” or Ophis, Ophiomorphos.

The Rudras will be noticed in their septenary character of “Fire-Spirits” in the “Symbolism” attached to the Stanzas in Volume II. There we shall also consider the Cross (3 + 4) under its primeval and later forms, and shall use for purposes of comparison the Pythagorean numbers side by side with Hebrew metrology. The immense importance of the number seven will thus become evident, as the root number of Nature. We shall examine it from the standpoint of the Vedas and [pg 497]the Chaldean Scriptures; as it existed in Egypt thousands of years b.c., and as treated in the Gnostic records; we shall show how its importance as a basic number has gained recognition in Physical Science; and we shall endeavour to prove that the importance attached to the number seven throughout all antiquity was due to no fanciful imaginings of uneducated priests, but to a profound knowledge of Natural Law.

Section XIV. The Four Elements.

Metaphysically and esoterically, there is but One Element in Nature, and at the root of it is the Deity; and the so-called seven Elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the garment, the veil, of that Deity, direct from the essence whereof comes Man, whether considered physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually. Four Elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, while five only are admitted in philosophy. For the body of Ether is not fully manifested yet, and its noumenon is still the “Omnipotent Father Æther,” the synthesis of the rest. But what are these Elements, whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry and Physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer embrace the whole number suspected? Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.

The Four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.” Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetichism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the Noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits, the Cosmic Gods, to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, but respectful, recognition by the wiser. In their turn, the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so-called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.

In the Theogony of Môchus, we find Ether first, and then the Air; [pg 499]the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (νοητὸς) God, the visible Universe of Matter, is born.763

In the Orphic hymns, the Erôs-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” which is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos,” the Divine Idea. In the Hindû Kathopanishad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, and from their union springs the great Soul of the World, “Mahâ-Âtmâ, Brahman, the Spirit of Life”;764 these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi; the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists being its last and lowest division.

The Elements (στοιχεῖα) of Plato and Aristotle were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines these primitive beliefs as “a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies.”765 So close, indeed, that the Hierarchies of these Potencies, or Forces, have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are septenary, not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension, but in their real cosmic gradation, from their chemical, or physical, to their purely spiritual composition. Gods with the ignorant masses; Gods independent and supreme; Demons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the Hermetic philosopher they are Forces relatively “blind” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves finally, in our cultured age, degraded into simple chemical elements.

At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants, ought to show more reverence for the Four Elements, if they would maintain any for Moses. For the Bible manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew temples, according to Clemens [pg 500]Alexandrinus,766 a gigantic curtain, supported by five pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum—now represented by the altar in Christian churches—wherein the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours this curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and with the five pillars signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements.

In Cory’s Ancient Fragments, one of the “Chaldean Oracles” expresses ideas about the elements and Ether in language singularly like that of The Unseen Universe, written by two eminent Scientists of our day.

It states that from Ether have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store-house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple-minded ancestors.”

Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Âryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci, a very late afterthought of the last sub-races of the Fifth Root-Race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues. It was the God of Fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the God of Water, symbolized by the fluvial bull, or some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the God of Air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vâyu and Indra; and the God or Spirit of the Earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.

These were the Cosmic Gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in every cosmogony or mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter, who included in himself the four Elements and the four cardinal points, and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic title of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus Mundus, the one Mundane God, who is made to swallow all others, in the latest theology, by the arbitrary decision of his special ministers.

As Gods of Fire, Air, and Water, they were Celestial Gods; as Gods of the Lower Region, they were Infernal Deities; the latter adjective applying simply to the Earth. They were “Spirits of the Earth” under their respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the “Lord of the Lower Kingdom,” etc., and their tellurial character sufficiently proves it. The Ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kâma Loka, the Limbus on this Earth.767 If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was identified with Dis, or the Roman Pluto with the Dionysus Chthonius, the Subterranean, and with Aïdoneus, the King of the Subterranean World, wherein, according to Creuzer,768 oracles were rendered, then it will become the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aïdoneus and Dionysus are the bases of Adonaï, or Iurbo-Adonaï, as Jehovah is called in the Codex Nazaræus. “Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is named Adonaï, whose name is also Kadush and El-El,”769 and also “Lord Bacchus.” Baal-Adonis of the Sôds, or Mysteries, of the pre-Babylonian Jews became the Adonaï by the Massorah, the later vowelled Jehovah. Hence the Roman Catholics are right. All these Jupiters are of the same family; but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete. The Jupiter Aërius or Pan, the Jupiter-Ammon, and the Jupiter-Bel-Moloch, are all correlations and one with Iurbo-Adonaï, because they are all one Cosmic Nature. It is that Nature and Power which creates the specific terrestrial symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves the Energy manifesting through it as extrinsic.

