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*** Venus is thus the Earth .
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also of Astrology, represented Venus in its astronomical tables as a Globe poised over a Cross, and the Earth, as a Globe under a Cross. The esoteric meaning of this is: "Earth fallen into generation, or into the production of its species through sexual union." But the later Western nations did not fail to give quite a different interpretation. They explained this sign through their mystics -- guided by the light of the Latin Church -- as meaning that our Earth and all on it were redeemed by the Cross, while Venus (otherwise Lucifer or Satan) was trampling upon it. Venus is the most occult, powerful, and mysterious of all the planets; the one whose influence upon, and relation to the Earth is most prominent. In exoteric Brahmanism, Venus or Sukra -- a male deity* -- is the son of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapati and a Vedic sage, and is Daitya-Guru, or the priest-instructor of the primeval giants. The whole history of "Sukra" in the Puranas, refers to the Third and to the Fourth Races.
"It is through Sukra that the 'double ones' (the Hermaphrodites) of the Third (Root-Race) descended from the first 'Sweat-born,'" says the Commentary. Therefore it is represented under the symbol of
(the circle and diameter) during the Third (Race) and of during the Fourth.
This needs explanation. The diameter, when found isolated in a circle, stands for female nature, for the first ideal World, self-generated and self-impregnated by the universally diffused Spirit of Life -- referring thus to the primitive Root-Race also. It becomes androgynous as the Races and all on Earth develop into their physical forms, and the symbol is transformed into a circle with a diameter from which runs a vertical line: expressive of male and female, not separated as yet -- the first and earliest
Egyptian Tau ; after which it becomes or male-female separated** (See first pp. of Book I) and fallen into generation. Venus (the planet) is symbolised by the sign of a globe over the cross, which shows it as presiding over the natural generation of man. The Egyptians symbolised Ank , "life,"
by the ansated cross, or , which is only another form of Venus (Isis) , and meant, esoterically, that mankind and all animal life bad stepped out of the divine spiritual circle and fallen into physical male and female generation. This sign, from the end of the Third Race, has the same phallic significance as the "tree
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 31 THE HORSES OF SUKRA'S CAR.
of life" in Eden Anouki, a form of Isis, is the goddess of life; and Ank was taken by the Hebrews from the Egyptians and introduced by Moses, one learned in the Wisdom of the priests of Egypt, with many other mystical words. The word Ank in Hebrew, with the personal suffix, means "my life," my being, which "is the personal pronoun Anochi," from the name of the Egyptian goddess Anouki.*
In one of the most ancient Catechisms of Southern India, Madras Presidency, the hermaphrodite goddess Adanari (see also "Indian Pantheon ") has the ansated cross, the Svastica, the "male and female sign," right in the central part, to denote the pre-sexual state of the Third Race. Vishnu, who is now represented with a lotus growing out of his navel -- or the Universe of Brahma evolving out of the central point Nara -- is shown in one of the oldest carvings as double-sexed (Vishnu and Lakshmi) standing on a lotus-leaf floating on the water; which water rises in a semicircle and pours through the Svastica, "the source of generation" or of the descent of man.
Pythagoras calls Sukra-Venus the Sol alter, "the other Sun." Of the "seven palaces of the Sun," that of Lucifer Venus is the third one in Christian and Jewish Kabala, the Zohar making of it the abode of Samael. According to the Occult Doctrine, this planet is our Earth's primary, and its spiritual prototype. Hence, Sukra's car (Venus-Lucifer's) is said to be drawn by an ogdoad of "earth-born horses," while the steeds of the chariots of the other planets are different.
"Every sin committed on Earth is felt by Usanas-Sukra. The Guru of the Daityas is the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Men. Every change on Sukra is felt on, and reflected by, the Earth."
Sukra, or Venus, is thus represented as the preceptor of the Daityas, the giants of the Fourth Race, who, in the Hindu allegory, obtained at one time the sovereignty of all the Earth, and defeated the minor gods. The Titans of the Western allegory are as closely connected with Venus-Lucifer, identified by later Christians with Satan. Therefore, as Venus, equally with Isis, was represented with Cow's horns on her head, the symbol of mystic Nature, and one that is convertible with, and significant of, the moon, since all these were lunar goddesses, the configuration of this planet is now placed by theologians between the horns of the mystic Lucifer.** It is owing to the fanciful interpretation of the
* The ansated Cross is the astronomical planetary sign of Venus, "signifying the existence of parturient energy in the sexual sense, and this was one of the attributes of Isis, the Mother, of Eve, Hauvah, or Mother-Earth, and was so recognised among all the ancient peoples in one or another mode of expression." (From a modern Kabalistic MS.)
** Athenaeus shows that the first letter of Satan's name was represented in days of old by an arc and crescent; and some Roman Catholics, good and kind men, would persuade the public that it is in honour of Lucifer's crescent-like horns that Mussulmen [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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archaic tradition, which states that Venus changes simultaneously (geologically) with the Earth; that whatever takes place on the one takes place on the other; and that many and great were their common changes -- it is for these reasons that St. Augustine repeats it, applying the several changes of configuration, colour, and even of the orbital paths, to that theologically-woven character of Venus-
Lucifer. He even goes so far in his pious fancy as to connect the last changes of the planet with the Noachian and mythical Deluge alleged to have taken place 1796 years B.C. (See "City of God" lxxi., ch. viii.).
As Venus has no satellites, it is stated allegorically, that "Asphujit" (this "planet") adopted the Earth, the progeny of the Moon, "who overgrew its parent and gave much trouble," a reference to the occult connection between the two. The Regent (of the planet) Sukra* loved his adopted child so well that he incarnated as Usanas and gave it perfect laws, which were disregarded and rejected in later ages. Another allegory, in Harivansa, is that Sukra went to Siva asking him to protect his pupils, the Daityas and Asuras, from the fighting gods; and that to further his object he performed a Yoga rite "imbibing the smoke of chaff with his head downwards for 1,000 years." This refers to the great inclination of the axis of Venus (amounting to 50 degrees), and to its being enveloped in eternal clouds. But it relates only to the physical constitution of the planet. It is with its Regent, the informing Dhyan Chohan,
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] have chosen the Crescent for their national arms. Venus has always been identified, since the establishment of Roman Catholic dogmatism, with Satan and Lucifer, or the great Dragon, contrary to all reason and logic. As shown by the symbologists and astronomers, the association between the serpent and the idea of darkness had an astronomical foundation. The position which the constellation of Draco at one time occupied showed that the great serpent was the ruler of the night. This constellation was formerly at the very centre of the heavens, and is so extensive that it was called the Great Dragon. Its body spreads over seven signs of the Zodiac; and Dupuis, "who," says Staniland Wake, "sees in the Dragon of the Apocalypse a reference to the celestial serpent," remarks that "it is not astonishing that a constellation so extended should be represented by the author of that book as a Great Dragon with seven heads, who drew the third part of the stars from heaven and cast them to Earth"; (Dupuis, tome III., p. 255). Only Dupuis never knew why Draco, once the pole-star -- the symbol of "Guide," Guru and director -- had been thus degraded by posterity. "The gods of our fathers are our devils," says an Asiatic proverb. When Draco ceased to be the lode-star, the guiding sidereal divinity, it shared the fate of all the fallen gods. Seth and Typhon was at one time, Bunsen tells us, "a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who conferred on the sovereigns of the 18th and 19th Dynasties the symbols of life and power. But subsequently, in the course of the 20th Dynasty, he is suddenly treated as an evil Demon, insomuch that his effigies and name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached." The real occult reason will be given in these pages.
* Sukra is the son of Bhrigu the great Rishi, and one of the Seven Prajapati, the founder of the Race of Bhargavas, in which Parasu Rama is born.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 33 PARENT STARS AND SISTER PLANETS.
that Occult mysticism has to deal. The allegory which states that for killing Sukra's mother, Vishnu was cursed by him to be reborn seven times on the Earth, is full of occult philosophical meaning. It does not refer to Vishnu's Avatars, since these number nine, the tenth being still to come, but to the Races on Earth. Venus, or Lucifer (also Sukra and Usanas) the planet, is the light-bearer of our Earth, in both its physical and mystic sense. The Christians knew it well in early times, since one of the earliest popes of Rome is known by his Pontiff name as Lucifer.
"Every world has its parent star and sister planet. Thus Earth is the adopted child and younger brother of Venus, but its inhabitants are of their own kind. . . . All sentient complete beings (full septenary men or higher beings) are furnished, in their beginnings, with forms and organisms in full harmony with the nature and state of the sphere they inhabit."*
"The Spheres of Being, or centres of life, which are isolated nuclei breeding their men and their animals, are numberless; not one has any resemblance to its sister-companion or to any other in its own special progeny."**
"All have a double physical and spiritual nature. "
"The nucleoles are eternal and everlasting; the nuclei periodical and finite. The nucleoles form part of the absolute. They are the embrasures of that black impenetrable fortress, which is for ever concealed from human or even Dhyanic sight. The nuclei are the light of eternity escaping therefrom. "
"It is that LIGHT which condenses into the forms of the 'Lords of Being' -- the first and the highest of which are, collectively, JIVATMA, or Pratyagatma (said figuratively to issue from Paramatma. It is the Logos of the Greek philosophers -- appearing at the beginning of every new Manvantara). From these downwards -- formed from the ever-consolidating waves of that light, which becomes on the objective plane gross matter -- proceed the numerous hierarchies of the Creative Forces, some formless, others having their
* This is a flat contradiction of Swedenborg, who saw, in "the first Earth of the astral world, " inhabitants dressed as are the peasants in Europe; and on the Fourth Earth women clad as are the shepherdesses in a bal masque. Even the famous astronomer Huygens laboured under the mistaken idea that other worlds and planets have the same identical beings as those who live on our Earth, possessing the same figures, senses, brain-power, arts, sciences, dwellings and even to the same fabric for their wearing apparel! (Theorie du Monde). For the clearer comprehension of the statement that the Earth "is the progeny of the Moon," see Book I., stanza VI.
** This is a modern gloss. It is added to the old Commentaries for the clearer comprehension of those disciples who study esoteric Cosmogony after having passed through Western learning. The earlier
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Glosses are too redundant with adjectives and figures of speech to be easily assimilated.
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own distinctive form, others, again, the lowest (Elementals), having no form of their own, but assuming every form according to the surrounding conditions."
"Thus there is but one Absolute Upadhi (basis) in the spiritual sense, from, on, and in which, are built for Manvantaric purposes the countless basic centres on which proceed the Universal, cyclic, and individual Evolutions during the active period."
"The informing Intelligences, which animate these various centres of Being, are referred to indiscriminately by men beyond the Great Range* as the Manus, the Rishis, the Pitris**, the Prajapati, and so on; and as Dhyani Buddhas, the Chohans, Melhas (fire-gods), Bodhisattvas,*** and others, on this side. The truly ignorant call them gods; the learned profane, the one God; and the wise, the Initiates, honour in them only the Manvantaric manifestations of THAT which neither our Creators (the Dhyan Chohans) nor their creatures can ever discuss or know anything about. The ABSOLUTE is not to be defined, and no mortal or immortal has ever seen or comprehended it during the periods of Existence. The mutable cannot know the Immutable, nor can that which lives perceive Absolute Life. "
Therefore, man cannot know higher beings than his own "progenitors." "Nor shall he worship them, "but he ought to learn how he came into the world.
(c) Number Seven, the fundamental figure among all other figures in every national religious system, from Cosmogony down to man, must have its raison d'etre. It is found among the ancient Americans, as prominently as among the archaic Aryans and Egyptians. The question will be fully dealt with in the second part of this Book; meanwhile a few facts may be given here. Says the author of the "Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches, 11,500 years ago "****:--
*" Beyond" the Great Range, means, in our case, India, as being the Trans-Himalayan region for the Cis-Himalayan region.
** The term Pitris is used by us in these Slokas to facilitate their comprehension, but it is not so used in the original Stanzas, where they have distinct appellations of their own, besides being called "Fathers" and "Progenitors."
*** It is erroneous to take literally the worship of the human Bodhisattvas, or Manjusri. It is true that, exoterically, the Mahayana school teaches adoration of these without distinction, and that Huien-
Tsang speaks of some disciples of Buddha as being worshipped. But esoterically it is not the disciple or the learned Manjusri personally that received honours, but the divine Bodhisattvas and Dhyani
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Buddhas that animated (Amilakha , as the Mongolians say) the human forms.
**** The author of this work is Augustus Le Plongeon. He and his wife are well known in the United States for their untiring labours in Central America. It is they who discovered the sepulchre of the royal Kan Coh, at Cichen-Itza. The author [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 35 THE "SEVEN" MYSTERY.
"Seven seems to have been the sacred number par excellence among all civilised nations of antiquity. Why? Each separate people has given a different explanation, according to the peculiar tenets of their (exoteric) religion. That it was the number of numbers for those initiated into the sacred mysteries, there can be no doubt. Pythagoras . . . calls it the 'Vehicle of Life' containing body and soul, since it is formed of a Quaternary, that is Wisdom and intellect, and of a Trinity or action and matter. The Emperor Julian, 'In matrem, etc.,' expresses himself thus: 'Were I to touch upon the initiation into our Sacred Mysteries, which the Chaldees Bacchized, respecting the seven-rayed god, lighting up the soul through him, I should say things unknown to the rabble, very unknown, but well known to the blessed Theurgists.' " (p. 141).
And who, acquainted with the Puranas, the Book of the Dead, the Zendavesta, the Assyrian tiles, and finally the Bible, and who has observed the constant occurrence of the number seven, in these records of people living from the remotest times unconnected and so far apart, can regard as a coincidence the following fact, given by the same explorer of ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of seven as a mystic number, among the inhabitants of the "Western continent" (of America), he adds that it is not less remarkable. For: --
"It frequently occurs in the Popul-vuh . . . we find it besides in the seven families said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical personage named Votan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. In the seven caves* from which the ancestors of the Nahuatl are reported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described by Coronado and Niza. . . . In the seven Antilles; in the seven heroes who, we are told, escaped the Deluge . . . ."
"Heroes," moreover, whose number is found the same in every "Deluge" story -- from the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to Noah's ark, into which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by "Sevens." Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called "celestial numbers" in the canonical "Book of Changes. " (Yi King, or transformation, as in "Evolution").
The explanation of it becomes evident when one examines the ancient
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learning of the Aryans and the Egyptians was derived from the Mayas. But, although certainly coeval with Plato's Atlantis, the Mayas belonged to the Fifth Continent, which was preceded by Atlantis and Lemuria.
* These seven caves, seven cities, etc., etc., stand in every case for the seven centres, or zones, upon which the seven primitive groups of the first Root-race were born.
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Symbols: all these are based upon and start from the figures given from the Archaic Manuscript in the
proem of Book I. , the symbol of evolution and fall into generation or matter, is reflected in the old Mexican sculptures or paintings, as it is in the Kabalistic Sephiroth, and the Egyptian Tau. Examine the Mexican MSS (Add. MSS. Brit. Mus. 9789)*; you will find in it a tree whose trunk is covered with ten fruits ready to be plucked by a male and female, one on each side of it, while from
the top of the trunk two branches shoot horizontally to the right and left, thus forming a perfect (tau), the ends of the two branches, moreover, each bearing a triple bunch, with a bird -- the bird of immortality, Atman or the divine Spirit -- sitting between the two, and thus making the seventh. This represents the same idea as the Sephirothal Tree,ten in all, yet, when separated from its upper triad,
leaving Seven. These are the celestial fruits, the ten or 10, born out of the two invisible male and female seeds, making up the 12, or the Dodecahedron of the Universe. The mystic system contains the
, the central point; the 3 or ; the five, , and the seven or , or again ; the triangle in the square and the synthesizing point in the interlaced double triangles. This for the world of the archetypes. The phenomenal world receives its culmination and the reflex of all in MAN. Therefore he is the mystic square -- in his metaphysical aspect -- the Tetraktis; and becomes the Cubeon the
creative plain. His symbol is the cube unfolded** and 6 becoming 7, or the three crossways (the female) and four vertically; and this is man, the culmination of the deity on Earth, whose body is the cross of flesh, on, through,and in which he is ever crucifying and putting to death the divine Logos or his HIGHER SELF.
"The universe," says every Philosophy and Cosmogony, "hath a Ruler (Rulers collectively) set over it, which is called the WORD (Logos); the fabricating Spirit is its Queen: which two are the First Power after the ONE."
These are the Spirit and Nature, which two form our illusory universe. The two inseparables remain in the Universe of Ideas so long as it lasts, and then merge back into Parabrahm, the One ever changeless. "The Spirit, whose essence is eternal, one and self-existent," emanates a pure ethereal LIGHT -- a dual light not perceptible to the elementary senses -- in the Puranas, in the Bible, in the Sepher
* The engraving is reproduced in the "Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and Quiches" on p. 134.
** See "Source of Measures" p. 50 to 53 and also Book II. Part 2.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 37 THE THREE KINDS OF LIGHT.
Jezirah, the Greek and Latin hymns, in the Book of Hermes, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, in the esotericism of Lao-tse, everywhere. In the Kabala, which explains the secret meaning of Genesis, this light is the DUAL-MAN, or the Androgyne (rather the sexless) angels, whose generic name is ADAM KADMON. It is they who complete man, whose ethereal form is emanated by other divine, but far lower beings, who solidify the body with clay, or the "dust of the ground" -- an allegory indeed, but as scientific as any Darwinian evolution and more true.
The author of the "Source of Measures" says that the foundation of the Kabala and all its mystic books is made to rest upon the ten Sephiroth; which is a fundamental truth.* He shows these ten Sephiroth or the ten numbers in the following diagram: --
wherein the circle is the naught, its vertical diameter line is the first or primal ONE (the Word or Logos), from which springs the series of the other numbers up to 9, the limit of the digits. The 10 is the first Divine Manifestation** containing "every possible power of exact expression of proportion." By this Kabalistic speculation we are taught that the Sephiroth "were the numbers or emanations of the Heavenly Light (figures 20612 to 6561), they were the 10 'Words,' DBRIM, 41224, the light, of which they were the flux, was the Heavenly Man, the Adam KDM (the 144- 144); and the Light, by the New Testament or Covenant (or 41224) created God; just as, by the Old Testament God (Alhim, 31415) creates light (20612 to 6561)."
Now there are three kinds of light in Occultism, as in the Kabala. (1) The Abstract and Absolute Light, which is Darkness; (2) The Light of the Manifested-Unmanifested, called by some the Logos; and (3) The latter light reflected in the Dhyan Chohans, the minor logoi (the Elohim, collectively), who, in their turn, shed it on the objective Universe. But in the Kabala -- re-edited and carefully adjusted to fit the Christian tenets by the Kabalists of the XIII. century -- the three lights are described as: -- (1) The clear and penetrating, that of Jehovah; (2) reflected light; and (3) light in the abstract." This light abstractly taken (in a metaphysical or symbolical sense) is Alhim (Elohim God),
* See "Masonic Review, " Cincinnati, June 1886, Art. Kabala No. 6.
** See "Isis Unveiled, " Vol. II., pp. 300 et seq., for a proof of the antiquity of the decimal system of figures.
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while the clear penetrating light is Jehovah. The light of Alhim belongs to the world in general, in its allness and general fulness, but the light of Jehovah is that pertaining to the chiefest production, man, whom this light penetrated and made." The author of the "Source of Measures" pertinently refers the reader to Inman's "Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names, " vol. ii., p. 648. There, an engraving of "the vesica piscis, Mary and the female emblem, copied from a rosary of the blessed Virgin . . . . printed at Venice, 1542," and therefore, as Inman remarks, "with a license from the Inquisition, consequently orthodox," will show the reader what the Latin Church understood by this "penetrating power of light and its effects " How sadly disfigured -- applied as they were to the grossest anthropomorphic conceptions -- have become, under Christian interpretation, the noblest and grandest, as the most exalted, ideas of deity of the Eastern philosophy!
The Occultists call this light Daiviprakriti in the East, and light of Christos in the West. It is the light of the LOGOS, the direct reflection of the ever Unknowable on the plane of Universal manifestation. But here is the interpretation thereof given by the modern Christians from the Kabala. As declared by the author just cited: --
"To the fulness of the world in general with its chiefest content, man, the term Elohim-Jehovah applies. In extracts from the Zohar, the Rev. Dr. Cassell (a Kabalist), to prove that the Cabbalah sets forth the doctrine of the Trinity, among other things says: 'Jehovah is Elohim (Alhim) . . . by three steps God (Alhim), and Jehovah become the same, and though separated each and together, they are of the same one.'" Similarly, Vishnu becomes the Sun, the visible symbol of the impersonal deity. Vishnu is described as "striding through the seven regions of the Universe in three steps." But with the Hindus this is an exoteric account, a surface tenet and an allegory, while the Kabalists give it out as the esoteric and final meaning. But to proceed: --
"Now light," explains the author, "as shown, is 20612 to 6561, as the proper enunciation of the integral and numerical relation of diameter to circumference of a circle. God (Alhim, i.e., 3.1415 to one, a modified form of the above) is the reduction of this, so as to obtain a standard unitone,as the basis, in general, of all calculation and all mensuration. But, for the production of animal life, and for especial time measure or the lunar year, that influence which causes conception and embryotic development, the numbers of the Jehovah measure ('man even Jehovah' measure), viz. 113 to 355, have to be specialised.* But this last ratio is but a modified form of light or 20612 to 6561, as a '[[pi ]]' value, being only a variation of the same (that is 20612 to 6561 is 31415 to one, or Alhim or God) -- and in such a manner that one can be made
* See "Source of Measures," pp. 276, et seq. App. VII.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 39 THE NUMBERS OF CREATION.
to flow into and be derived from the other, and these are the three steps by which the Unity and sameness can be shown of the divine names. That is, the two are but variations of the same ratio, viz., that of '[[pi]].' The object of this comment is to show the same measuring use for the Cabbalah as was employed in the three Covenants of the Bible, and in the symbols of Masonry, as just noticed."
"First then, the Sephiroth are described as Light, that is, they themselves are a function of, indeed, the same as, the manifestation of Ain Soph; and they are so from the fact that Light represents the ratio of 20612 to 6561, as part of the 'Words,' DBRIM, 41224, or as to the Word, Debar, 206 (= 10 cubits). Light is so much the burden of the Kabbalah, in explaining the Sephiroth, that the most famous book on the Kabbalah is called Zohar or Light. In this we find expressions of this kind: -- 'The Infinite was entirely unknown and diffused no light before the luminous point violently broke through into vision . . . .' 'When he first assumed the form (of the Crown, or the first Sephira), he caused 9 splendid lights to emanate from it, which, shining through it, diffused a bright light in all directions': that is, these 9 with
his one (which was the origin, as above, of the nine), together made the 10, that is or , or the sacred Ten (numbers or Sephiroth), or Jod -- and these numbers were 'the Light.' Just as in the Gospel of St. John, God (Alhim, 31415 to one) was that light (20612 to 6561) by which (Light) all things were made."
In Sepher Jezirah, or Numbers of Creation, the whole process of evolution is given out in Numbers. In its "32 paths of Wisdom" the number 3 is repeated four times, and the number 4 five times. Therefore, the Wisdom of God is contained in numbers (Sephrim or Sephiroth), for Sepher (or S-ph-ra when unvowelled) means "to cipher." And therefore, also, we find Plato stating that the deity geometrizes in fabricating the Universe.
The Kabalistic book, the Sepher Jezirah, opens with a statement of the hidden wisdom of Alhi in Sephrim, i.e , the Elohim in the Sephiroth.
"In thirty and two paths, hidden wisdom, established Jah, JHVH, Tzabaoth, Elohi of Israel, Alhim of Life, El of Grace and Mercy -- exalted, uplifted Dweller on high, and King of Everlasting, and his name -- Holy! in three Sephrim: viz: -- B-S'ph-r, V-S'ph-r, V-Siph-o-r."
"This Comment sets forth 'the Hidden Wisdom' of the original text by hidden Wisdom, that is, by the use of words carrying a special set of Numbers and a special phraseology, which will set forth the very explanatory system which we find to fit so accurately in the Hebrew Bible. . . . . In setting forth his scheme, to enforce it, and to finish out his detailed exposition in a general postulate, viz., the one word
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Sephrim (Sephiroth) of the Number Jezirah, the author explains the separation of this word in the three subordinate ones, a play upon a common word s-ph-r, or number."
The prince Al-Chazari says to the Rabbi*: -- "I wish now that thou wouldest impart to me some of the chiefest or leading principles of Natural Philosophy, which as thou sayest were in former times worked out by them (the Ancient Wise Ones)"; to which the Rabbi makes answer: -- "To such principles appertains the Number of Creation of our Race-father Abraham" (that is Abram and Abraham, or numbers 41224 and 41252). He then says that this book of Number treats of teaching the Alhim-ness and One-ness through, "DBRIM," viz., the numbers of the Word " Words." That is, it teaches the use of the ratio 31415 to one, through 41224, which last, in the description of the Ark of the Covenant, was divided into two parts by two tables of stone, on which these, DBRIM or 41224, were written or engraved -- or 20612 by 2. He then comments on these three subordinately used words, and takes care as to one of them to make the comment: -- "And Alhim (31415 to 1) said: Let there be Light (20612 to 6561)."
The three words as given in the text are: . And the Rabbi in commenting upon them says: "It teaches the Alhim-ness (31415) and One-ness (the diameter to Alhim) through Words (DBRIM, 41224), by which on the one side there is infinite expression in heterogeneous creations, and on the other a final harmonic tendency to One-ness" (which as everyone knows is the mathematical function of "[[pi ]]" of the schools, which measures, and weighs and numbers the stars of heaven, and yet resolves them back into the final Oneness of the Universe through Words). "Their final accord perfects itself in that Oneness that ordains them and which consists in (Book of Al-Chazari), that is the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves the jod, or i, out of one of the words, whereas afterwards he restores it again. If we take the values of those subordinate words, we find them to be 340, 340, 346; together these are 1026, and the division of the general word into these has been to produce these numbers, which by Temurah may be changed in various ways for various purposes." (Kabala.)
The reader is asked to turn to Stanza IV. of Book I. and its fourth commentary to find that the 3, 4 -- (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065, the number of Jehovah, is the number of the 21 Prajapati mentioned in the Mahabharata, or the three Sephrim (words in cipher or figures). And this comparison between the Creative Powers of Archaic philosophy and the anthropomorphic Creator of exoteric Judaism (since their esotericism shows its identity with the Secret Doctrine) will lead the student to perceive and discover that, in truth, Jehovah is but a lunar and
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"generation" god. (See Book I, Part 2, "Deus Lunus. ") It is a fact well known to every conscientious student of the Kabala, that the deeper he dives into it, the more he feels convinced that unless the Kabala -- or what is left of it -- is read by the light of the Eastern esoteric philosophy, its study leads only to the discovery that, on the lines traced by exoteric Judaism and Christianity, the monotheism of both is nothing more exalted than ancient Astrolatry, now vindicated by modern Astronomy. The Kabalists never cease to repeat that primal intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and negative. Hence the Ain-
Soph -- the "UNKNOWABLE" and the "UNNAMEABLE" -- which, as it could not be made manifest, was conceived to emanate manifesting Powers. It is then with its emanations alone that human intellect has to, and can deal. Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious creations of angels and the rest out of nothing, now finds itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or miracle, and materialism. An extra-cosmic god is fatal to philosophy, an intra-cosmic Deity -- i.e. Spirit and matter inseparable from each other -- is a philosophical necessity. Separate them and that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of emotionalism. But why "geometrize," as Plato has it, why represent these emanations under the form of an immense arithmetical table? The question is well answered by the author just cited. His remarks are quoted in Part II., § "The Theogony of the Creative Gods."
"Mental perception," he says, "to become physical perception, must have the Cosmic principle of light: and by this, our mental circle must become visible through light; or, for its complete manifestation, the Circle must be that of physical visibility, or Light itself. Such conceptions, thus formulated, became the groundwork of the philosophy of the divine manifesting in the Universe."
This is philosophy. It is otherwise when we find the Rabbi in Al-Chazari saying that "under s'ph-r is to be understood calculation and weighing of created bodies. For the calculation, by means of which a body must be constructed in harmony or symmetry, by which it must be in construction rightly arranged and made to correspond to the object in design, consists at last in number, extension, mass, weight; co-ordinate relation of movements, then harmony of music, must consist altogether by number, that is (S'ph-r). . . By Sippor (s'phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim whereunto joins or adapts itself the design of the frame or form of construction; for example, it was said 'Let Light be.' The work became as the WORDS were spoken, that is, as the numbers of the work came forth. . . . ."
This is materialising the Spiritual without scruple. But the Kabala
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was not always so well adapted to anthropo-monotheistic conceptions. Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance, in Kapila's "Sankhya" Philosophy, unless, allegorically speaking, Purusha mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti, the latter remains irrational, while the former remains inactive without her. Therefore Nature (in man) must become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as
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"MAN," but has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever changing forms. Evolution, not creation, by means of WORDS is recognized in the philosophies of the East, even in their exoteric records. Ex oriente lux . Even the name of the first man in the Mosaic Bible had its origin in India, Professor Max Muller's negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from Chaldea; and Adam-
Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold symbol, and proves the occult dogmas.
This is no place for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be reminded that the words Ad and Adi mean in Sanskrit "the first"; in Aramaean, "One" (Ad-ad, "the only one"); in Assyrian, "father" whence Ak-Ad or "father-creator."* And once the statement is found correct it becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic Bible alone, and to see therein simply a Jewish name. Vide Part II. of this Volume, § "Adam-Adami."
There is frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the gods in their theogonies, as given to the world by the half-initiated writers, Brahmanical and Biblical, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that symbolical science. Yet there could be no such confusion made by the earliest nations, the descendants and pupils of the divine instructors: for both the attributes and the genealogies were inseparably linked with cosmogonical symbols, the "gods" being the life and animating "soul-
principle" of the various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no people was speculation allowed to range beyond those manifested gods. The boundless and infinite UNITY remained with every nation a virgin forbidden soil, untrodden by man's thought,
* The appellation Ak-ad (or Akkadians) is of the same class as Ad-m, Ha-va (Eve), AEd-en (Eden); Ak-
Ad meaning "Son of Ad " (like the sons of Ad in Ancient Arabia). Ad-ad, the "Only One" and the First, was the Ad-on or "Lord" of Syria and consort of Ad-ar-gat or Aster't, the Syrian goddess. And Gan-
AEden (Eden) or Gandunia was Babylonia and Mesopotamia. In Assyrian Ak meant Creator, the letter K pronounced Kh (Ah) gutturally. According to Swedenborg's mysticism Adam was not a man but a church (?) of primitive light. In the Vedas Ad -iti is the primitive light, the Akasa of the phenomenal world.
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untouched by fruitless speculation. The only reference made to it was the brief conception of its diastolic and systolic property, of its periodical expansion or dilatation, and contraction. In the Universe with all its incalculable myriads of systems and worlds disappearing and re-appearing in eternity, the anthropomorphised powers, or gods, their Souls, had to disappear from view with their bodies: -- "The breath returning to the eternal bosom which exhales and inhales them," says our Catechism.
"Ideal nature, " the abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony. Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia-Achamoth of the Gnostics, and Isis, the virgin Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the creative deity, there is a superior deity, a
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planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the UNKNOWABLE and the unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations. . . . .
It thus becomes easy to account for the reason why "Adam-Adami " is found in the Chaldean scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic Books. In Assyrian Ad is the father, and in Aramaean Ad is "One," and Ad-ad the "only one," while Ak is in Assyrian "creator." Thus Ad-am-ak-ad-mon became Adam Kadmon in the Kabala (Zohar), meaning as it did, the "One (Son) of the divine Father, or the creator," for the words "am" and "om" meant at one time in nearly every language the divine, or the deity. Thus Adam Kadmon and Adam-Adami came to mean: -- "The first emanation of the Father-Mother or divine nature," and literally "the first divine one." And it is easy to see that Ad -Argat (or Aster't, the Syrian goddess, the consort of Ad-on, the lord god of Syria or the Jewish Adonai), and Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Eve, etc., etc., are identical with the Aditi and Vach of the Hindus. They are all the "Mothers of all living" and "of the gods." On the other hand -- cosmically and astronomically -- all the male gods became at first "Sun-gods," then, theologically, the "Suns of Righteousness" and the Logoi, all symbolised by the Sun.* They are all Protogonoi (the first-born) and
* Adam-Jehovah, Brahma and Mars are, in one sense, identical; they are all symbols for primitive or initial generative powers for the purposes of human procreation. Adam is red, and so also are Brahma-
Viraj and Mars -- god and planet. Water is the blood of the Earth; therefore, all these names are connected with Earth and Water. "It takes earth and water to create a human soul," says Moses. Mars is identical with Kartikeya God of War (in one sense) -- which god is born of the Sweat of Siva, Siva Gharmaja and the Earth. In the Mahabharata he is shown as born without the intervention of a woman. And he is also called "Lohita," the red, like Adam, and the other "first men." Hence, the author of "The Source of Measures" is quite right in thinking that Mars (and all the other gods of like attributes), "being the god of war and of [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Mikroprosopoi. With the Jews Adam Kadmon was the same as Athamaz, Tamaz, or the Adonis of the Greeks -- "the One with, and of his father" -- the "Father" becoming during the later Races Helios, the Sun, as Apollo Karneios,* for instance, who was the "Sun born"; Osiris, Ormazd, and so on, were all followed by, and found themselves transformed later on into still more earthly types: such as Prometheus, the crucified of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many others, sun-gods and heroes, until all of them came to have no better significance than phallic symbols.
In the Zohar is it said "Man was created by the Sephiroth (Elohim-Javeh, also) and they engendered by common power the earthly Adam." Therefore in Genesis the Elohim say: -- "Behold Man is become as one of us." But in Hindu Cosmogony or "Creation," Brahma-Prajapati creates Viraj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly called "the Mind-born Sons of Brahma"; and this specified mode of engendering precluded every idea of Phallicism, at any rate in the earlier human nations. This instance well illustrates the respective spirituality of the two nations.
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3. SAID THE "LORD OF THE SHINING FACE." "I SHALL SEND THEE A FIRE WHEN THY WORK IS COMMENCED. RAISE THY VOICE TO OTHER LOKAS, APPLY TO THY FATHER THE LORD OF THE LOTUS (Kumuda-Pati) (a) FOR HIS SONS . . . . THY PEOPLE SHALL BE UNDER THE RULE OF THE FATHERS (Pitri-pati). THY MEN SHALL BE MORTALS. THE MEN OF THE LORD OF WISDOM (Budha, Mercury) NOT THE SONS OF SOMA (the Moon) ARE IMMORTAL. CEASE THY COMPLAINTS (b). THY SEVEN SKINS ARE YET ON THEE. . . . THOU ART NOT READY. THY MEN ARE NOT READY (c).
(a) Kumuda-Pati is the Moon, the Earth's parent, in his region of Soma-loka. Though the Pitris (Pitar or "Fathers") are sons of the Gods, elsewhere sons of Brahma and even Rishis, they are generally known as the "lunar" ancestors.
(b) Pitri-pati is the lord or king of the Pitris, Yama, the god of Death and the Judge of mortals. The men of Budha (Mercury) are
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] bloodshed, was but a secondary idea flowing out of the primary one of shedding of blood in conception for the first time." Hence Jehovah became later a fighting god, "Lord of Hosts," and one who commands war. He is the aggressive Zodh -- or Cain by permutation who slew his (female) "brother," whose "blood crieth from the ground," the Earth having opened her mouth to receive the blood. (Genesis iii.)
* Apollo Karneios is certainly a Greek transformation from the Hindu Krishna Karna . "Karna" means radiant from "carne," "a ray," and Karneios, which was a title of Apollo with the Celts as with the Greeks, meant "Sun born."
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metaphorically immortal through their Wisdom. Such is the common belief of those who credit every star or planet with being inhabited. (And there are men of science -- M. Flammarion among others -- who believe in this fervently, on logical as well as on astronomical data). The Moon being an inferior body to the Earth even, to say nothing of other planets, the terrestrial men produced by her sons -- the lunar men or "ancestors" -- from her shell or body, cannot be immortal. They cannot hope to become real, self-conscious and intelligent men, unless they are finished, so to say, by other creators. Thus in the Puranic legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha (Mercury), "the intelligent" and the Wise, because he is the offspring of Soma, the "regent" of the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus Mercury is the elder brother of the Earth, metaphorically -- his step-brother, so to say, the offspring of Spirit -- while she (the Earth) is the progeny of the body. These allegories have a deeper and more scientific meaning (astronomically and geologically) thA
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n our modern physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the "first War in Heaven," the Taraka-
maya, is as full of philosophical as of Cosmogonical and astronomical truths. One can trace therein the biographies of all the planets by the history of their gods and rulers. Usanas (Sukra, or Venus), the bosom-friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter) the instructor of the gods, whose wife Tara (or Taraka) had been carried away by the Moon, Soma -- "of whom he begat Budha" -- took also an active part in this war against "the gods" and forthwith was degraded into a demon (Asura) deity, and so he remains to this day.*
Here the word "men" refers to the celestial men, or what are called in India the PITAR or pitris, the Fathers, the progenitors of men. This
* Usanas-Sukra or Venus is our "Lucifer," the morning star, of course. The ingenuity of this allegory in its manifold meanings is great indeed. Thus Brihaspati (the planet Jupiter) or Brahmanaspati is, in the Rig Veda, a deity who is the symbol and the prototype of the exoteric or ritualistic worship. He is priest sacrificer, suppliant, and the medium through which the prayers of mortals reach the gods. He is the Purohita (family priest, or Court Chaplain) of the Hindu Olympus and the spiritual Guru of the Gods. Soma is the mystery god and presides over the mystic and occult nature in man and the Universe. Tara, the priest's wife, who symbolizes the worshipper, prefers esoteric truths to their mere shell, exotericism; hence she is shown as carried off by Soma. Now Soma is the sacred juice of that name, giving mystic visions and trance revelations, the result of which union is Budha (Wisdom), Mercury, Hermes, etc., etc.; that science in short which to this day is proclaimed by the Brihaspatis of Theology as devilish and Satanic. What wonder that by expanding the cycle of this allegory we find Christian theology espousing the quarrel of the Hindu gods, and regarding Usanas (Lucifer), who helped Soma against that ancient personification of ritualistic worship (Brahmanaspati, the lord of the Brahmans, now become "Jupiter-Jehovah") as SATAN, the "enemy of God"!
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does not remove the seeming difficulty, in view of modern hypotheses, of the teaching, which shows these progenitors or ancestors creating the first human Adams out of their sides: as astral shadows. And though it is an improvement on Adam's rib, still geological and climatic difficulties will be brought forward. Such, however, is the teaching of Occultism.