For primitive religion was something better than simple preöccupation about physical phenomena, as remarked by Schelling; and principles, [pg 502]more elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, “were hidden under the transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder, the winds, and rain.” The Ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual Elements in the Forces of Nature.

The four-fold Jupiter, as the four-faced Brahmâ, the aërial, the fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the marine God, the lord and master of the four Elements, may stand as a representative for the great Cosmic Gods of every nation. Although deputing power over the fire to Hephæstus-Vulcan, over the sea to Poseidon-Neptune, and over the Earth to Pluto-Aïdoneus, the Aërial Jove was still all these; for Æther, from the first, had preëminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the Elements.

Tradition tells of a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia, whereinto light pours, through four seemingly natural apertures, or clefts placed crossways at the four cardinal points. From noon till an hour before sunset the light streams in, of four different colours, as averred, red, blue, orange-gold, and white, owing to some either natural or artificially prepared conditions of vegetation and soil. The light converges in the centre round a pillar of white marble with a globe upon it, which represents our earth. It is named the “Grotto of Zarathustra.”

Included under the arts and sciences of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal manifestation of the Four Elements, which were justly attributed by these believers to the intelligent interference of the Cosmic Gods, assumed a scientific character. The Magic of the ancient priests consisted, in those days, in addressing their Gods in their own language.

The speech of the men of the Earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective Element.

So says The Book of Rules, in a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning, adding as an explanation of the nature of that element-language:

It is composed of Sounds, not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending Power [the Regent-God of the specific Element needed].

Thus this “language” is that of incantations or of mantras, as they are called in India; sound being the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and Immortals. He who believes in the words and [pg 503]teachings of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only which he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of Cosmic Gods and their presence among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution, a “creation” spiritualem ac mundanum, as the Roman Church has it, ages before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric phraseology has changed little with respect to Divine Hierarchies since the most palmy days of Paganism, or “Idolatry.” Names alone have changed, together with claims which have now become false pretences. For when, for instance, Plato put in the mouth of the Highest Principle (Father Æther or Jupiter) the words, “the Gods of the Gods of whom I am the maker, as I am the father of all their works,” he knew the spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as St. Paul did, when saying: “For though there be that are called Gods, whether in Heaven or in Earth, as there be Gods many and Lords many….”770 Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put forward in such guarded terms.

We cannot be taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse from the Corinthians as we do; for, if the translation in the English Bible is made ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and the Roman Catholic Church accepts the words of the Apostle in their true sense. For a proof see St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, who was “directly inspired by the Apostle,” and “who wrote under his dictation,” as we are assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are approved by Rome, and who says, commenting on that special verse: “And, though there are (in fact) they who are called Gods, for it seems there are really several Gods, withal and for all that, the God-Principle and the Superior God ceases not to remain essentially one and indivisible.”771 Thus spoke the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor Gods could never affect the “God Principle.” 772

Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces:

This, the great man of Science, in his preface to the sixth edition of his work, considers to be the only concern of exact Science, which has no business to meddle with the causes.

This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above-quoted words, namely, the spirituality of the “ultimate generating power,” it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognize this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their compounds, as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The Ancients knew these powers so well, that, while concealing their true nature under various allegories, for the benefit, or to the detriment, of the uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view, while inverting them. They contrived to throw a thick veil over the nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried to preserve the latter as a record for future generations, sufficiently transparent to allow their wise men to discern the truth behind the fabulous form of the glyph or allegory. These ancient sages are accused of superstition and credulity; and this too by the very nations, which, though learned in all the modern arts and sciences, and cultured and wise in their generation, accept to this day as their one living and infinite God, the anthropomorphic “Jehovah” of the Jews!

What were some of these alleged “superstitions”? Hesiod believed, for instance, that “the winds were the sons of the Giant Typhôeus,” who were chained and unchained at will by Æolus, and the polytheistic Greeks accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should they not, since the monotheistic Jews had the same beliefs, with other names for their dramatis personæ, and since Christians believe in the same to this day? The Hesiodic Æolus, Boreas, etc., were named Kedem, Tzephum, Derum, and Ruach Hayum by the “chosen people” of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the Hellenes were taught that Æolus tied and untied the winds, the Jews believed as fervently [pg 505]that their Lord God, with “smoke” coming “out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, … rode upon a cherub and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind”.775 The expressions of the two nations are either both figures of speech, or both superstitions. We think they are neither; but only arise from a keen sense of oneness with Nature, and a perception of the mysterious and the intelligent behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no longer possess. Nor was it “superstitious” in the Greek Pagans to listen to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes, that oracle advised them to “sacrifice to the winds,” if the same has to be regarded as divine worship in the Israelites, who sacrificed as often to the wind and also especially to the fire. Do they not say that their “God is a consuming fire,”776 who appeared generally as fire and “encompassed by fire”? and did not Elijah seek for the “Lord” in the “great strong wind, and in the earthquake”? Do not the Christians repeat the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to this day, to the same “God of Wind and Water”? They do; because special prayers for rain, dry weather, trade-winds and the calming of storms on the seas, exist to this hour in the prayer-books of the three Christian Churches; and the several hundred sects of the Protestant religion offer them to their God upon every threat of calamity. The fact that they are no more answered by Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the fact of these prayers being addressed to the Power, or Powers, supposed to rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being identical in Paganism and Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry and absurd “superstition” only when addressed by a Pagan to his “idol,” and that the same superstition is suddenly transformed into “praiseworthy piety” and “religion” whenever the name of the celestial addressee is changed? But the tree is known by its fruit. And the fruit of the Christian tree being no better than that of the tree of Paganism, why should the former command more reverence than the latter?

Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and by the Marquis de Mirville, a Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy, that in Hebrew “lightning” is a synonym of “fury,” and is always handled by the “evil” Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by the Christians Elicius, and [pg 506]denounced as the “soul of lightning,” its Dæmon;777 we have either to apply the same explanation and definitions to the “Lord God of Israel,” under the same circumstances, or renounce our right of abusing the Gods and creeds of other nations.

The foregoing statements, emanating as they do from two ardent and learned Roman Catholics, are, to say the least, dangerous, in the presence of the Bible and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the “chief Dæmon of the Pagan Greeks,” hurled his deadly thunder-bolts and lightnings at those who excited his wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. For we read that:

The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Dæmon” is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract him by offering contra-sacrifices to Thetis.779 Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars, showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet, owing to the “prayers” of its enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers? What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one’s own next-of-kin, say of one’s father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour’s parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.

So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.

The above is not a defence of Pagan Gods, nor is it an attack on the [pg 507]Christian Deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of both, neither praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such “personal” and anthropomorphic God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The “light of Christ” shines upon as hideous features of the animal man now, as the “light of Lucifer” did in days of old. Says the missionary Lavoisier, in the Journal des Colonies:

In reply to this, we may quote from Luke: “And he [Jesus] arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was a calm.”780 And here is another quotation from a Prayer Book: “O Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves.” This prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, is copied textually from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin-Goddess Astarte. The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the missionary, is that the commands of the Brâhmans to their Element-Gods not remaining “ineffectual,” the power of the Brâhmans is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be “Devils” in theological fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown to be as immoral and as wicked as the Pagans ever were, what benefit has Humanity derived from its change of Gods and Idols?

That which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes in simple mortals a crime, if successful. Sorcery and incantations are now regarded as fables; yet from the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws of England and America against witchcraft—obsolete [pg 508]but not repealed to this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for “unchaining the winds,” and thus preventing ships laden with grain from arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias is derided when he affirms that he saw with his own eyes “men who by simple prayers and incantations” stopped a strong hail-storm. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy. Hoppo and Stadlein, two magicians and sorcerers, were sentenced to death for “throwing charms on fruit” and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: “Qui fruges excantassent segetem pellicentes incantando.”

Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth, in spiritual and material, in visible and invisible Nature, and that Science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the “ultimate generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. “Ethereal Fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the Aërial is but the union [correlation] of the former with Terrestrial Fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity”—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces, magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental, in fact of every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral, the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upâdhis, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are [pg 509]now regarded and recognized as perfectly natural, even by Science. Why should man be the only exception in Nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their Vehicles, their Vâhanas, in what we call the Physical Forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?

Section XV. On Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin.

Like Avalokiteshvara, Kwan-Shi-Yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that: “He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Reäbsorption [Pralaya]”. Thus the Logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Vishvakarman of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilized nations, are the “Word” who was in the “Beginning,” or the reäwakening of the energizing Powers of Nature, with the One Absolute. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct Elements, It was the “Maker,” the fashioner or modeller, of all things. “Without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men,” who finally may be called as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of Manifested Nature. “The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be reäbsorbed with him.”781 As this Bodhisattva is said “to assume any form he pleases,” from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday, or memorial day, is celebrated according to the Kin-kwang-ming-King, or “Luminous Sûtra of Golden Light,” in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of Maitreya Buddha, in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatâras and Buddhas, in the Seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali Yuga, our present terrifically materialistic age of Darkness, the “Black Age,” that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali Yuga is “l’Age d’Or” (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudo-Occultists.782

Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this Deity was founded on magic. The Mantras are all taken from special books kept secret by the priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter or reader, by simply chanting them, produces a secret causation which results in immediate effects. Kwan-Shi-Yin is Avalokiteshvara, and both are forms of the Seventh Universal Principle; while in its highest metaphysical character this Deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the Planetary Spirits, Dhyân Chohans. He is the “Self-Manifested”; in short, the “Son of the Father.” Crowned with seven dragons, above his statue there appears the inscription Pu-tsi-k’iun-ling, “the universal Saviour of all living beings.”

Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite different, but Kwan-Yin is a perfect equivalent. In a temple of P’u-to, the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan-Shi-Yin is represented floating on a black aquatic bird (Kâlahamsa), and pouring on the heads of mortals the elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of the chief Dhyâni-Buddhas, the Regent of a star called the “Star of Salvation.” In his third transformation Kwan-Yin is the informing Spirit or Genius of Water. In China the Dalaï-Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Kwan-Shi-Yin, who in his third terrestrial appearance was a Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of Amitâbha Buddha, or Gautama.

It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do McClatchey and Hargrave Jennings. The first discovers “the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols, the Kheen or Yang, which is the membrum virile, and the Khw-an or Yin, the pudendum muliebre.”783 Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan-Shi-Yin (Avalokiteshvara) and Kwan-Yin, besides being now the patron Deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogîs of Tibet, are the Gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys Davids’ Buddhism: “The name Avalokiteshvara … means ‘the Lord who looks down from on high’.”784 Nor is Kwan-Shi-Yin the “Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but, literally interpreted, it means “the Lord that is seen.” and in one sense, “the Divine Self perceived by Self”—the human Self—that is, the Âtman or Seventh Principle, merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, [pg 512]Buddhi, the Sixth Principle, or Divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense, Avalokiteshvara-Kwan-Shi-Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal Principle, is the Logos perceived by the Universal Buddhi, or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate of the Dhyâni-Buddhas; and is not the “Spirit of Buddha present in the Church,” but the Omnipresent Universal Spirit manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of Yoginî, which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, is a Sanskrit word, “in the dialects pronounced Jogi or Zogee (!), and is … equivalent with Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Dutica,” i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Shakti.785 “The books of morality [in India] direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sacti.”786 Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about “Budh,” as being a name “which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ.”787 Max Müller, in treating of “False Analogies,” says that “the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat … maintains that the three syllables I Hi Wei [in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-King] were meant for Je-ho-vah”;788 and again, Father Amyot “felt certain that the three persons of the Trinity could be recognized” in the same work. And if Abel Rémusat, why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognize the absurdity of ever seeing in Budh, the “enlightened” and the “awakened,” a “phallic symbol.”

Kwan-Shi-Yin, then, is “the Son identical with his Father,” mystically, or the Logos, the Word. He is called the “Dragon of Wisdom,” in Stanza III, for all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with, and symbolized by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, “he who unites the doubles,” was represented as a serpent on human legs, either with or without arms. This was the Astral Light reüniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the Divine-Human to its purely Divine Monad, the Prototype in “Heaven” or Nature. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature; of Christ with the Ophites; and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him. The serpent was also an emblem of Christ with [pg 513]the Templars, as is shown by the Templar degree in Masonry. The symbol of Knooph (Khnoom also), or the Soul of the World, says Champollion, “is represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the Good Genius and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded.”789 This sacred animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. It appears with various heads, human and animal, but its gems are always found inscribed with the name ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ (ChNOUBIS). This symbol is identical with one which; according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called the “First of the Celestial Gods,” the God Hermes, or Mercury, with the Greeks, to which God Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of, and the first initiation of men into, Magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or “Reäwakening” into the divine Science.

To close, Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin are the two aspects, male and female, of the same principle in Kosmos, Nature and Man, of Divine Wisdom and Intelligence. They are the Christos-Sophia of the mystic Gnostics, the Logos and its Shakti. In their longing for the expression of some mysteries never to be wholly comprehended by the profane, the Ancients, knowing that nothing could be preserved in human memory without some outward symbol, have chosen the, to us, often ridiculous images of the Kwan-Yins to remind man of his origin and inner nature. To the impartial, however, the Madonnas in crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves must appear far more absurd than the Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin in their dragon-garb. The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective. Therefore, since the symbolic formula attempts to characterize that which is above scientific reasoning, and is as often far beyond our intellects, it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it will fade out from human remembrance.