(c) Man's organism was adapted in every race to its surroundings. The first Root-Race was as ethereal as ours is material. The progeny of the seven Creators, who evolved the seven primordial Adams,* surely required no purified gases to breathe and live upon (see Part III. of this Volume). Therefore, however strongly the impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees of modern science, the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated aeons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which itself took place 18,000,000 years ago.**
Preliminary evolution is described in one of the BOOKS OF DZYAN and the Commentaries thereon
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in this wise: --
Archaic Scripture teaches that at the commencement of every local Kalpa, or Round, the earth is reborn; "as the human Jiva (monad), when passing into a new womb, gets re-covered with a new body, so does the Jiva of the Earth; it gets a more perfect and solid covering with each Round after re-
emerging once more from the matrix of space into objectivity" (Comment). This process is attended, of course, by the throes of the new birth or geological convulsions.
Thus the only reference to it is contained in one verse of the volume of the Book of Dzyan before us, where it says:
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4. AND AFTER GREAT THROES SHE (the Earth) CAST OFF HER OLD THREE AND PUT ON HER NEW SEVEN SKINS, AND STOOD IN HER FIRST ONE (a).
(a) This refers to the growth of the Earth, whereas in the Stanza treating of the First Round it is said (given in the Commentary): --
"After the changeless (avikara) immutable nature (Essence, sadaikarupa) had awakened and changed (differentiated) into (a state of) causality (avayakta), and from cause (Karana) had become its own discrete effect (vyakta), from invisible it became visible. The smallest of the small (the most atomic of
* As shown elsewhere, it is only the "Heavenly Man," Adam Kadmon, of the first chapter of Genesis, who is made "in the image and likeness of God." Adam, of chapter ii., is not said to be made in that image nor in the divine likeness, before he ate of the forbidden fruit. The former Adam is the Sephirothal Host; the second Adam is the Mindless first human Root-race; the third Adam is the race that separated, whose eyes are opened.
** For a discussion of the scientific objections to the views and figures here enunciated, the reader is referred to the Addenda, which form Part III. of this book.
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atoms, or aniyamsam aniyasam) became one and the many (ekanekarupa); and producing the Universe produced also the Fourth Loka (our Earth) in the garland of the seven lotuses. The Achyuta then became the Chyuta.*
The Earth is said to cast off her old three skins, because this refers to the three preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present being the fourth Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new ROUND, after a period of "obscuration," the earth (as do also the other six "earths") casts
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off, or is supposed to cast off, her old skins as the Serpent does: therefore she is called in the Aitareya-
Brahmana the Sarpa Rajni, "the Queen of the Serpents," and "the mother of all that moves." The "Seven Skins," in the first of which she now stands, refer to the seven geological changes which accompany and correspond to the evolution of the Seven Root-Races of Humanity.
Stanza II., which speaks of this Round, begins with a few words of information concerning the age of our Earth. The chronology will be given in its place. In the Commentary appended to the Stanza, two personages are mentioned: Narada and Asura Maya, especially the latter. All the calculations are attributed to this archaic celebrity; and what follows will make the reader superficially acquainted with some of these figures.
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TWO ANTEDILUVIAN ASTRONOMERS.
To the mind of the Eastern student of Occultism, two figures are indissolubly connected with mystic astronomy, chronology, and their cycles. Two grand and mysterious figures, towering like two giants in the Archaic Past, emerge before him, whenever he has to refer to Yugas and Kalpas. When, at what period of pre-history they lived, none save a few men in the world know, or ever can know with that certainty which is required by exact chronology. It may have been 100,000 years ago, it may have been 1,000,000, for all that the outside world will ever know. The mystic West and Freemasonry talk loudly of Enoch and Hermes. The mystic East speaks of NARADA, the old Vedic Rishi, and of ASURAMAYA, the Atlantean.
It has already been hinted that of all the incomprehensible characters in the Mahabharata and the Puranas, Narada, the son of Brahrna in Matsya Purana, the progeny of Kasyapa and the daughter of Daksha
* Achyuta is an almost untranslatable term. It means that which is not subject to fall or change for the worse: the Unfalling; and it is the reverse of chyuta, "the Fallen." The Dhyanis who incarnate in the human forms of the Third Root-Race and endow them with intellect (Manas) are called the chyuta, for they fall into generation.
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in the Vishnu Purana, is the most mysterious. He is referred to by the honourable title of Deva Rishi (divine Rishi, more than a demi-god) by Parasara, and yet he is cursed by Daksha and even by Brahma. He informs Kansa that Bhagavat (or Vishnu in exotericism) would incarnate in the eighth child of Devaki, and thus brings the wrath of the Indian Herod upon Krishna's mother; and then, from the cloud on which he is seated -- invisible as a true Manasaputra -- he lauds Krishna, in delight at the Avatar's feat of killing the monster Kesim. Narada is here, there, and everywhere; and yet, none of the
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Puranas gives the true characteristics of this great enemy of physical procreation. Whatever those characteristics may be in Hindu Esotericism, Narada -- who is called in Cis-Himalayan Occultism Pesh-Hun, the "Messenger," or the Greek Angelos -- is the sole confidant and the executor of the universal decrees of Karma and Adi-Budh: a kind of active and ever incarnating logos, who leads and guides human affairs from the beginning to the end of the Kalpa.
"Pesh-Hun" is a general not a special Hindu possession. He is the mysterious guiding intelligent power, which gives the impulse to, and regulates the impetus of cycles, Kalpas and universal events.* He is Karma's visible adjuster on a general scale; the inspirer and the leader of the greatest heroes of this Manvantara. In the exoteric works he is referred to by some very uncomplimentary names; such as "Kali-Karaka," strife-maker, "Kapi-vaktra," monkey-faced, and even "Pisuna," the spy, though elsewhere he is called Deva-Brahma. Even Sir W. Jones was strongly impressed with this mysterious character from what he gathered in his Sanskrit Studies. He compares him to Hermes and Mercury, and calls him "the eloquent messenger of the gods" (see Asiat. Res. I. p. 264). All this led the late Dr. Kenealy ("Book of God "), on the ground that the Hindus believe him to be a great Rishi, "who is for ever wandering about the earth, giving good counsel," to see in him one of his twelve Messiahs. He was, perhaps, not so far off the real track as some imagine.
What Narada really is, cannot be explained in print; nor would the modern generations of the profane gather much from the information. But it may be remarked, that if there is in the Hindu Pantheon a deity which resembles Jehovah, in, tempting by "suggestion" of thoughts and "hardening" of the hearts of those whom he would make his tools and victims, it is Narada. Only with the latter it is no desire to obtain a pretext for "plaguing," and thus showing that "I am the Lord God."
* This is perhaps the reason why, in the Bhagavad Gita, we are told that Brahma had communicated to Narada in the beginning that all men whatsoever, even Mlechchhas, outcasts and barbarians, might know the true nature of Vasudeva and learn to have faith in that deity.
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Nor is it through any ambitious or selfish motive; but, verily, to serve and guide universal progress and evolution.
Narada is one of the few prominent characters, save some gods, in the Puranas, who visits the so-
called nether or infernal regions, Patala. Whether or not it was from his intercourse with the thousand-
headed Sesha, the serpent who bears the seven Patalas and the entire world like a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great teacher of astronomy,* that Narada learned all that he knew, certain it is that he surpasses Garga's Guru in his knowledge of cyclic intricacies. It is he who has charge of our progress and national weal or woe. It is he who brings on wars and puts an end to them. In the old Stanzas Pesh-Hun is credited with having calculated and recorded all the astronomical and cosmic cycles to come, and with having taught the Science to the first gazers at the starry vault. And it is Asuramaya, who is said to have based all his astronomical works upon those records, to have
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determined the duration of all the past geological and cosmical periods, and the length of the all the cycles to come, till the end of this life-cycle, or the end of the seventh Race.
There is a work among the Secret Books, called the "Mirror of Futurity," wherein all the Kalpas within Kalpas and cycles within the bosom of Sesha, or infinite Time, are recorded. This work is ascribed to Pesh-Hun Narada. There is another old work which is attributed to various Atlanteans. It is these two Records which furnish us with the figures of our cycles, and the possibility of calculating the date of cycles to come. The chronological calculations which will presently be given are, however, those of the Brahmins as explained further on; but most of them are also those of the Secret Doctrine.
The chronology and computations of the Brahmin Initiates are based upon the Zodiacal records of India, and the works of the above-mentioned astronomer and magician -- Asuramaya. The Atlantean zodiacal records cannot err, as they were compiled under the guidance of those who first taught astronomy, among other things, to mankind.
But here again we are deliberately and recklessly facing a new difficulty. We shall be told that our statement is contradicted by science, in the person of a man regarded as a great authority (in the West) upon all subjects of Sanskrit literature -- Professor Albrecht Weber, of Berlin. This, to our great regret, cannot be helped; and we are ready to maintain what is now stated. Asuramaya, to whom the epic tradition points as the earliest astronomer in Aryavarta, one to whom "the
* Sesha, who is also Ananta, the infinite, and the "Cycle of Eternity" in esotericism, is credited with having given his astronomical knowledge to Garga, the oldest astronomer of India, who propitiated him, and forthwith knew all about the planets and how to read omens.
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Sun-god imparted the knowledge of the stars," in propria persona, as Dr. Weber himself states, is identified by him, in some very mysterious way, with the "Ptolemaios" of the Greeks. No more valid reason is given for this identification than that "this latter name (Ptolemaios), as we see from the inscription of Piyadasi, became the Indian 'Turamaya,' out of which the name 'Asuramaya' might very easily grow." No doubt it "might," but the vital question is -- Are there any good proofs that it has thus grown? The only evidence that is given for it is, that it must be so: "since this Maya is distinctly assigned to Romaka-pura in the West."* The Maya is evident, since no Sanskritist among Europeans can tell where that locality of "Romaka-pura" was, except, indeed, that it was somewhere "in the West." Anyhow, as no member of the Asiatic Society, or Western Orientalist, will ever listen to a Brahmanical teaching, it is useless to take the objections of European Orientalists into consideration. "Romakapura" was in "the West," certainly, since it was part and parcel of the last continent of ATLANTIS. And it is equally certain that it is Atlantis, which is assigned in the Hindu Puranas as the birth-place of Asuramaya, "as great a magician as he was an Astrologer and an Astronomer." Moreover, Prof. Weber refuses to assign any great antiquity to the Indian Zodiac, and feels inclined to
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think that the Hindus never knew of a Zodiac at all till "they had borrowed one from the Greeks."** This statement clashes with the most ancient traditions of India, and must therefore be ignored. (Vide "The Zodiac and its Antiquity"). We are the more justified in ignoring it, as the learned German Professor himself tells us in the introduction to his work (History of Sanskrit Literature) that "in addition to the natural obstacles which impede investigation (in India), there still prevails a dense mist of prejudices and preconceived opinions hovering over the land, and enfolding it as with a veil." Caught in that veil, it is no wonder that Dr. Weber should himself have been led into involuntary errors. Let us hope that he knows better now.
Now whether Asuramaya is to be considered a modern myth, a personage who flourished in the day of the Macedonian Greeks, or as that which he is claimed to be by the Occultists, in any case his calculations agree entirely with those of the Secret Records.
From fragments of immensely old works attributed to the Atlantean astronomer, and found in Southern India, the calendar elsewhere men-
* See "Lectures on the Indian Literature, " p. 253, by Prof. A. Weber; in Trubner's Asiatic Series.
** Even the Maya Indians of Guatemala had their Zodiac from untold antiquity. And "primitive man acted in the same manner independently of time or locality in every age," observes a French writer.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 51 WHAT THE EARTH-WHIRL PRODUCED.
tioned was compiled by two very learned Brahmins* in 1884 and 1885. The work is proclaimed by the best Pundits as faultless -- from the Brahmanical standpoint -- and thus far relates to the chronology of the orthodox teachings. If we compare its statements with those made several years earlier in "Isis Unveiled," with the fragmentary teachings published by some Theosophists, and with the present data derived from the Secret Books of Occultism, the whole will be found to agree perfectly, save in some details which may not be explained; for secrets of higher Initiation -- as unknown to the writer as they are to the reader -- would have to be revealed, and that cannot be done. (But see "Chronology of the Brahmins " at the close of Stanza II.)
* The "Tirukkanda Panchanga" for the Kali Yug 4986, by Chintamany Raghanaracharya, son of the famous Government astronomer of Madras, and Tartakamala Venkata Krishna Rao.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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STANZA II.
NATURE UNAIDED FAILS.
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§ (5) After enormous periods the Earth creates monsters. (6) The "Creators" are displeased. (7) They dry the Earth. (8) The forms are destroyed by them. (9) The first great tides. (10) The beginning of incrustation.
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5. THE WHEEL WHIRLED FOR THIRTY CRORES (of years, or 300,000,000 *). IT CONSTRUCTED RUPAS (forms ). SOFT STONES, THAT HARDENED (minerals); HARD PLANTS, THAT SOFTENED (vegetation). VISIBLE FROM INVISIBLE, INSECTS AND SMALL LIVES (sarisripa, swapada). SHE (the Earth) SHOOK THEM OFF HER BACK, WHENEVER THEY OVERRAN THE MOTHER (a). AFTER THIRTY CRORES OF YEARS, SHE TURNED ROUND. SHE LAID ON HER BACK; ON HER SIDE. . . . . SHE WOULD CALL NO SONS OF HEAVEN, SHE WOULD ASK NO SONS OF WISDOM. SHE CREATED FROM HER OWN BOSOM. SHE EVOLVED WATER-MEN TERRIBLE AND BAD (b).
(a) This relates to an inclination of the axis -- of which there were several -- to a consequent deluge and chaos on Earth (having, however, no reference to primeval chaos), in which monsters, half-human, half-animal, were generated. We find it mentioned in the "Book of the Dead," and also in the Chaldean account of creation, on the Cutha Tablets, however mutilated.
* 300 million years, or Three Occult Ages. The Rig Veda has the same division. In the "Physician's Hymn, " (X 97 1) it is said that "the plants came into being three ages (Triyugam) before the gods" on our Earth (See "Chronology of the Brahmins" at the end of this Stanza).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 53 THE MONSTERS OF CHAOS.
It is not even allegory. Here we have facts, that are found repeated in the account of Pymander, as well as in the Chaldean tablets of creation. The verses may almost be checked by the Cosmogony, as given by Berosus, which has been disfigured out of recognition by Eusebius, but some of the features of
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which may yet be found in fragments left by ancient Greek authors -- Apollodorus, Alexander Polyhistor, etc., etc. "The water-men terrible and bad," who were the production of physical nature alone, a result of the "evolutionary impulse" and the first attempt to create man the "crown," and the aim and goal of all animal life on Earth -- are shown to be failures in our Stanzas. Do we not find the same in the Berosian Cosmogony, denounced with such vehemence as the culmination of heathen absurdity? And yet who of the Evolutionists can say that things in the beginning have not come to pass as they are described? That, as maintained in the Puranas, the Egyptian and Chaldean fragments, and even in Genesis, there have not been two, and even more, "creations" before the last formation of the Globe; which, changing its geological and atmospheric conditions, changed also its flora, its fauna, and its men? This claim agrees not only with every ancient Cosmogony, but also with modern science, and even, to a certain degree, with the theory of evolution, as may be demonstrated in a few words.
There is no "dark creation," no "Evil Dragon" conquered by a Sun-God, in the earliest World-
Cosmogonies. Even with the Akkads, the great Deep (the Watery Abyss, or SPACE) was the birthplace and abode of Ea, Wisdom, the incognizable infinite Deity. But with the Semites and the later Chaldeans, the fathomless Deep of Wisdom becomes gross matter, sinful Substance, and Ea is changed into Tiamat, the dragon slain by Merodach, or Satan, in the astral waves.
In the Hindu Puranas, Brahma, the creator, is seen recommencing de novo several creations after as many failures; and two great creations are mentioned,* the Padma and the Varaha, the present, when the Earth was lifted out of the water by Brahma, in the shape of a boar, or "Varaha Avatar." Creation is shown as a sport, an amusement (Lila) of the creative god. The Zohar speaks of primordial worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence. And the same is said in Midraish, Rabbi Abahu explaining distinctly (in Bereschith Rabba, Parscha IX.) that "the Holy One" had successively created and de-
* These two must not be confused with the seven creations or divisions in each Kalpa (See Book I. "The Seven Creations"). The primary and secondary creations are here meant.
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stroyed sundry worlds, before he succeeded in the present one. This does not relate only to other worlds in space, but to a mystery of our own globe contained in the allegory about the "kings of Edom." For the words, "This one pleases me," are repeated in Genesis i. 31, though in disfigured terms, as usual. The Chaldean fragments of Cosmogony on the Cuneiform inscriptions, and elsewhere, show two distinct creations of animals and men, the first being destroyed, as it was a failure. The Cosmogonical tablets prove that this our actual creation was preceded by others (See "Hibbert Lectures," p. 390); and as shown by the author of "The Qabbalah," in the Zohar, Siphrah Dzeniouta, in Jovah Rabbah, 128a, etc., etc. The Kabala states the same.
(b) Oannes (or Dagon, the Chaldean "Man-fish") divides his Cosmogony and Genesis into two portions. First the abyss of waters and darkness, wherein resided most hideous beings --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
-men with wings, four and two-faced men, human beings with two heads, with the legs and horns of a goat (our "goat-men,")* hippocentaurs, bulls with the heads of men, and dogs with tails of fishes. In short, combinations of various animals and men, of fishes, reptiles and other monstrous animals assuming each other's shapes and countenances. The feminine element they resided in, is personified by Thalatth -- the Sea, or "Water" -- which was finally conquered by Belus, the male principle. And Polyhistor says: "Belus came and cut the woman asunder, and of one half of her he formed the Earth, and of the other half the heavens, and at the same time he destroyed the animals within her." As pertinently remarked by I. Myer, "with the Akkadians each object and power of Nature had its Zi, Spirit. The Akkadians formed their deities into triads, usually males (sexless, rather?); the Semites also had triadic deities, but introduced sex" (p. 246) -- or phallicism. With the Aryans and the earliest Akkadians all things are emanations through, not by, a creator or logos. With the Semites everything is begotten.
* Whence the identity of the ideas? The Chinese have the same traditions. According to the commentator Kwoh P'oh, in the work called Shan-Hai-King, "Wonders by Sea and Land," a work which was written by the historiographer Chung Ku from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yu, (B.C. 2255), an interview is mentioned with men having two distinct faces on their heads, before and behind, monsters with bodies of goats and human faces, etc. Gould, in his "Mythical Monsters, " p. 27, giving the names of some authors on Natural History, mentions Shan-Hai-King. According to Kwoh P'oh (A.D. 276-324) this work was compiled three thousand years before his time, or at seven dynasties distance. Yang Sun of the Ming Dynasty (commencing A.D. 1368) states that it was compiled by Kung Chia and Chung Ku (as stated above). Chung Ku at the time of the last emperor of the Hia dynasty, B.C. 1818, fearing that the emperor might destroy the books treating of the ancient time, carried them in his flight to Yin. (See "Mythical Monsters, " by C. Gould, p. 27.)
6. THE WATER-MEN TERRIBLE AND BAD SHE HERSELF CREATED. FROM THE REMAINS OF OTHERS (from the mineral, vegetable and animal remains) FROM THE FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD (Rounds) SHE FORMED THEM. THE DHYANI CAME AND LOOKED. . . . . THE DHYANI FROM THE BRIGHT FATHER-MOTHER, FROM THE WHITE (Solar-lunar) REGIONS THEY CAME,* FROM THE ABODES OF THE IMMORTAL-MORTALS (a).
(a) The explanations given in our Stanzas are far more clear than that which the legend of creation from the Cutha tablet would give, even were it complete. What is preserved on it, however, corroborates them. For, in the tablet, "the Lord of Angels" destroys the men in the abyss, when "there were not left the carcases and waste" after they were slaughtered. After which they, the Great Gods, create men with the bodies of birds of the desert, human beings, "seven kings, brothers of the same family," etc., which is a reference to the locomotive qualities of the primary ethereal bodies of men,
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which could fly as well as they could walk,** but who "were destroyed" because they were not "perfect, " i.e., they "were sexless, like the Kings of Edom."
Weeded of metaphors and allegories, what will science say to this idea of a primordial creation of species? It will object to the "Angels" and "Spirits" having anything to do therewith: but if it is nature and the physical law of evolution that are the creators of all there is now on Earth, why could there be "no such abyss" when the globe was covered with waters, in which numbers of monstrous beings were generated? Is it the "human beings" and animals with human heads and double faces, which are a point of the objection? But if man is only a higher animal and has evolved from the brute species by an infinite series of transformations, why could not the "missing links" have had human heads attached to the bodies of animals, or, being two-headed, have heads of beasts and vice versa, in Nature's early efforts? Are we not shown during the geological periods, in the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds' wings, and serpents' heads on animal bodies.*** And, arguing from the standpoint of science, does not even our modern human race occasionally furnish us with monster-specimens: two-
headed children, animal bodies with human heads, dog-headed babies, etc., etc.? And this proves that, if nature will still play such
* Gods and planetary Spirits, especially the Ribhus. "The three Ribhus" who yet become "thrice seven in number" of their gifts.
** Remember the "winged Races" of Plato; and the Popol-Vuh accounts of the first human race, which could walk, fly and see objects, however distant.
*** See "Mythical Monsters, " by Charles Gould.
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freaks now that she has settled for ages into the order of her evolutionary work, monsters, like those described by Berosus, were a possibility in her opening programme; which possibility may even have existed once upon a time as a law, before she sorted out her species and began regular work upon them; which indeed now admits of definite proof by the bare fact of "REVERSION," as science puts it.
This is what the doctrine teaches and demonstrates by numerous proofs. But we shall not wait for the approval of either dogmatic theology or materialistic science, but proceed with the Stanzas. Let these speak for themselves, with the help of the light thrown by the Commentaries and their explanations; the scientific aspect of these questions will be considered later on.
Thus physical nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal and man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two and the lower animal kingdoms, but when it comes to the turn of man, spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his creation, besides the "coats of skin" and the "Breath of animal Life." The human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher than purely physical materials to build their personalities with, under the penalty of remaining even below
* In the first volume of the lately published "Introduction a l'atude des Races Humaines," by M. de Quatrefages, there is proof that since the post-tertiary period and even before that time -- since many Races were already scattered during that age on the face of the Earth -- man has not altered one iota in his physical structure. And if, surrounded for ages by a fauna that altered from one period or cycle to another, which died out, which was reborn in other forms -- so that now there does not exist one single animal on Earth, large or small, contemporary with the man of that period -- if, then, every animal has been transformed save man himself, this fact goes to prove not only his antiquity, but that he is a distinct Kingdom. Why should he alone have escaped transformation? Because, says de Quatrefages, the weapon used by him, in his struggle with nature and the ever-changing geological conditions and elements, was "his psychic force, not his physical strength or body," as in the case of animals. Give man only that dose of intelligence and reason with which other mammalia are endowed, and with his present bodily organization he will show himself the most helpless of creatures of Earth. And as everything goes to prove that the human organism with all its characteristics, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies existed already on our Globe in those far distant geological periods when there was not yet one single specimen of the now-existing forms of mammalia , what is the unavoidable conclusion? Why this: Since all the human races are of one and the same species, it follows that this species is the most ancient of all the now-living mammalia. Therefore it is the most stable and persevering of all, and was already as fully developed as it is now when all the other mammalia now known had not made even their first approach to appearance on this Earth. Such is the opinion of the great French Naturalist, who gives thereby a terrible blow to Darwinism.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 57 THE "DOUBLE DRAGON."
7. DISPLEASED THEY WERE. OUR FLESH IS NOT THERE (they said). THIS IS NO FIT RUPA FOR OUR BROTHERS OF THE FIFTH. NO DWELLINGS FOR THE LIVES.* PURE WATERS, NOT TURBID, THEY MUST DRINK (a). LET US DRY THEM (the waters).
(a) Says the Catechism (Commentaries): --
"It is from the material Worlds that descend they, who fashion physical man at the new Manvantaras. They are inferior Lha (Spirits), possessed of a dual body (an astral within an ethereal form). They are the fashioners and creators of our body of illusion." . . . .
"Into the forms projected by the Lha (Pitris) the two letters** (the Monad, called also 'the Double Dragon') descend from the spheres of expectation.*** But they are like a roof with no walls, nor pillars to rest upon ." . . . .
"Man needs four flames and three fires to become one on Earth, and he requires the essence of the
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forty-nine fires**** to be perfect. It is those who have deserted the Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will,***** who complete the Manu of illusion. For the 'Double Dragon' has no hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where there is no tree or branch to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form where there is no agent of transmission (Manas, "Mind") and the form knows it not."
"In the highest worlds, the three are one,****** on Earth (at first) the one becomes two. They are like the two (side) lines of a triangle that has lost its bottom line -- which is the third fire." (Catechism Book III., sec. 9.)
Now this requires some explanation before proceeding any further. To do so especially for the benefit of our Aryan Hindu brethren --
* The Monads of the presentments of men of the Third Round, the huge Ape-like forms.
** In the esoteric system the seven principles in man are represented by seven letters. The first two are more sacred than the four letters of the Tetragrammaton.
*** The intermediate spheres, wherein the Monads, which have not reached Nirvana, are said to slumber in unconscious inactivity between the Manvantaras.
**** Explained elsewhere. The "Three Fires," Pavaka, Pavamana, and Suchi, who had forty-five sons, who, with their three fathers and their Father Agni, constitute the 49 fires. Pavamana (fire produced by friction) is the parent of the fire of the Asuras; Suchi (Solar fire) is the parent of the fire of the gods; and Pavaka (electric fire) is the father of the fire of the Pitris (See Vayu Purana). But this is an explanation on the material and the terrestrial plane. The flames are evanescent and only periodical; the fires -- eternal in their triple unity. They correspond to the four lower, and the three higher human principles.
***** The Suras, who become later the A-Suras.
****** Atma, Buddhi and Manas. In Devachan the higher element of the Manas is needed to make it a state of perception and consciousness for the disembodied Monad .
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whose esoteric interpretations may differ from our own -- we shall have to explain to them the foregoing by certain passages in their own exoteric books, namely, the Puranas. In the allegories of the latter, Brahma, who is collectively the creative Force of the Universe, is said to be "at the beginning of the Yugas (cycles) . . . . Possessed of the desire and of the power to create, and, impelled by the potencies of what is to be created, again and again does he, at the outset of a Kalpa, put forth a similar creation," (see Vishnu Purana, Book I. ch. V., closing Sloka. Also "Manava Dharma Shastra " I. 30.) It
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is now proposed to examine the exoteric account in the Vishnu Purana, and see how much it may agree or disagree with our occult version.
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CREATION OF DIVINE BEINGS IN THE EXOTERIC ACCOUNTS.
In the Vishnu Purana -- which is certainly the earliest of all the scriptures of that name -- we find, as in all the others, Brahma assuming as the male God, for purposes of creation, "four bodies invested by three qualities."* It is said: "In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsna (dawn), Ratri (night), Ahan (day), and Sandhya (evening twilight) are the four bodies of Brahma" . . (p. 81, Vol. I., Wilson's translation). As Parasara explains it, when Brahma wants to create the world anew and construct progeny through his will, in the fourfold condition (or the four orders of beings) termed gods (Dhyan Chohans), Demons** (i.e., more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and men, "he collects Yoga-like (Yuyuje) his mind."
Strange to say, he begins by creating DEMONS, who thus take precedence over the angels or gods. This is no incongruity, nor is it due to inconsistency, but has, like all the rest, a profound esoteric meaning, quite clear to one free from Christian theological prejudice. He who bears in mind that the principle MAHAT, or Intellect, the "Universal Mind" (literally "the great"), which esoteric philosophy explains as the "manifested Omniscience" -- the "first product" of Pradhana (primordial matter) as Vishnu Purana says, but the first Cosmic aspect of Parabrahm or the esoteric SAT, the Universal Soul,*** as Occultism
* This has in esotericism a direct bearing upon the seven principles of the manifested Brahma, or universe, in the same order as in man. Exoterically, it is only four principles.
** Demons is a very loose word to use, as it applies to a great number of inferior -- i.e., more material -- Spirits, or minor Gods, who are so termed because they "war" with the higher ones; but they are no devils.
*** The same order of principles in man: -- Atma (Spirit), Buddhi (Soul), its vehicle, as Matter is the Vahan of Spirit, and Manas (mind), the third, or the fifth microcosmically. On the plane of personality, Manas is the first.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 59 THE BODIES OF BRAHMA.
teaches -- is at the root of SELF-Consciousness, will understand the reason why. The so-called "Demons" -- who are (esoterically) the Self-asserting and (intellectually) active Principle -- are the positive poles of creation, so to say; hence, the first produced. This is in brief the process as narrated allegorically in the Puranas.
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"Having concentrated his mind into itself and the quality of darkness pervading Brahma's assumed body, the Asuras, issuing from his thigh, were first produced; after which, abandoning this body, it was transformed into NIGHT." (See Part II., § "The Fallen Angels.")
Two important points are involved herein: -- (a) Primarily in the Rig-Veda, the "Asuras" are shown as spiritual divine beings; their etymology is derived from asu (breath), the "Breath of God," and they mean the same as the Supreme Spirit or the Zoroastrian Ahura. It is later on, for purposes of theology and dogma, that they are shown issuing from Brahma's thigh, and that their name began to be derived from a privative, and sura, god (solar deities), or not-a-god, and that they became the enemies of the gods. Every ancient theogony without exception -- from the Aryan and the Egyptian down to that of Hesiod -- places, in the order of Cosmogonical evolution, Night before the Day; even Genesis, where "darkness is upon the face of the deep" before "the first day. " The reason for this is that every Cosmogony -- except in the Secret Doctrine -- begins by the "Secondary Creation" so-called: to wit, the manifested Universe, the Genesis of which has to open by a marked differentiation between the eternal Light of Primary Creation, whose mystery must remain for ever "Darkness" to the prying finite conception and intellect of the profane, and the Secondary Evolution of manifested visible nature. The Veda contains the whole philosophy of that division without having ever been correctly explained by our Orientalists, because it has never been understood by them.
Continuing to create, Brahma assumes another form, that of the Day, and creates from his breath the gods, who are endowed with the quality of goodness (passivity)*. In his next body the quality of great passivity prevailed, which is also (negative) goodness, and from the side of that personage issued the Pitris, the progenitors of men, because, as the text explains, "Brahma thought of himself (during the process) as the father of the world."** This is Kriya-sakti -- the mysterious Yoga power
* Thus, says the Commentary, the saying "by day the gods are most powerful, and by night the demons," is purely allegorical.
** This thinking of oneself as this, that, or the other, is the chief factor in the production of every kind of psychic or even physical phenomena. The words "whosoever shall say to this mountain be thou removed and cast into the sea, and shall not doubt . . . . that thing will come to pass," are no vain words. Only the word "faith" ought to be translated by WILL. Faith without Will is like a wind-mill without wind -- barren of results.
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explained elsewhere. This body of Brahma when cast off became the Sandhya (evening twilight), the interval between day and night.
Finally Brahma assumed his last form pervaded by the quality of foulness, "and from this MEN, in whom foulness and passion predominate, were produced." This body when cast off became the dawn, or morning twilight -- the twilight of Humanity. Here Brahma stands esoterically for the Pitris. He is
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collectively the Pitar, "father."
The true esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained. Brahma here symbolizes personally the collective creators of the World and Men -- the universe with all its numberless productions of things movable and (seemingly) immovable.* He is collectively the Prajapatis, the Lords of Being; and the four bodies typify the four classes of creative powers or Dhyan Chohans, described in the Commentary directly following Stanza VII. in Book I. The whole philosophy of the so-called "Creation" of the good and evil in this world and of the whole cycle of Manvantaric results therefrom, hangs on the correct comprehension of these Four bodies of Brahma.
The reader will now be prepared to understand the real, the esoteric significance of what follows. Moreover there is an important point to be cleared up. Christian theology having arbitrarily settled and agreed that Satan with his Fallen Angels belonged to the earliest creation, Satan being the first-created, the wisest and most beautiful of God's Archangels, the word was given, the key-note struck. Henceforth all the pagan scriptures were made to yield the same meaning, and all were shown to be demoniacal, and it was and is claimed that truth and fact belong to, and commence only with, Christianity. Even the Orientalists and Mythologists, some of them no Christians at all but "infidels," or men of science, entered unconsciously to themselves, and by the mere force of association of ideas and habit, into the theological groove. Purely Brahmanical considerations, based on greed of power and ambition, allowed the masses to remain in ignorance of great truths; and the same causes led the Initiates among the early Christians to remain silent, while those who had never known the truth disfigured the order of things, judging of the hierarchy of "Angels" by their exoteric form. Thus as the Asuras had become the rebellious inferior gods fighting the higher ones in popular creeds, so the highest archangel, in truth the Agathodaemon, the eldest benevolent Logos, became with theology the "Adversary" or Satan. But is this warranted by the correct interpretation of any old Scripture? The answer is, most certainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the
* The same idea is found in the first four chapters of Genesis, with their "Lord" and "God," which are the Elohim and the Androgynous Eloha .
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 61 WHAT THE GNOSTICS SAY.
Zend-Avesta, the Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through AHURA the Asuras to their legitimate place in theogony, so the recent discoveries of the Chaldean tablets vindicate the good name of the first divine Emanations. This is easily proved. Christian Angelology is directly and solely derived from that of the Pharisees, who brought their tenets from Babylonia. The Sadducees, the real guardians of the Laws of Moses, knew not of, and rejected, any angels, opposing even the immortality of the human Soul (not impersonal Spirit). In the Bible the only "Angels" spoken of are the "Sons of God" mentioned in Genesis vi. (who are now regarded as the Nephilim, the Fallen Angels), and several angels in human form, the "Messengers" of the Jewish God, whose own rank needs a closer analysis than heretofore given. (Vide Supra, Stanza I., sub-sections 2, 3, et seq., where it is shown that the early Akkadians called Ea,
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Wisdom, that which was disfigured by the later Chaldees and Semites into Tismat, Tisalat and the Thallath of Berosus, the female Sea Dragon, now Satan.) Truly -- "How art thou fallen (by the hand of man), O bright star and son of the morning"!
Now what do the Babylonian accounts of "Creation," as found on the Assyrian fragments of tiles, tell us; those very accounts upon which the Pharisees built their angelology? But compare Mr. G. Smith's "Assyrian Discoveries, " p. 398, and his "Chaldean Account of Genesis," p. 107. The "Tablet with the story of the Seven Wicked Gods or Spirits," has the following account -- we print the important passages in italics: --
1. In the first days the evil Gods,
2. the angels, who were in rebellion, who in the lower part of heaven 3. had been created, 4. they caused their evil work
5. devising with wicked heads . . . . etc.
Thus we are shown, as plainly as can be, on a fragment which remained unbroken, so that there can be no dubious reading, that the "rebellious angels" had been created in the lower part of heaven, i.e., that they belonged and do belong to a material plane of evolution, although as it is not the plane of which we are made cognizant through our senses, it remains generally invisible to us, and is thus regarded as subjective. Were the Gnostics so wrong, after this, in affirming that this our visible world, and especially the Earth, had been created by lower angels, the inferior Elohim, of which, as they taught, the God of Israel was one. These Gnostics were nearer in time to the records of the Archaic Secret Doctrine, and therefore ought to be allowed to have known better than non-initiated Christians, who took upon themselves, hundreds of years
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later, to remodel and correct what was said. But let us see what the same Tablet says further on: --
7. There were seven of them (the wicked gods) . . . . (then follows the description of these, the fourth being a "serpent," the phallic symbol of the fourth Race in human Evolution).
15. The seven of them, messengers of the God Anu, their king.
Now Anu belongs to the Chaldean trinity, and is identical with Sin, the "Moon," in one aspect. And the Moon in the Hebrew Kabala is the Argha of the seed of all material life, and is still more closely connected, kabalistically, with Jehovah, who is double-sexed as Anu is. They are both represented in Esotericism and viewed from a dual aspect: male or spiritual, female or material, or Spirit and Matter, the two antagonistic principles. Hence the "Messengers of Anu," (who is Sin, the "Moon,") are shown, in verses 28 to 41, as being finally overpowered by the same Sin with the help of Bel (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus). This is regarded as a contradiction by the Assyriologists, but is simply metaphysics in the esoteric teaching.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
There is more than one interpretation, for there are seven keys to the mystery of the Fall. Moreover there are two "Falls" in Theology: the rebellion of the Archangels and their "Fall," and the "Fall" of Adam and Eve. Thus the lower as well as the higher Hierarchies are charged with a supposed crime. The word "supposed" is the true and correct term, for in both cases it is founded on misconception. Both are considered in Occultism as Karmic effects, and both belong to the law of Evolution: intellectual and spiritual on the one hand, physical and psychic on the other. The "Fall" is a universal allegory. It sets forth at one end of the ladder of Evolution the "rebellion," i.e., the action of differentiating intellection or consciousness on its various planes, seeking union with matter; and at the other, the lower end, the rebellion of matter against Spirit, or of action against spiritual inertia. And here lies the germ of an error which has had such disastrous effects on the intelligence of civilized societies for over 1,800 years. In the original allegory it is matter -- hence the more material angels -- which was regarded as the conqueror of Spirit, or the Archangels who "fell" on this plane. "They of the flaming sword (or animal passions) had put to flight the Spirits of Darkness." Yet it is the latter who fought for the supremacy of the conscious and divine spirituality on Earth and failed, succumbing to the power of matter. But in theological dogma we see the reverse. It is Michael, "who is like unto God," the representative of Jehovah, who is the leader of the celestial hosts -- as Lucifer, in Milton's fancy, is of the infernal hosts -- who has the best of Satan. It is true that the nature of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 63 WHO ARE THE "FLAMES"?
Michael depends upon that of his Creator and Master. Who the latter is, one may find out by carefully studying the allegory of the "War in Heaven" with the astronomical key. As shown by Bentley, the "War of the Titans against the gods" in Hesiod, and also the war of the Asuras (or the Tarakamaya) against the devas in Puranic legend, are identical in all save the names. The aspects of the stars show (Bentley taking the year 945 B.C. as the nearest date for such conjunction) that "all the planets, except Saturn, were on the same side of the heavens as the Sun and Moon," and hence were his opponents. And yet it is Saturn, or the Jewish "Moon-god," who is shown as prevailing, both by Hesiod and Moses, neither of whom was understood. Thus it was that the real meaning became distorted.
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STANZA II. -- Continued.
8. THE FLAMES CAME. THE FIRES WITH THE SPARKS; THE NIGHT FIRES AND THE DAY FIRES (a). THEY DRIED OUT THE TURBID DARK WATERS. WITH THEIR HEAT THEY QUENCHED THEM. THE LHAS (Spirits) OF THE HIGH; THE LHAMAYIN (those) OF BELOW, CAME (b). THEY SLEW THE FORMS, WHICH WERE TWO- AND FOUR-FACED. THEY FOUGHT THE GOAT-MEN, AND THE DOG-HEADED MEN, AND THE MEN WITH FISHES' BODIES.
(a) The "Flames" are a Hierarchy of Spirits parallel to, if not identical with, the "burning" fiery Saraph (Seraphim) mentioned by Isaiah (vi. 2-6), those who attend, according to Hebrew Theogony, "the Throne of the Almighty." Melha is the Lord of the "Flames." When he appears on Earth, he assumes
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
the personality of a Buddha, says a popular legend. He is one of the most ancient and revered Lhas, a Buddhist St. Michael.
(b) The word "Below" must not be taken to mean infernal regions, but simply a spiritual, or rather ethereal, Being of a lower grade, because nearer to the Earth, or one step higher than our terrestrial sphere; while the Lhas are Spirits of the highest Spheres -- whence the name of the capital of Tibet, Lha-ssa.
Besides a statement of a purely physical nature and belonging to the
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evolution of life on Earth, there may be another allegorical meaning attached to this Sloka, or indeed, as is taught, several. The FLAMES, or "Fires," represent Spirit, or the male element, and "Water," matter, or the opposite element. And here again we find, in the action of the Spirit slaying the purely material form, a reference to the eternal struggle, on the physical and psychic planes, between Spirit and Matter, besides a scientific cosmic fact. For, as said in the next verse: --
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9. MOTHER-WATER, THE GREAT SEA WEPT. SHE AROSE, SHE DISAPPEARED IN THE MOON, WHICH HAD LIFTED HER, WHICH HAD GIVEN HER BIRTH (a).
(a) Now what can this mean? Is it not an evident reference to tidal action in the early stage of the history of our planet in its fourth Round? Modern research has been busy of late in its speculations on the Palaeozoic high-tides. Mr. Darwin's theory was that not less than 52,000,000 years ago -- and probably much more -- the Moon originated from the Earth's plastic mass. Starting from the point where research was left by Helmholtz, Ferrel, Sir William Thomson and others, he retraced the course of tidal retardation of the earth's rotary motions far back into the very night of time, and placed the Moon during the infancy of our planet at only "a fraction of its present distance." In short, his theory was that it is the Moon which separated from the Earth. The tidal elevation concurring with the swing of the globular mass -- centrifugal tendency being then nearly equal to gravity -- the latter was overcome, and the tidally elevated mass could thus separate completely from the Earth.*
The Occult teaching is the reverse of this. The Moon is far older than the Earth; and, as explained in Book I., it is the latter which owes its being to the former, however astronomy and geology may explain the fact. Hence, the tides and the attraction to the Moon, as shown by the liquid portion of the Globe ever striving to raise itself towards its parent. This is the meaning of the sentence that "the Mother-Water arose and disappeared in the Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
* But see the difficulties suggested later, in the works of various geologists, against this theory. Compare Sir R. S. Bull's article in "Nature " (Dec. 1, 1881), and also what the American geologists say.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 65 DIVINE WILL BECOMES EROS.
10. WHEN THEY (the Rupas) WERE DESTROYED, MOTHER-EARTH REMAINED BARE,* SHE ASKED TO BE DRIED (a).**
(a) The time for its incrustation had arrived. The waters had separated and the process was started. It was the beginning of a new life. This is what one key divulges to us. Another key teaches the origin of Water, its admixture with Fire (liquid fire it calls it),*** and enters upon an alchemical description of the progeny of the two -- solid matter such as minerals and earths. From the "Waters of Space," the progeny of the male Spirit-Fire and the female (gaseous) Water has become the Oceanic expanse on Earth. Varuna is dragged down from the infinite Space, to reign as Neptune over the finite Seas. As always, the popular fancy is found to be based on a strictly scientific foundation.
Water is the symbol of the female element everywhere; mater, from which the letter M, is derived pictorially from [[diagram]] a water hieroglyph. It is the universal matrix or the "Great Deep." Venus, the great Mother-Virgin, issues forth from the Sea-wave, and Cupid or Eros is her son. But Venus is the later mythological variant of Gaia (or Gaea), the Earth, which, in its higher aspect is Nature (Prakriti), and metaphysically Aditi, and even Mulaprakriti, the root of Prakriti or its noumenon.
Hence Cupid or Love in his primitive sense is Eros, the Divine Will, or Desire of manifesting itself through visible creation. Thence Fohat, the prototype of Eros, becomes on Earth the great power "Life-
electricity," or the Spirit of "Life-giving." Let us remember the Greek Theogony and enter into the spirit of its philosophy. We are taught by the Greeks (See "Iliad " IV., 201, 246) that all things, gods included, owe their being to the Ocean and his wife Tethys, the latter being Gaea, the Earth or Nature. But who is Ocean? Ocean is the immeasurable SPACE (Spirit in Chaos), which is the Deity (see Book I.); and Tethys is not the Earth, but primordial matter in the process of formation. In our case it is no longer Aditi-Gaea who begets Ouranos or Varuna, the chief Aditya among the seven planetary gods, but Prakriti, materialised and localised. The Moon, masculine in its theogonic character, is,
* The goddess who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the account of Berosus, was Thallath, in Greek Thalassa, "the Sea."
** See, for comparison, the account of creation by Berosus (Alexander Polyhistor) and the hideous beings born from the two-fold principle (Earth and Water) in the Abyss of primordial creation: Neras (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human bodies), and Kimnaras (men with the heads of horses) created by Brahma in the commencement of the Kalpa.
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in its cosmic aspect only, the female generative principle, as the Sun is the male emblem thereof. Water is the progeny of the Moon, an androgyne deity with every nation.
Evolution proceeds on the laws of analogy in Kosmos as in the formation of the smallest globe. Thus the above, applying to the modus operandi at the time when the Universe was appearing, applies also in the case of our Earth's formation.
This Stanza opens by speaking of thirty crores, 30,000,000, of years. We may be asked -- What could the ancients know of the duration of geological periods, when no modern scientist or mathematician is able to calculate their duration with anything like approximate accuracy? Whether they had or had not better means (and it is maintained that they had them in their Zodiacs), still the chronology of the ancient Brahmins shall now be given as faithfully as possible.
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THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BRAHMINS.
No greater riddle exists in science, no problem is more hopelessly insoluble, than the question: How old -- even approximately -- are the Sun and Moon, the Earth and Man? What does modern science know of the duration of the ages of the World, or even of the length of geological periods?
Nothing; absolutely nothing.
If one turns to science for chronological information, one is told by those who are straightforward and truthful, as for instance Mr. Pengelly, the eminent geologist, "We do not know."* One will learn that, so far, no trustworthy numerical estimate of the ages of the world and man could be made, and that both geology and anthropology are at sea. Yet when a student of esoteric philosophy presumes to bring forward the teachings of Occult Science, he is at once sat upon. Why should this be so, since, when reduced to their own physical methods, the greatest scientists have failed to arrive even at an approximate agreement?
It is true that science can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, in the Cimmerian darkness of the prehistoric ages, the explorers are lost in a labyrinth, whose great corridors are doorless, allowing no visible exit into the Archaic past. Lost in the maze of their own conflicting speculations, rejecting, as they have always done, the evidence of Eastern tradition, without any clue, or one single certain milestone to guide them, what can geologists or anthropologists do but pick up the slender
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 67 THE RACE THAT NEVER DIES.
thread of Ariadne where they first perceive it, and then proceed at perfect random? Therefore we are first told that the farthest date to which documentary record extends is now generally regarded by Anthropology as but "the earliest distinctly visible point of the pre-historic period." (Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
At the same time it is confessed that "beyond that period stretches back a vast indefinite series of prehistoric ages." (Ibid.)
It is with those specified "Ages" that we shall begin. They are "prehistoric" to the naked eye of matter only. To the spiritual eagle eye of the seer and the prophet of every race, Ariadne's thread stretches beyond that "historic period" without break or flaw, surely and steadily, into the very night of time; and the hand which holds it is too mighty to drop it, or even let it break. Records exist, although they may be rejected as fanciful by the profane; though many of them are tacitly accepted by philosophers and men of great learning, and meet with an unvarying refusal only from the official and collective body of orthodox science. And since the latter refuses to give us even an approximate idea of the duration of the geological ages -- save in a few conflicting and contradictory hypotheses -- let us see what Aryan philosophy can teach us.
Such computations as are given in Manu and the Puranas -- save trifling and most evidently intentional exaggerations -- are, as already stated, almost identical with those taught in esoteric philosophy. This may be seen by comparing the two in any Hindu calendar of recognised orthodoxy.
The best and most complete of all such calendars, at present, as vouched for by the learned Brahmins of Southern India, is the already mentioned Tamil calendar called the "Tirukkanda Panchanga," compiled, as we are told, from, and in full accordance with, secret fragments of Asuramaya's data. As Asuramaya is said to have been the greatest astronomer, so he is whispered to have also been the most powerful "Sorcerer" of the "WHITE ISLAND, which had become BLACK with sin," i.e., of the islands of Atlantis.
The "White Island" is a symbolical name. Asuramaya is said to have lived (see the tradition of Jhana-
bhaskara) in Romaka-pura in the West: because the name is an allusion to the land and cradle of the "Sweat-born" of the Third Race. That land or continent had disappeared ages before Asuramaya lived, since he was an Atlantean; but he was a direct descendant of the Wise Race, the Race that never dies. Many are the legends concerning this hero, the pupil of Surya (the Sun-God) himself, as the Indian accounts allege. It matters little whether he lived on one or another island, but the question is to prove that he was no myth, as Dr. Weber and others would make him. The
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
fact of "Romaka-pura in the West" being named as the birth-place of this hero of the archaic ages, is
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
the more interesting because it is so very suggestive of the esoteric teaching about the "Sweat-born" Races, the men born from the pores of their parents. "ROMAKUPAS" means "hair-pores" in Sanskrit. In Mahabharata XII. 10,308, a people named Raumyas are said to have been created from the pores of Virabhadara, the terrible giant, who destroyed Daksha's sacrifice. Other tribes and people are also represented as born in this way. All these are references to the later Second and the earlier Third Root Races.
The following figures are from the calendar just referred to; a footnote marks the points of disagreement with the figures of the Arya Samaj school: --
I. From the beginning of cosmic evolution,* up
to the Hindu year Tarana (or 1887) .................... 1,955,884,687 years.
II. The (astral) mineral, vegetable and animal
kingdoms up to Man, have taken to evolve** ........ 300,000,000 years.
III. Time, from the first appearance of
"Humanity" (on planetary chain)..........................1,664,500,987 years.***
* The esoteric doctrine says that this "cosmic evolution" refers only to our solar system; while exoteric Hinduism makes the figures refer, if we do not mistake, to the whole Universal System.
** Another point of disagreement. Occultism says: "The astral prototypes of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man have taken that time (300 million years) to evolve, re-forming out of the cast-off materials of the preceding Round, which, though very dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively ethereal as compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the physical and material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind and works downwards, hardening or materialising forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found in strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of millions of years, must be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the preceding Round, which, while living, were far more ethereal than physical, as we know the physical. That we perceive and disinter them as tangible forms, is due to the process of materialization or crystallization referred to, which took place subsequently, at the beginning of the Fourth Round, and reached its maximum after the appearance of man, proceeding parallel with his physical evolution. This alone illustrates the fact that the degree of materiality of the Earth changes pari passu with that of its inhabitants. And thus man now finds, as tangible fossils, what were once the (to his present senses) ethereal forms of the lower kingdoms. The above Brahmanical figures refer to evolution beginning on Globe A, and in the First Round. In this Volume we speak only of this, the Fourth Round."
*** This difference and the change of cyphers in the last three triplets of figures, the writer cannot undertake to account for. According to every calculation, once the three hundred millions are subtracted, the figures ought to stand, 1,655,884,687. But they are given as stated in the Tamil calendar above-named and as they were translated. The school of the late Pandit Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the "Arya Magazine" of Lahore, the cover of
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which bears the words: "Aryan era 1,960,852,987."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 69 THE VARIOUS PRALAYAS.
IV. The number that elapsed since the " Vaivasvata Manvantara"* -- or the human period --
up to the year 1887, is just ......................... 18,618,728 years.
V. The full period of one Manvantara is ..... 308,448,000 years.
VI. 14 "Manvantaras" plus the period of one Satya Yuga make ONE DAY OF BRAHMA, or complete Manvantara and make ................. 4,320,000,000 years.
Therefore a Maha-Yuga consists of ............. 4,320,000 years.**
The year 1887 is from the commencement of
Kali-Yuga ..................................................... 4,989 years.
To make this still clearer in its details, the following computations by Rao Bahadur P. Sreenivas Row, are given from the "Theosophist" of November, 1885.
* VAIVASVATA Manu is the one human being -- some versions add to him the seven Rishis -- who in the Matsya Avatar allegory is saved from the Deluge in a boat, like Noah in the Ark. Therefore, this Vaivasvata Manvantara would be the "post-Diluvian" period. This, however, does not refer to the later "Atlantean" or Noah's deluge, nor to the Cosmic Deluge or Pralaya of obscuration, which preceded our Round, but to the appearance of mankind in the latter Round. There is a great difference made, however, between the "Naimitika, " occasional or incidental, "Prakritika," elemental, "Atyantika, " the absolute, and "Nitya, " the perpetual Pralaya; the latter being described as "Brahma's contingent
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
recoalescence of the Universe at the end of Brahma's DAY." The question was raised by a learned Brahmin Theosophist: "Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic Pralaya; because, otherwise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and he is Aja (unborn)." We cannot see why. The Logos is said to be born only metaphorically, as the Sun is born daily, or rather a beam of that Sun is born in the morning and is said to die when it disappears, whereas it is simply reabsorbed into the parent essence. Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not for the Arupa , formless, world. The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at the end of one hundred years of Brahma; when the Universal dissolution is said to take place. Then the Avyaya, say the exoteric scriptures, the eternal life symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra, the Destroyer, enters into the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the waters of the Universe. "Thus fed, the seven solar Rays dilate to seven Suns and set fire to the whole Cosmos. . . . ."
** Since a Maha-Yuga is the 1,000th part of a day of Brahma.
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Add Sandhis, i.e., intervals between the reign of each Manu, which amount
to six Maha-Yugas, equal to ................................................................................................... 25,920,000
The total of these reigns and interregnums of 14 Manus, is 1,000 Maha-Yugas, which constitute a Kalpa, i.e., one day of Brahma ............................................................ 4,320,000,000
As Brahma's Night is of equal duration, one Day and Night of Brahma would contain .... 8,640,000,000
360 of such days and nights make one year of Brahma make ....................................... 3,110,400,000,000
100 such years constitute the whole period of Brahma's age, i.e., Maha-Kalpa ...... 311,040,000,000,000
These are the exoteric figures accepted throughout India, and they dovetail pretty nearly with those of the Secret works. The latter, moreover, amplify them by a division into a number of esoteric cycles, never mentioned in Brahmanical popular writings -- one of which, the division of the Yugas into racial cycles, is given elsewhere as an instance. The rest, in their details, have of course never been made public. They are, nevertheless, known to every "Twice-born" (Dwija, or Initiated) Brahmin, and the Puranas contain references to some of them in veiled terms, which no matter-of-fact Orientalist has yet endeavoured to make out, nor could he if he would.
These sacred astronomical cycles are of immense antiquity, and most of them pertain, as stated, to the calculations of Narada and Asuramaya. The latter has the reputation of a giant and a sorcerer. But the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
antediluvian giants (the Gibborim of the Bible) were not all bad or Sorcerers, as Christian Theology, which sees in every Occultist a servant of the Evil one, would have it; nor were they worse than many of "the faithful sons of the Church." A Torquemada and a Catherine de Medicis certainly did more harm in their day and in the name of their Master than any Atlantean giant or demigod of antiquity ever did; whether his name was Cyclops, or Medusa, or yet the Orphic Titan, the anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There were good "giants" in days of old just as there are bad "pigmies" now; and the Rakshasas and Yakshas of Lanka are no worse than our modern dynamiters, and certain Christian and civilised generals during modern wars. Nor are they myths. "He who would laugh at Briareus and Orion ought to abstain from going to, or even talking of, Karnac or Stonehenge," remarks somewhere a modern writer.
As the Brahmanical figures given above are approximately the basic calculations of our esoteric system, the reader is requested to carefully keep them in mind.
In the "Encyclopaedia Britannica " one finds, as the last word of science, that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over "tens of thou-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 71 SCIENTIFIC SELF-COMPLACENCE.
sands of years."* It becomes evident that as these figures may be made to fluctuate between 10,000 and 100,000, therefore they mean very little if anything, and only render still denser the darkness surrounding the question. Moreover, what matters it that science places the birth of man in the "pre- or post-glacial drift," if we are told at the same time that the so-called "ice age" is simply a long succession of ages which "shaded without abrupt change of any kind into what is termed the human or Recent period . . . the overlapping of geological periods having been the rule from the beginning of time." The latter "rule" only results in the still more puzzling, even if strictly scientific and correct, information, that "even to-day man is contemporary with the ice-age in the Alpine valleys and in the Finmark."**
Thus, had it not been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine, and even by exoteric Hinduism and its traditions, we should be left to this day to float in perplexed uncertainty between the indefinite ages of one school of science, the "tens of thousands" of years of the other, and the 6,000 years of the Bible interpreters. This is one of the several reasons why, with all the respect due to the conclusions of the men of learning of our modern day, we are forced to ignore them in all such questions of pre-historic antiquity.
Modern Geology and Anthropology must, of course, disagree with our views. But Occultism will find as many weapons against these two sciences as it has against astronomical and physical theories, in spite of Mr. Laing's assurances that*** "in (chronological) calculations of this sort, concerning older and later formations, there is no theory, and they are based on positive facts, limited only by a certain possible (?) amount of error either way," occultism will prove, scientific confessions in hand, that geology is very much in error, and very often even more so than Astronomy. In this very passage by Mr. Laing, which gives to Geology pre-eminence for correctness over Astronomy, we find a passage in flagrant contradiction to the admissions of the best Geologists themselves. Says the author --
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"In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian period,**** when the present order of things was fairly inaugurated, are approximate (truly so) facts and not theories, while the astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some
* See article "Geology," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica. "
** This allows a chance even to the Biblical "Adam Chronology" of 6,000 years. (Ibid.)
*** See his "Modern Science and Modern Thought. "
**** To the Silurian period as regards Molluscs and Animal life -- granted; but what do they know of man?
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cases they give results incredibly short . . . in others they give results almost incredibly long."
After which, the reader is advised that the safest course "seems to be to assume that Geology really proves the duration of the present order of things to have been somewhere over 100 millions of years," as "Astronomy gives an enormous though unknown time in the past, and to come in the future, for the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death of the Solar System, of which our Earth is a small planet now passing through the habitable phase." (p. 49.)
Judging from past experience, we do not entertain the slightest doubt that, once called upon to answer "the absurd unscientific and preposterous claims of exoteric (and esoteric) Aryan chronology," the scientist of "the results incredibly short," i.e., only 15,000,000 years, and the scientist, who "would require 600,000,000 years," together with those who accept Mr. Huxley's figures of 1,000,000,000 "since sedimentation began in Europe" (World Life), would all be as dogmatic one as the other. Nor would they fail to remind the Occultist and the Brahmin, that it is the modern men of science alone who represent exact science, whose duty it is to fight inaccuracy and superstition.
The earth is passing through the "habitable phase" only for the present order of things, and as far as our present mankind is concerned with its actual "coats of skin" and phosphorus for bones and brain.
We are ready to concede the 100 millions of years offered by Geology, since we are taught that our present physical mankind -- or the Vaivasvata humanity -- began only 18 millions of years ago. But Geology has no facts to give us for the duration of geological periods, as we have shown, no more indeed than has Astronomy. The authentic letter from Mr. W. Pengelly, F.R.S., quoted elsewhere, says that: "It is at present, and perhaps always will be, IMPOSSIBLE to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even into millenniums." And having never, hitherto, excavated a fossil
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 2
man of any other than the present form -- what does Geology know of him? It has traced zones or strata and, with these, primordial zoological life, down to the Silurian. When it has, in the same way, traced man down to his primordial protoplasmic form, then we will admit that it may know something of primordial man. If it is not very material "to the bearings of modern scientific discovery on modern thought," whether "man has existed in state of constant though slow progression for the last 50,000 years of period of 15 millions, or for the last 500,000 years of a period of 150 millions" ("Modern Science, etc." p. 49), as Mr. S. Laing tells his readers, it is very much so for the claims of the Occultists. Unless the latter show that it is a possibility, if not a perfect certainty, that man
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 73 COSMOGONY, AN INTELLIGENT PLAN.
lived 18 millions of years ago, the Secret Doctrine might as well have remained unwritten. An attempt must, therefore, be made in this direction, and it is our modern geologists and men of science generally who will be brought to testify to this fact in the third part of this volume. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the fact that Hindu Chronology is constantly represented by the Orientalists as a fiction based on no "actual computation,"* but simply a "childish boasting," it is nevertbeless often twisted out of recognition to make it yield to, and fit in with, Western theories. No figures have ever been more meddled with and tortured than the famous 4, 3, 2, followed by cyphers of the Yugas and Maha-Yugas.
As the whole cycle of prehistoric events, such as the evolution and transformation of Races and the extreme antiquity of man, hangs upon the said Chronology, it becomes extremely important to check it by other existing calculations. If the Eastern Chronology is rejected, we shall at least have the consolation of proving that no other -- whether the figures of Science or of the Churches -- is one whit more reliable. As Professor Max Muller expresses it, it is often as useful to prove what a thing is not as to show what it may be. And once we succeed in pointing out the fallacies of both Christian and scientific computations -- by allowing them a fair chance of comparison with our Chronology -- neither of the two will have a reasonable ground to stand upon, in pronouncing the esoteric figures less reliable than its own.
We may here refer the reader to our earlier work "Isis Unveiled, " Vol. I., p. 32, for some remarks concerning the figures which were cited a few pages back.
To-day a few more facts may be added to the information there given, which is already known to every Orientalist. The sacredness of the cycle of 4320, with additional cyphers, lies in the fact that the figures which compose it, taken separately or joined in various combinations, are each and all symbolical of the greatest mysteries in Nature. Indeed, whether one takes the 4 separately, or the 3 by itself, or the two together making 7, or again the three added together and yielding 9, all these numbers have their application in the most sacred and occult things, and record the workings of Nature in her eternally periodical phenomena. They are never erring, perpetually recurring numbers, unveiling, to him who studies the secrets of Nature, a truly divine System, an intelligent plan in Cosmogony, which results in natural cosmic divisions of times, seasons, invisible influences, astronomical phenomena, with their action and reaction on terrestrial and even moral nature; on
* Wilson's "Translation of Vishnu Purana," Vol. I., pp. 50, 51.
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birth, death, and growth, on health and disease. All these natural events are based and depend upon cyclical processes in the Kosmos itself, producing periodic agencies which, acting from without, affect the Earth and all that lives and breathes on it, from one end to the other of any Manvantara. Causes and effects are esoteric, exoteric, and endexoteric, so to say.
In Isis Unveiled we wrote that which we now repeat: -- " We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; 'but their parts,' owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), 'are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature.' When those circulations -- which Eliphas Levi calls ' currents of the astral light' -- in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the ' superior natures,' and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these 'inferior' ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of scepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes." And philosophizing alone, how can it understand the "SOUL DOCTRINE"?
In order not to break the thread of the narrative we shall give some striking proofs of these cyclic laws in Part II., proceeding meanwhile with our explanations of geological and racial cycles.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 75 THE SECRET OF THE FALL OF THE ANGELS.
STANZA III.
ATTEMPTS TO CREATE MAN.
§§ (11) The Descent of the Demiurge. (12) The lunar gods ordered to create. (13) The higher gods refuse.
11. THE LORD OF THE LORDS CAME. FROM HER BODY HE SEPARATED THE WATERS, AND THAT WAS HEAVEN ABOVE, THE FIRST HEAVEN (the atmosphere, or the air, the firmament ) (a).
(a) Here tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest version, repeated in the Puranas, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the first it is said: "He the Lord" (the god who has the form of Brahma) "when the world had become one ocean (Harivamsa I. 36) concluding that within the waters lay the earth, and desirous to raise it up," to separate it, "created himself in another form. As in the preceding Kalpa (Manvantara) he had assumed the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the shape of a boar, etc. etc." In the Elohistic "creation" (Genesis, verses 6, 7, 8, and 9) "God" creates a firmament in the midst of the waters . . . . . and says "let dry land appear." And now comes the traditional peg whereunto is hung the esoteric portion of the Kabalistic interpretation.
11.. THE GREAT CHOHANS (Lords), CALLED THE LORDS OF THE MOON, OF THE AIRY BODIES (a). "BRING FORTH MEN, (they were told), MEN OF YOUR NATURE. GIVE THEM (i.e., the Jivas or Monads) THEIR FORMS WITHIN. SHE (Mother Earth or Nature) WILL BUILD COVERINGS WITHOUT (external bodies). (For) MALES-FEMALES WILL THEY BE. LORDS OF THE FLAME, ALSO."
(a) Who are the Lords of the Moon? In India they are called Pitris or "lunar ancestors," but in the Hebrew scrolls it is Jehovah himself who is the "Lord of the Moon," collectively as the Host, and also as one of the Elohim. The astronomy of the Hebrews and their observance of times was regulated by the moon. A Kabalist, having shown that "Daniel . . . told off God's providence by set times," and that the "Revelation" of John "speaks of a carefully measured cubical city descending out of the heavens," etc., adds --
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 76 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"But the vitalizing power of heaven lay chiefly with the moon. . . . It was the Hebrew
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
(Jehovah), and St. Paul enjoins: 'Let no man judge you for your observance of the seventh day, and the day of the new moon, which are a shadow of things to come; but the body (or substance) is of Christ" or Jehovah, that function of this power that "made the barren woman . . . a mother . . . for they are the gift of Jehovah" . . . which is a key to the objection which her husband made to the Shunamite, as to her going to the man of God -- "for it is neither the seventh day nor the day of the new moon. . . . (2 Kings, iv., 23.) The living spiritual powers of the constellations had mighty wars, marked by the movements and positions of the stars and planets, and especially as the result of the conjunction of the moon, earth, and sun. Bentley comments on the Hindu "War between the gods and the giants," as marked by the eclipse of the Sun at the ascending node of the Moon, 945 B.C. (! !), at which time was born* or produced from the sea, SRI (Sarai, S-r-i, the wife of the Hebrew A-bram**). Sri is also Venus-
Aphrodite the Western emblem "of the luni-solar year or the moon (as Sri is the wife of the moon; vide foot-note), the goddess of increase*** . . . " Therefore . . . "the grand monument and landmark of the exact period of the lunar year and month, by which this cycle (of 19 tropical years and 235 revolutions of the moon) could be calculated, was Mount Sinai -- the Lord Jehovah coming down thereon. . . . Paul speaks (then) as a mystagogue, when he says concerning the freed woman and bond woman of Abraham: 'For this Hagar (the bond-woman) is Mount Sinai in Arabia.' How could a woman be a mountain? and such a mountain! Yet . . . she was. . . . Her name was Hagar, Hebrew , whose numbers re-read 235, or in exact measure, the very number of lunar months to equal nineteen tropical years to complete this cycle. . . . Mount Sinai being, in the esoteric language of the wisdom, the monument of the exact time of the lunar
* According to the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days when Biblical chronology was still undisputed; and also according to that of those modern Orientalists who dwarf the Hindu dates as far as they can.
** Now Sri is the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapatis and Rishis, the chief of the Bhrigus, "the Consumers," the aerial class of gods. She is Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu, and she is "the bride of Siva" (Gauri), and she is Sarasvati, "the watery," the wife of Brahma, because the three gods and goddesses are one, under three aspects. Read the explanation by Parasara, in Vishnu Purana in Bk. I., ch. viii. (Vol. I., Wilson's trans., p. 119), and you will understand. "The Lord of Sri" is the moon, he says, and "Sri is the wife of Narayana, the God of Gods"; Sri or Lakshmi (Venus) is Indrani, as she is Sarasvati, for in the words of Parasara: "Hari (or Iswara, "the Lord") is all that is called male in the Universe; Lakshmi is all that is termed female. There is nothing else than they." Hence she is "female," and "God" is male Nature.
*** Sri is goddess of, and herself "Fortune and Prosperity."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 77 THE VARIOUS CLASSES OF CREATORS.
years and months, by which this spiritual vitalizing cycle could be computed -- and which mountain, indeed, was called (see Fuerst), "the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). So also Sarai (SRI), the wife of Abram, could have no child until her name was changed to Sarah, , giving to her the property of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
this lunar influence."*
This may be regarded as a digression from the main subject; but it is a very necessary one with a view to Christian readers. For who, after studying dispassionately the respective legends of Abram or Abraham, Sarai or Sarah, who was "fair to look upon," and those of Brahma and Sarasvati, or Sri, Lakshmi-Venus, with the relations of all these to the Moon and Water; -- and especially one who understands the real Kabalistic meaning of the name Jehovah and its relation to, and connection with, the moon -- who can doubt that the story of Abram is based upon that of Brahma, or that Genesis was written upon the old lines used by every ancient nation? All in the ancient Scriptures is allegorical -- all based upon and inseparably connected with Astronomy and Cosmolatry.
-------
13. THEY (the Moon-gods) WENT, EACH ON HIS ALLOTTED LAND: SEVEN OF THEM, EACH ON HIS LOT. THE LORDS OF THE FLAME REMAINED BEHIND. THEY WOULD NOT GO, THEY WOULD NOT CREATE (a).
(a) The Secret teachings show the divine Progenitors creating men on seven portions of the globe "each on his lot" -- i.e., each a different race of men externally and internally, and on different zones. This polygenistic claim is considered elsewhere (vide Stanza VII.). But who are "They" who create, and the "Lords of the Flame," "who do not"? Occultism divides the "Creators" into twelve classes; of which four have reached liberation to the end of the "Great Age," the fifth is ready to reach it, but still remains active on the intellectual planes, while seven are still under direct Karmic law. These last act on the man-bearing globes of our chain.
Exoteric Hindu books mention seven classes of Pitris, and among them two distinct kinds of Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and the Agnishwatta; or those possessed of the "sacred fire" and those devoid of it. Hindu ritualism seems to connect them with sacrificial fires, and with Grihasta Brahmins in earlier incarnations: those who have, and those who have not attended as they should to their household sacred fires in their previous births. The distinction, as said, is derived from the Vedas. The first and highest class (esoterically) the Agnishwatta,
* "Masonic Review"; Cincinnati, June 1886, Art. "The Cabbalah."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 78 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
are represented in the exoteric allegory as Grihasta (Brahman-householders) who, in their past births in other Manvantaras having failed to maintain their domestic fires and to offer burnt sacrifices, have lost every right to have oblations with fire presented to them. Whereas the Barhishad, being Brahmins who have kept up their household sacred fires, are thus honoured to this day. Thence the Agnishwatta are represented as devoid of, and the Barhishad as possessed of, fires.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
But esoteric philosophy explains the original qualifications as being due to the difference between the natures of the two classes: the Agnishwatta Pitris are devoid of fire (i.e., of creative passion), because too divine and pure (vide supra, Sloka 11th); whereas the Barhishad, being the lunar spirits more closely connected with Earth, became the creative Elohim of form, or the Adam of dust.
The allegory says that Sanandana and other Vedhas, the Sons of Brahma, his first progeny, "were without desire or passion, inspired with the holy wisdom, estranged from the Universe and undesirous of progeny" ( Vishnu Purana, Book I. vii.). This also is what is meant in Sloka 11 by the words: "They would not create," and is explained as follows: -- "The primordial Emanations from the creative Power are too near the absolute Cause. They are transitional and latent forces, which will develop only in the next and subsequent removes." This makes it plain. Hence Brahma is said to have felt wrathful when he saw that those "embodied spirits, produced from his limbs (gatra), would not multiply themselves." After which, in the allegory, he creates other seven mind-born Sons (see "Moksha-Darma" and "Mahabharata"), namely, Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasishta, the latter being often replaced by Daksha, the most prolific of the creators. In most of the texts these Seven Sons of Vasishta-Daksha are called the seven Rishis of the Third Manvantara; the latter referring both to the Third Round and also to the third Root-Race and its branch-Races in the Fourth Round. These are all the creators of the various beings on this Earth, the Prajapati, and at the same time they appear as divers reincarnations in the early Manvantaras or races.
It thus becomes clear why the Agnishwatta, devoid of the grosser creative fire, hence unable to create physical man, having no double, or astral body, to project, since they were without any form , are shown in exoteric allegories as Yogis, Kumaras (chaste youths), who became "rebels," Asuras, fighting and opposing gods,* etc., etc. Yet it is they
* Because, as the allegory shows, the Gods who had no personal merit of their own, dreading the sanctity of those self-striving incarnated Beings who had become ascetics and Yogis, and thus threatened to upset the power of the former by their self-acquired powers -- renounced them. All this has a deep philosophical meaning and refers to the evolution and acquirement of divine powers through self-exertion. Some Rishi- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 79 THE LIVING SPIRITUAL FIRE.
alone who could complete man, i.e., make of him a self-conscious, almost a divine being -- god on Earth. The Barhishad, though possessed of creative fire, were devoid of the higher MAHAT-mic element. Being on a level with the lower principles -- those which precede gross objective matter -- they could only give birth to the outer man, or rather to the model of the physical, the astral man. Thus, though we see them intrusted with the task by Brahma (the collective Mahat or Universal Divine Mind), the "Mystery of Creation" is repeated on Earth, only in an inverted sense, as in a mirror. It is those who are unable to create the spiritual immortal man, who project the senseless model (the Astral) of the physical Being; and, as will be seen, it was those who would not multiply, who sacrificed themselves to the good and salvation of Spiritual Humanity. For, to complete the septenary man, to
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
add to his three lower principles and cement them with the spiritual Monad -- which could never dwell in such a form otherwise than in an absolutely latent state -- two connecting principles are needed: Manas and Kama. This requires a living Spiritual Fire of the middle principle from the fifth and third states of Pleroma. But this fire is the possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect) Cubes, which symbolize the Angelic Beings:* the former having from the first creation got hold of it and being said to have appropriated it for themselves, as in the allegory of Prometheus. These are the active, and therefore -- in Heaven -- no longer "pure" Beings. They have become the independent and free Intelligences, shown in every Theogony as fighting for that independence and freedom, and hence -- in the ordinary sense -- "rebellious to the divine passive law." These are then those "Flames" (the Agnishwatta) who, as shown in Sloka 13, "remain behind" instead of going along with the others to create men on Earth. But the true esoteric meaning is that most of them were destined to incarnate as the Egos of the forthcoming crop of Mankind. The human Ego is neither Atman nor Buddhi, but the higher Manas: the intellectual fruition and the efflorescence of the intellectual self-conscious Egotism -
- in the higher spiritual sense. The ancient works refer to it as Karana Sarira on the plane of Sutratma, which is the golden thread on which, like beads, the various personalities of this higher Ego are strung. If the reader were told, as in the semi-esoteric allegories, that these Beings were returning Nirvanees, from preceding Maha-Manvantaras -- ages of incalculable dura-
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Yogis are shown in the Puranas to be far more powerful than the gods. Secondary gods or temporary powers in Nature (the Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the spiritual potentiality in man which can lead him to become one with the INFINITE and the ABSOLUTE.
* See Book I., Stanzas III. to V. The triangle becomes a Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth.
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tion which have rolled away in the Eternity, a still more incalculable time ago -- he would hardly understand the text correctly; while some Vedantins might say: "This is not so; the Nirvanee can never return"; which is true during the Manvantara he belongs to, and erroneous where Eternity is concerned. For it is said in the Sacred Slokas:
"The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all things back into action. . . ."
Hence, as the higher "Pitris or Dhyanis" had no hand in his physical creation, we find primeval man, issued from the bodies of his spiritually fireless progenitors, described as aeriform, devoid of compactness, and MINDLESS. He had no middle principle to serve him as a medium between the highest and the lowest, the spiritual man and the physical brain, for he lacked Manas. The Monads which incarnated in those empty SHELLS, remained as unconscious as when separated from their previous incomplete forms and vehicles. There is no potentiality for creation, or self-Consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because divine, nature is, so to
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower line of the Triangle -- representing the first triad that emanates from the Universal MONAD -- that can furnish this needed consciousness on the plane of differentiated Nature. But how could these pure Emanations, which, on this principle, must have originally been themselves unconscious (in our sense), be of any use in supplying the required principle, as they could hardly have possessed it themselves? The answer is difficult to comprehend, unless one is well acquainted with the philosophical metaphysics of a beginningless and endless series of Cosmic Re-births; and becomes well impressed and familiarised with that immutable law of Nature which is ETERNAL MOTION, cyclic and spiral, therefore progressive even in its seeming retrogression. The one divine Principle, the nameless THAT of the Vedas, is the universal Total, which, neither in its spiritual aspects and emanations, nor in its physical atoms, can ever be at "absolute rest" except during the "Nights" of Brahma. Hence, also, the "first-
born" are those who are first set in motion at the beginning of a Manvantara, and thus the first to fall into the lower spheres of materiality. They who are called in Theology "the Thrones," and are the "Seat of God," must be the first incarnated men on Earth; and it becomes comprehensible, if we think of the endless series of past Manvantaras, to find that the last had to come first, and the first last. We find, in short, that the higher Angels had broken, countless aeons before, through the "Seven Circles," and thus robbed them of the Sacred fire;
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 81 MAN, A GOD IN ANIMAL FORM.
which means in plain words, that they had assimilated during their past incarnations, in lower as well as in higher worlds, all the wisdom therefrom -- the reflection of MAHAT in its various degrees of intensity. No Entity, whether angelic or human, can reach the state of Nirvana, or of absolute purity, except through aeons of suffering and the knowledge of EVIL as well as of good, as otherwise the latter remains incomprehensible.
Between man and the animal -- whose Monads (or Jivas) are fundamentally identical -- there is the impassable abyss of Mentality and Self-consciousness. What is human mind in its higher aspect, whence comes it, if it is not a portion of the essence -- and, in some rare cases of incarnation, the very essence -- of a higher Being: one from a higher and divine plane? Can man -- a god in the animal form -
- be the product of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal, which differs from man in external shape, but by no means in the materials of its physical fabric, and is informed by the same, though undeveloped, Monad -- seeing that the intellectual potentialities of the two differ as the Sun does from the Glow-worm? And what is it that creates such difference, unless man is an animal plus a living god within his physical shell? Let us pause and ask ourselves seriously the question, regardless of the vagaries and sophisms of both the materialistic and the psychological modern sciences.
To some extent, it is admitted that even the esoteric teaching is allegorical. To make the latter comprehensible to the average intelligence, requires the use of symbols cast in an intelligible form. Hence the allegorical and semi-mythical narratives in the exoteric, and the (only) semi-metaphysical and objective representations in the esoteric teachings. For the purely and transcendentally spiritual conceptions are adapted only to the perceptions of those who "see without eyes, hear without ears, and sense without organs," according to the graphic expression of the Commentary. The too puritan idealist is at liberty to spiritualise the tenet, whereas the modern psychologist would simply try to spirit
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
away our "fallen," yet still divine, human Soul in its connection with Buddhi.
The mystery attached to the highly spiritual ancestors of the divine man within the earthly man is very great. His dual creation is hinted at in the Puranas, though its esoteric meaning can be approached only by collating together the many varying accounts, and reading them in their symbolical and allegorical character. So it is in the Bible, both in Genesis and even in the Epistles of Paul. For that creator, who is called in the second chapter of Genesis the "Lord God," is in the original the Elohim, or Gods (the Lords), in the plural; and while one of them makes the earthly Adam of dust, the other breathes into him the breath of life, and the third makes of him a living soul (ii. 7), all of which readings
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are implied in the plural number of the Elohim.* "The first man is of the Earth, the second (the last, or rather highest) is from heaven," says Paul in I. Corinthians xv. 47.
In the Aryan allegory the rebellious Sons of Brahma are all represented as holy ascetics and Yogis. Re-
born in every Kalpa, they generally try to impede the work of human procreation. When Daksha, the chief of the Prajapati (creators), brings forth 10,000 sons for the purpose of peopling the world, Narada -- a son of Brahma, the great Rishi, and virtually a "Kumara," if not so in name -- interferes with, and twice frustrates Daksha's aim, by persuading those Sons to remain holy ascetics and eschew marriage. For this, Daksha curses Narada to be re-born as a man, as Brahma had cursed him before for refusing to marry, and obtain progeny, saying: -- "Perish in thy present (Deva or angelic) form and take up thy abode in the womb," i.e., become a man (Vayu Purana; Harivamsa, 170). Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same story, it is easy to see that Narada belongs to that class of Brahma's, "first-born," who have all proven rebellious to the law of animal procreation, for which they had to incarnate as men. Of all the Vedic Rishis, Narada, as already shown, is the most incomprehensible, because the most closely connected with the occult doctrines -- especially with the secret cycles and Kalpas (vide supra).
Certain contradictory statements about this Sage have much distracted the Orientalists. Thus he is shown as refusing positively to create (have progeny), and even as calling his father Brahma "a false teacher" for advising him to get married ( "Narada-Pancha-Ratra"); nevertheless, he is referred to as one of the Prajapati, "progenitors"! In Naradiya Purana, he describes the laws and the duties of the celibate adepts; and as these occult duties do not happen to be found in the fragment of about 3,000 Stanzas in the possession of European museums, the Brahmins are proclaimed liars;
the Orientalists forgetting that the Naradiya is credited with containing 25,000 Stanzas, and that it is not very likely that such MSS. should be found in the hands of the Hindu profane, those who are ready to sell any precious olla for a red pottage. Suffice it to say, that Narada is
* Seth, as Bunsen and others have shown, is not only the primitive god of the Semites -- early Jews included -- but also their "semi-divine ancestor." For, says Bunsen ( "God in History," vol. i, pp. 233,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
234), "the Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man) must be considered as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam's father." "According to Bunsen, the Deity (the god Seth) was the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine" (Staniland Wake, "The Great Pyramid"). And Seth became considered in the later Theology of the Egyptians as "AN EVIL DAEMON," says the same Bunsen, for he is one with Typhon and one with the Hindu demons as a logical sequel.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 83 "FIRES," "SPARKS," AND "FLAMES."
the Deva-Rishi of Occultism par excellence; and that the Occultist who does not ponder, analyse, and study Narada from his seven esoteric facets, will never be able to fathom certain anthropological, chronological, and even Cosmic Mysteries. He is one of the Fires above-mentioned, and plays a part in the evolution of this Kalpa from its incipient, down to its final stage. He is an actor who appears in each of the successive acts (Root-Races) of the present Manvantaric drama, in the world allegories which strike the key-note of esotericism, and are now becoming more familiar to the reader. But shall we turn to other ancient Scriptures and documents for the corroboration of the "Fires," "Sparks," and "Flames?" They are plentiful, if one only seeks for them in the right places. In the "Book of the Concealed Mystery," they are clearly enunciated, as also in the "Ha Idra Zuta Qadisha," or the lesser holy Assembly. The language is very mystical and veiled, yet still comprehensible. Therein, among the sparks of Prior Worlds, "vibrating Flames and Sparks," from the divine flint, the workmen proceed to create man, "male and female" (427); which "Flames and Sparks" (Angels and their Worlds, Stars and Planets) are said, figuratively, to "become extinct and die," that is to say, remain unmanifested until a certain process of nature is accomplished. To show how thickly veiled from public view are the most important facts of anthropogenesis, two passages are now quoted from two Kabalistic books. The first is from the Book of the Concealed Mystery: --
(429.) From a Light-Bearer (one of the seven sacred planets) of insupportable brightness proceeded a radiating Flame, dashing off, like a vast and mighty hammer, those sparks which were the prior worlds.
(430.) And with most subtle ether were these intermingled and bound mutually together, but only when they were conjoined together, even the great Father and great Mother.
(431.) From Hoa, himself, is AB, the Father; and from Hoa, himself, is RUACH, the Spirit; who are hidden in the Ancient of Days, and therein is that Ether concealed.
(432.) And it was connected with a Light-Bearer (a planet and its angel or regent), which went forth from that Light-Bearer of insupportable brightness, which is hidden in the bosom of Aima, the Great Mother.*
Now the following extract from the Zohar** also deals with the same mystery: -- "The Pre-Adamite Kings. 'We have learned in the Siphrah D'Tzniootha: That the At-tee'kah DAt-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared his Form, built Kings, and engraved
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, stanza 3
* See Mr. Mather's "Kabbalah Unveiled."
** Translated in I. Myer's Qabbalah.
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Kings, and sketched out Kings (men, the Kings of the animals), and they could not exist: till he overthrew them and hid them until after a time, therefore it is written: 'And these are the Kings which reigned in the land of Edom' . . . . And they could not exist till Resha'Hiv'rah, the White Head, the At'-
tee-'kah D'At-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, arranged Himself . . . . and formed all forms above and below. . . . Before He arranged himself in his Form had not been formed all those whom he desired to form, and all worlds have been destroyed . . . . they did not remain in their places, because the form of the Kings had not been formed as it ought to be, and the Holy City had not been prepared." (Zohar iii., 135a; 292a Idra Zootah. Brody, etc.)
Now the plain meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this: Worlds and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of evolution and from pre-existing material, until both the planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal and human races, became what they are now in the present cycle: opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before man could become male and female physically, his prototype, the creating Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane astrally. That is to say, the atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabala calls the Balance, through which everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of materiality. Chochmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephiroth, had to diffuse itself in, and through, Binah, intelligent Nature, or Understanding. Therefore the First Root-race of men, sexless and mindless, had to be overthrown and "hidden until after a time"; i.e., the first race, instead of dying, disappeared in the second race, as certain lower lives and plants do in their progeny. It was a wholesale transformation. The First became the Second Root-race, without either begetting it, procreating it, or dying. "They passed by together," as it is written: "And he died and another reigned in his stead" (Genesis xxvi. 31 et seq. Zohar iii., 292a). Why? Because "the Holy City had not been prepared." And what is the "Holy City"? The Maquom (the Secret Place or the Shrine) on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe.* So much so, that in the paragraph on "the Emanation of the Male and Female Principles" in the Zohar
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(ibid.), it is said that, on this earth, the WISDOM from the "Holy Ancient" "does not shine except in male and female." "Hohmah, Wisdom, is the Father, and BINAH, understanding, is the Mother . . . . and when they connect one with the other they bring forth and diffuse and emanate truth. In the sayings of Rabbi Je-yeva Sabah, i.e., the Old, we learned this: What is Binah Understanding? But when they connect in one another, the [[diagram]] (Yod) in the [[diagram]] (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And, therefore, it is called Binah, Understanding. It means BeN YaH, i.e., Son of YaH. This is the completeness of the whole."*
This is also the "completeness" of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect apotheosis, the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the grossness of the terrestrial. Nothing so graphically gross exists in Eastern Occultism, nor in the primitive Kabala -- the "Chaldean Book of Numbers." We have said so in "Isis Unveiled": --
"We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: 'In a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming, like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form of the lingham . . . the Maha Deva.' Before casting slurs on a symbol whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that religion of sensualism par excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas of their own temples. The Mahody of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhangulpore, the minarets of Islam -- either rounded or pointed -- are the originals of the Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of the Rochester Cathedral, and of the modern Duomo of Milan. All of these steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian temples, are the reproductions of the primitive idea of the lithos, the upright phallus." (Vol. II., p. 5.)
Nevertheless, and however it may be, the fact that all these Hebrew Elohim, Sparks, and Cherubs are identical with the Devas, Rishis and the Fires and Flames, the Rudras and the forty-nine Agnis of the ancient Aryas, is sufficiently proven by and in the Kabala.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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STANZA IV.
CREATION OF THE FIRST RACES.
§§ (14) Creation of men. (15) They are empty shadows. (16) The Creators are perplexed how to create a THINKING man. (17) What is needed for the formation of a perfect Man.
14. THE SEVEN HOSTS, THE "WILL (or Mind)-BORN" LORDS, PROPELLED BY THE SPIRIT OF LIFE-GIVING (Fohat), SEPARATE MEN FROM THEMSELVES, EACH ON HIS OWN ZONE (a).
(a) They threw off their "shadows" or astral bodies -- if such an ethereal being as a "lunar Spirit" may be supposed to rejoice in an astral, besides a hardly tangible body. In another Commentary it is said that the "Ancestors" breathed out the first man, as Brahma is explained to have breathed out the Suras (Gods), when they became "Asuras " (from Asu, breath). In a third it is said that they, the newly-created men, "were the shadows of the Shadows."
With regard to this sentence -- "They were the shadows of the Shadows" -- a few more words may be said and a fuller explanation attempted. This first process of the evolution of mankind is far easier to accept than the one which follows it, though one and all will be rejected and doubted even by some Kabalists, especially the Western, who study the present effects, but have neglected to study their primary causes. Nor does the writer feel competent to explain a mode of procreation so difficult of appreciation save for an Eastern Occultist. Therefore it is useless to enter here into details concerning the process, though it is minutely described in the Secret Books, as it would only lead to speaking of facts hitherto unknown to the profane world, and hence to their being misunderstood. An "Adam" made of the dust of the ground will always be found preferable, by a certain class of students, to one projected out of the ethereal body of his creator; though the former process has never been heard of, while the latter is familiar, as all know, to many Spiritualists in Europe and America, who, of all men, ought to understand it. For who of those who have witnessed the phenomenon of a materialising form oozing out of the pores of a medium or, at other times, out of his left side, can fail to credit the possibility, at least, of such a birth? If there are
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 87 MAN NOT CREATED PERFECT.
in the Universe such beings as Angels or Spirits, whose incorporeal essence may constitute an intelligent entity notwithstanding the absence of any (to us) solid organism; and if there are those who
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believe that a god made the first man out of dust, and breathed into him a living Soul -- and there are millions upon millions who believe both -- what does this doctrine of ours contain that is so impossible? Very soon the day will dawn, when the world will have to choose whether it will accept the miraculous creation of man (and Kosmos too) out of nothing, according to the dead letter of Genesis, or a first man born from a fantastic link -- absolutely "missing" so far -- the common ancestor of man, and of the "true ape."* Between these two fallacies,** Occult philosophy steps in. It teaches that the first human stock was projected by higher and semi-divine Beings out of their own essences. If the latter process is to be considered as abnormal or even inconceivable -- because obsolete in Nature at this point of evolution -- it is yet proven possible on the authority of certain "Spiritualistic" FACTS. Which, then, we ask of the three hypotheses or theories is the most reasonable and the least absurd? Certainly no one -- provided he is not a soul-blind materialist -- can ever object to the occult teaching.
Now, as shown, we gather from the latter that man was not "created" the complete being he is now, however imperfect he still remains. There was a spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, and an animal evolution, from the highest to the lowest, as well as a physical development -- from the simple and homogeneous, up to the more complex and heterogeneous; though not quite on the lines traced for us by the modern evolutionists. This double evolution in two contrary directions, required various ages, of divers natures and degrees of spirituality and intellectuality, to fabricate the being now known as man. Furthermore, the one absolute, ever acting and never erring law, which proceeds on the
* ". . . Huxley, supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative Anatomy, could utter the momentous sentence that the anatomical differences between man and the highest apes are less than those between the latter and the lowest apes. In relation to our genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes." ("The Pedigree of Man, " by Ernest Haeckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p. 49).
What may be the scientific and logical objections to the opposite conclusion -- we would ask? The anatomical resemblances between Man and the Anthropoids -- grossly exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M. de Quatrefages shows -- are simply enough "accounted for" when the origin of the latter is taken into consideration.
"Nowhere, in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that approximates more closely to man, or a man that approximates more closely to an ape . . . . . ."
** ". . . . . The same gulf which is found to-day between Man and Ape, goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This fact alone is enough to make its untenability clear," (Dr. F. Pfaff, Prof. of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen).
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same lines from one eternity (or Manvantara) to the other -- ever furnishing an ascending scale for the manifested, or that which we call the great Illusion (Maha-Maya), but plunging Spirit deeper and
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deeper into materiality on the one hand, and then redeeming it through flesh and liberating it -- this law, we say, uses for these purposes the Beings from other and higher planes, men, or Minds (Manus), in accordance with their Karmic exigencies.
At this juncture, the reader is again asked to turn to the Indian philosophy and religion. The Esotericism of both is at one with our Secret Doctrine, however much the form may differ and vary.
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ON THE IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCES OF THE INCARNATING POWERS.
THE Progenitors of Man, called in India "Fathers," Pitara or Pitris, are the creators of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves, as the first personalities, and we are they. Primeval man would be "the bone of their bone and the flesh of their flesh," if they had body and flesh. As stated, they were "lunar Beings."
The Endowers of man with his conscious, immortal EGO, are the "Solar Angels" -- whether so regarded metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of the Conscious EGO or human Soul are great. The esoteric name of these "Solar Angels" is, literally, the "Lords" (Nath) of "persevering ceaseless devotion" (pranidhana ). Therefore they of the fifth principle (Manas) seem to be connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogis who make of pranidhana their fifth observance (see Yoga Shastra, II., 32.) It has already been explained why the trans-Himalayan Occultists regard them as evidently identical with those who in India are termed Kumaras, Agnishwattas, and the Barhishads.
How precise and true is Plato's expression, how profound and philosophical his remark on the (human) soul or EGO, when he defined it as "a compound of the same and the other." And yet how little this hint has been understood, since the world took it to mean that the soul was the breath of God, of Jehovah. It is "the same and the other," as the great Initiate-Philosopher said; for the EGO (the "Higher Self" when merged with and in the Divine Monad) is Man, and yet the same as the "OTHER," the Angel in him incarnated, as the same with the universal MAHAT. The great classics and philosophers felt this truth, when saying that "there must be something within us which produces our thoughts. Something very subtle; it is a breath; it is fire; it is ether;
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 89 PITRIS OF THE GODS AND DEMONS.
it is quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intellection; it is a number; it is harmony. . . . . " ( Voltaire).
All these are the Manasam and Rajasas: the Kumaras, Asuras, and other rulers and Pitris, who incarnated in the Third Race, and in this and various other ways endowed mankind with Mind.
There are seven classes of Pitris, as shown below, three incorporeal and four corporeal; and two kinds, the Agnishwatta and the Barhishad. And we may add that, as there are two kinds of Pitris, so there is a
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double and a triple set of Barhishad and Agnishwatta. The former, having given birth to their astral doubles, are reborn as Sons of Atri, and are the "Pitris of the Demons," or corporeal beings, on the authority of Manu (III., 196); while the Agnishwatta are reborn as Sons of Marichi (a son of Brahma), and are the Pitris of the Gods (Manu again, Matsya and Padma Puranas and Kulluka in the Laws of the Manavas, III., 195).* Moreover, the Vayu Purana declares all the seven orders to have originally been the first gods, the Vairajas, whom Brahma "with the eye of Yoga, beheld in the eternal spheres, and who are the gods of gods "; and the Matsya adds that the Gods worshipped them; while the Harivansa (S. 1, 935) distinguishes the Virajas as one class of the Pitris only -- a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, however, identify the Virajas with the elder Agnishwattas** and the Rajasas, or Abhutarajasas, who are incorporeal without even an astral phantom. Vishnu is said, in most of the MSS., to have incarnated in and through them. "In the Raivata Manvantara, again, Hari, best of gods, was born of Sambhuti, as the divine Manasas -- originating with the deities called Rajasas." Sambhuti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife of Marichi, the father of the Agnishwatta, who, along with the Rajasas, are ever associated with Manasas. As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than Wilson, Mr. Fitzedward Hall, "Manasa is no inappropriate name for a deity associated with the Rajasas. We appear to have in it Manasam -- the same as Manas -- with the change of termination required to express male personification" ( Vishnu Purana Bk. III., ch. I., p. 17 footnote). All the sons of Viraja are Manasa, says Nilakantha. And
* We are quite aware that the Yayu and Matsya Puranas identify (agreeably to Western interpretation) the Agnishwatta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with the months; adding a fourth class -- the Kavyas -- cyclic years. But do not Christian, Roman Catholics identify their Angels with planets, and are not the seven Rishis become the Saptarshi -- a constellation? They are deities presiding over all the cyclic divisions.
** The Vayu Purana shows the region called Viraja-loka inhabited by the Agnishwattas.
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Viraja is Brahma, and, therefore, the incorporeal Pitris are called Vairajas from being the sons of Viraja, says Vayu Purana.
We could multiply our proofs ad infinitum, but it is useless. The wise will understand our meaning, the unwise are not required to. There are thirty-three crores, or 330 millions, of gods in India. But, as remarked by the learned lecturer on the Bhagavad Gita, "they may be all devas, but are by no means all 'gods', in the high spiritual sense one attributes to the term." "This is an unfortunate blunder," he remarks, "generally committed by Europeans. Deva is a kind of spiritual being, and because the same word is used in ordinary parlance to mean god, it by no means follows that we have to worship thirty-
three crores of gods." And he adds suggestively: "These beings, as may be naturally inferred have a certain affinity with one of the three component Upadhis (basic principles) into which we have divided man." -- ( Vide Theosophist, Feb., 1887, et seq.)
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The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every Manvantara. Thus the twelve great gods, Jayas, created by Brahma to assist him in the work of creation in the very beginning of the Kalpa, and who, lost in Samadhi, neglected to create -- whereupon they were cursed to be repeatedly born in each Manvantara till the seventh -- are respectively called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, Sadhyas, and Adityas: they are Tushitas (in the second Kalpa), and Adityas in this Vaivasvata period (see Vayu Purana), besides other names for each age. But they are identical with the Manasa or Rajasas, and these with our incarnating Dhyan Chohans. They are all classes of the Gnana-
devas.
Yes; besides those beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas, Kinaras, etc., etc., taken in their individualities, inhabit the astral plane, there are real Devagnanams, and to these classes of Devas belong the Adityas, the Vairajas, the Kumaras, the Asuras, and all those high celestial beings whom Occult teaching calls Manaswin, the Wise, foremost of all, and who would have made all men the self-
conscious spiritually intellectual beings they will be, had they not been "cursed" to fall into generation, and to be reborn themselves as mortals for their neglect of duty.
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STANZA IV. -- (Continued.)
15. SEVEN TIMES SEVEN SHADOWS (chhayas) OF FUTURE MEN (or Amanasas) (a) WERE (thus) BORN, EACH OF HIS OWN COLOUR (complexion) AND KIND (b). EACH (also) INFERIOR TO HIS FATHER (creator). THE FATHERS, THE BONELESS, COULD GIVE NO LIFE TO BEINGS WITH
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BONES. THEIR PROGENY WERE BHUTA (phantoms ) WITH NEITHER FORM NOR MIND, THEREFORE THEY WERE CALLED THE CHHAYA (image or shadow) RACE (c).
(a) Manu, as already remarked, comes from the root "man" to think, hence "a thinker." It is from this Sanskrit word very likely that sprung the Latin "mens," mind, the Egyptian "Menes, " the "Master-
Mind," the Pythagorean Monas, or conscious "thinking unit," mind also, and even our "Manas" or mind, the fifth principle in man. Hence these shadows are called amanasa, "mindless."
With the Brahmins the Pitris are very sacred, because they are the Progenitors,* or ancestors of men -- the first Manushya on this Earth -- and offerings are made to them by the Brahmin when a son is born unto him. They are more honoured and their ritual is more important than the worship of the gods (See the "Laws of Manu, " Bk. III., p. 203).
May we not now search for a philosophical meaning in this dual group of progenitors?
The Pitris being divided into seven classes, we have here the mystic number again. Nearly all the
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Puranas agree that three of these are arupa, formless, while four are corporeal; the former being intellectual and spiritual, the latter material and devoid of intellect. Esoterically, it is the Asuras who form the first three classes of Pitris -- "born in the body of night" -- whereas the other four were produced from the body of twilight. Their fathers, the gods, were doomed to be born fools on Earth, according to Vayu Purana. The legends are purposely mixed up and made very hazy: the Pitris being in one the sons of the gods, and, in another those of Brahma; while a third makes them instructors of their own fathers. It is the Hosts of the four material classes who create men simultaneously on the seven zones.
Now, with regard to the seven classes of Pitris, each of which is again divided into seven, a word to students and a query to the profane. That class of the "Fire Dhyanis," which we identify on undeniable grounds with the Agnishwattas, is called in our school the "Heart" of the Dhyan-Chohanic Body; and it is said to have incarnated in the third race of men and made them perfect. The esoteric Mystagogy speaks of the mysterious relation existing between the hebdomadic essence or substance of this angelic Heart and that of man, whose
* This was hinted at in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., p. xxxviii., though the full explanation could not then be given: "The Pitris are not the ancestors of the present living men, but those of the first human kind or Adamic race; the spirits of human races, which, on the great scale of descending evolution, preceded our races of men, and were physically as well as spiritually, far superior to our modem pigmies. In Manava-Dharma-Sastra they are called the Lunar ancestors."
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every physical organ, and psychic, and spiritual function, is a reflection, so to say, a copy on the terrestrial plane of the model or prototype above. Why, it is asked, should there be such a strange repetition of the number seven in the anatomical structure of man? Why should the heart have four lower "cavities and three higher divisions," answering so strangely to the septenary division of the human principles, separated into two groups, the higher and the lower; and why should the same division be found in the various classes of Pitris, and especially our Fire Dhyanis? For, as already stated, these Beings fall into four corporeal (or grosser) and three incorporeal (or subtler) "principles," or call them by any other name you please. Why do the seven nervous plexuses of the body radiate seven rays? Why are there these seven plexuses, and why seven distinct layers in the human skin?
"Having projected their shadows and made men of one element (ether), the progenitors re-ascend to Maha-loka, whence they descend periodically, when the world is renewed, to give birth to new men.
"The subtle bodies remain without understanding (Manas) until the advent of the Suras (Gods) now called Asuras (not Gods)," says the Commentary.
"Not-gods, " for the Brahmins, perhaps, but the highest Breaths, for the Occultist; since those progenitors (Pitar), the formless and the intellectual, refuse to build man, but endow him with mind;
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the four corporeal classes creating only his body.
This is very plainly shown in various texts of the Rig Veda -- the highest authority for a Hindu of any sect whatever. Therein Asura means "spiritual divine," and the word is used as a synonym for Supreme Spirit, while in the sense of a "God," the term "Asura" is applied to Varuna and Indra and pre-
eminently to Agni -- the three having been in days of old the three highest gods, before Brahmanical Theo-Mythology distorted the true meaning of almost everything in the Archaic Scriptures. But, as the key is now lost, the Asuras are hardly mentioned.
In the Zendavesta the same is found. In the Mazdean, or Magian, religion, "Asura" is the lord Asura Visvavedas, the "all-knowing" or "omniscient Lord"; and Asura-Mazdha, become later Ahura-Mazdha, is, as Benfey shows, "the Lord who bestows Intelligence" -- Asura-Medha and Ahura-Mazdao. Elsewhere in this work it is shown, on equally good authority, that the Indo-Iranian Asura was always regarded as sevenfold. This fact, combined with the name Mazdha, as above, which makes of the sevenfold Asura the "Lord," or "Lords" collectively "who bestow Intelligence," connects the Amshaspends with the Asuras and with our incarnating Dhyan Chohans, as well as with the Elohim, and the seven informing gods of Egypt, Chaldea, and every other country.
Why these "gods" refused to create men is not, as stated in exoteric
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accounts, because their pride was too great to share the celestial power of their essence with the children of Earth, but for reasons already suggested. However, allegory has indulged in endless fancies and theology taken advantage thereof in every country to make out its case against these first-born, or the logoi, and to impress it as a truth on the minds of the ignorant and credulous. (Compare also what is said about Makara and the Kumaras in connection with the Zodiac.)
The Christian system is not the only one which has degraded them into demons. Zoroastrianism and even Brahmanism have profited thereby to obtain hold over the people's mind. Even in Chaldean exotericism, Beings who refuse to create, i.e., who are said to oppose thereby the Demiurgos, are also denounced as the Spirits of Darkness. The Suras, who win their intellectual independence, fight the Suras who are devoid thereof, who are shown as passing their lives in profitless ceremonial worship based on blind faith -- a hint now ignored by the orthodox Brahmins -- and forthwith the former become A-Suras. The first and mind-born Sons of the Deity refuse to create progeny, and are cursed by Brahma to be born as men. They are hurled down to Earth, which, later on, is transformed, in theological dogma, into the infernal regions. Ahriman destroys the Bull created by Ormazd -- which is the emblem of terrestrial illusive life, the "germ of sorrow" -- and, forgetting that the perishing finite seed must die, in order that the plant of immortality, the plant of spiritual, eternal life, should sprout and live, Ahriman is proclaimed the enemy, the opposing power, the devil. Typhon cuts Osiris into fourteen pieces, in order to prevent his peopling the world and thus creating misery; and Typhon becomes, in the exoteric, theological teaching, the Power of Darkness. But all this is the exoteric shell. It is the worshippers of the latter who attribute to disobedience and rebellion the effort and self-
sacrifice of those who would help men to their original status of divinity through self-conscious
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efforts; and it is these worshippers of Form who have made demons of the Angels of Light.
Esoteric philosophy, however, teaches that one third* of the Dhyanis -- i.e., the three classes of the Arupa Pitris, endowed with intelligence, "which is a formless breath, composed of intellectual not elementary substances" (see Harivamsa, 932) -- was simply doomed by the law of Karma and evolution to be reborn (or incarnated) on Earth.** Some
* Whence the subsequent assertions of St. John's vision, referred to in his Apocalypse, about "the great red Dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads," whose "tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth" (ch. xii.).
** The verse "did cast them to the Earth," plainly shows its origin in the grandest and oldest allegory of the Aryan mystics, who, after the destruction of the Atlantean [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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of these were Nirmanakayas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the Puranas, reappearing on this globe, in the third Manvantara, as Kings, Rishis and heroes (read Third Root-
Race). This tenet, being too philosophical and metaphysical to be grasped by the multitudes, was, as already stated, disfigured by the priesthood for the purpose of preserving a hold over them through superstitious fear.
The supposed "rebels," then, were simply those who, compelled by Karmic law to drink the cup of gall to its last bitter drop, had to incarnate anew, and thus make responsible thinking entities of the astral statues projected by their inferior brethren. Some are said to have refused, because they had not in them the requisite materials -- i.e., an astral body -- since they were arupa. The refusal of others had reference to their having been Adepts and Yogis of long past preceding Manvantaras; another mystery. But, later on, as Nirmanakayas, they sacrificed themselves for the good and salvation of the Monads which were waiting for their turn, and which otherwise would have had to linger for countless ages in irresponsible, animal-like, though in appearance human, forms. It may be a parable and an allegory within an allegory. Its solution is left to the intuition of the student, if he only reads that which follows with his spiritual eye.
As to their fashioners or "Ancestors" -- those Angels who, in the exoteric legends, obeyed the law -- they must be identical with the Barhishad Pitris, or the Pitar-Devata, i.e., those possessed of the physical creative fire. They could only create, or rather clothe, the human Monads with their own astral Selves, but they could not make man in their image and likeness. "Man must not be like one of us," say the creative gods, entrusted with the fabrication of the lower animal but higher; (see Gen. and Plato's Timaeus). Their creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means, esoterically, that it is
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[[Footnote continued from previous page]] giants and sorcerers, concealed the truth -- astronomical, physical, and divine, as it is a page out of pre-cosmic theogony -- under various allegories. Its esoteric, true interpretation is a veritable Theodice of the "Fallen Angels," so called; the willing and the unwilling, the creators and those who refused to create, being now mixed up most perplexingly by Christian Catholics, who forget that their highest Archangel, St. Michael, who is shown to conquer (to master and to assimilate) the DRAGON OF WISDOM and of divine Self-sacrifice (now miscalled and calumniated as Satan), WAS THE FIRST TO REFUSE TO CREATE! This led to endless confusion. So little does Christian theology understand the paradoxical language of the East and its symbolism, that it even explains, in its dead letter sense, the Chinese Buddhist and Hindu exoteric rite of raising a noise during certain eclipses to scare away the "great red Dragon," which laid a plot to carry away the light! But here "Light" means esoteric Wisdom, and we have sufficiently explained the secret meaning of the terms Dragon, Serpent, etc., etc., all of which refer to Adepts and Initiates.
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they who became the first Race, and thus shared its destiny and further evolution. They would not, simply because they could not, give to man that sacred spark which burns and expands into the flower of human reason and self-consciousness, for they had it not to give. This was left to that class of Devas who became symbolised in Greece under the name of Prometheus, to those who had nought to do with the physical body, yet everything with the purely spiritual man. (See Part II of this volume, "The Fallen Angels "; also "The Gods of Light proceed from the Gods of Darkness.")
Each class of Creators endows man with what it has to give: the one builds his external form; the other gives him its essence, which later on becomes the Human Higher Self owing to the personal exertion of the individual; but they could not make men as they were themselves -- perfect, because sinless; sinless, because having only the first, pale shadowy outlines of attributes, and these all perfect -- from the human standpoint -- white, pure and cold as the virgin snow. Where there is no struggle, there is no merit. Humanity, "of the Earth earthy," was not destined to be created by the angels of the first divine Breath: therefore they are said to have refused to do so, and man had to be formed by more material creators,* who, in their turn, could give only what they had in their own natures, and no more. Subservient to eternal law, the pure gods could only project out of themselves shadowy men, a little less ethereal and spiritual, less divine and perfect than themselves -- shadows still. The first humanity, therefore, was a pale copy of its progenitors; too material, even in its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of gods; too spiritual and pure to be MEN, endowed as it is with every negative (Nirguna) perfection. Perfection, to be fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the incorruptible must grow out of the corruptible, having the latter as its vehicle and basis and contrast. Absolute light is absolute darkness, and vice versa. In fact, there is neither light nor
* In spite of all efforts to the contrary, Christian theology -- having burdened itself with the Hebrew esoteric account of the creation of man, which is understood literally -- cannot find any reasonable excuse for its "God, the Creator," who produces a man devoid of mind and sense; nor can it justify the
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punishment following an act, for which Adam and Eve might plead non compos. For if the couple is admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating of the forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that disobedience was evil? If primeval man was meant to remain a half-witted, or rather witless, being, then his creation was aimless and even cruel, if produced by an omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and Eve are shown, even in Genesis, to be created by a class of lower divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of their personal prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they will not allow man to become "as one of us." This is plain, even from the dead-
letter meaning of the Bible. The Gnostics, then, were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible World.
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darkness in the realms of truth. Good and Evil are twins, the progeny of Space and Time, under the sway of Maya. Separate them, by cutting off one from the other, and they will both die. Neither exists per se, since each has to be generated and created out of the other, in order to come into being; both must be known and appreciated before becoming objects of perception, hence, in mortal mind, they must be divided.
Nevertheless, as the illusionary distinction exists, it requires a lower order of creative angels to "create" inhabited globes -- especially ours -- or to deal with matter on this earthly plane. The philosophical Gnostics were the first to think so, in the historical period, and to invent various systems upon this theory. Therefore in their schemes of creation, one always finds their Creators occupying a place at the very foot of the ladder of spiritual Being. With them, those who created our earth and its mortals were placed on the very limit of mayavic matter, and their followers were taught to think -- to the great disgust of the Church Fathers -- that for the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe, no high divinity could be made responsible, but only angels of a low hierarchy,* to which class they relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah.
Mankinds different from the present are mentioned in all the ancient Cosmogonies. Plato speaks, in the Phaedrus, of a winged race of men. Aristophanes (in Plato's Banquet), speaks of a race androgynous and with round bodies. In Pymander, all the animal kingdom even is double-sexed. Thus in § 18, it is said: "The circuit having been accomplished, the knot was loosened. . . . and all the animals, which were equally androgynous, were untied (separated) together with man. . . . ." for. . . . "the causes had to produce effects on earth."** Again, in the ancient Quiche Manuscript, the Popol Vuh -- published by the late Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg -- the first men are described as a race "whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once": thus showing the divine knowledge of Gods, not mortals. The Secret Doctrine, correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the facts as they are recorded in the Archaic symbols.
* In Isis Unveiled several of these Gnostic systems are given. One is taken from the Codex Nazaraeus, the Scriptures of the Nazarenes, who, although they existed long before the days of Christ, and even before the laws of Moses, were Gnostics, and many of them Initiates. They held their "Mysteries of
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Life" in Nazara (ancient and modern Nazareth), and their doctrines are a faithful echo of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine -- some of which we are now endeavouring to explain.
** See the translation from the Greek by Francois, Monsieur de Foix, Evesque d'Ayre: the work dedicated to Marguerite de France, Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579, Bordeaux.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 97 THE TREES OF LIFE.
(b) These "shadows" were born "each of his own colour and kind," each also "inferior to his creator," because the latter was a complete being of his kind. The Commentaries refer the first sentence to the colour or complexion of each human race thus evolved. In Pymander, the Seven primitive men, created by Nature from the "heavenly Man," all partake of the qualities of the "Seven Governors," or Rulers, who loved Man -- their own reflection and synthesis.
In the Norse Legends, one recognizes in Asgard, the habitat of the gods, as also in the Ases themselves, the same mystical loci and personifications woven into the popular "myths," as in our Secret Doctrine; and we find them in the Vedas, the Puranas, the Mazdean Scriptures and the Kabala. The Ases of Scandinavia, the rulers of the world which preceded ours, whose name means literally the "pillars of the world," its "supports," are thus identical with the Greek Cosmocratores, the "Seven Workmen or Rectors" of Pymander, the seven Rishis and Pitris of India, the seven Chaldean gods and seven evil spirits, the seven Kabalistic Sephiroth synthesised by the upper triad, and even the seven Planetary Spirits of the Christian mystics. The Ases create the earth, the seas, the sky and the clouds, the whole visible world, from the remains of the slain giant Ymir; but they do not create MAN, but only his form from the Ask or ash-tree. It is Odin who endows him with life and soul, after Lodur had given him blood and bones, and finally it is Honir who furnishes him with his intellect (manas) and with his conscious senses. The Norse Ask, the Hesiodic Ash-tree, whence issued the men of the generation of bronze, the Third Root-Race, and the Tzite tree of the Popol-Vuh, out of which the Mexican third race of men was created, are all one.* This may be plainly seen by any reader. But the Occult reason why the Norse Yggdrasil, the Hindu Aswatha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, and the Tibetan Zampun, are one with the Kabalistic Sephirothal Tree, and even with the Holy Tree made by Ahura Mazda, and the Tree of Eden -- who among the western scholars can tell?** Nevertheless, the fruits of all those "Trees," whether Pippala or Haoma or yet the more prosaic apple, are the "plants of life," in fact and verity. The prototypes of our races were all enclosed in the microcosmic tree, which grew and developed within and under the great mundane macrocosmic tree***; and the mystery is half revealed in the Dirghotamas, where it is said: "Pippala, the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come spirits who
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love the science, and where the gods produce all marvels." As in the Gogard, among the luxuriant branches of all those mundane trees, the "Serpent" dwells. But while the Macroscosmic tree is the Serpent of Eternity and of absolute Wisdom itself, those who dwell in the Microcosmic tree are the Serpents of the manifested Wisdom. One is the One and All; the others are its reflected parts. The "tree" is man himself, of course, and the Serpents dwelling in each, the conscious Manas, the connecting link between Spirit and Matter, heaven and earth.
Everywhere, it is the same. The creating powers produce Man, but fail in their final object. All these logoi strive to endow man with conscious immortal spirit, reflected in the Mind (manas) alone; they fail, and they are all represented as being punished for the failure, if not for the attempt. What is the nature of the punishment? A sentence of imprisonment in the lower or nether region, which is our earth; the lowest in its chain; an "eternity" -- meaning the duration of the life-cycle -- in the darkness of matter, or within animal Man. It has pleased the half ignorant and half designing Church Fathers to disfigure the graphic symbol. They took advantage of the metaphor and allegory found in every old religion to turn them to the benefit of the new one. Thus man was transformed into the darkness of a material hell; his divine consciousness, obtained from his indwelling Principle (the Manasa), or the incarnated Deva, became the glaring flames of the infernal region; and our globe that Hell itself. Pippala, Haoma, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, were denounced as the forbidden fruit, and the "Serpent of Wisdom," the Voice of reason and consciousness, remained identified for ages with the Fallen Angel, which is the old Dragon, the Devil! ( Vide Part II., "The Evil Spirit, who, or what?")
The same for the other high symbols. The Svastica, the most sacred and mystic symbol in India, the "Jaina-Cross" as it is now called by the Masons, notwithstanding its direct connection, and even identity with the Christian Cross, has become dishonoured in the same manner. It is the "devil's sign," we are told by the Indian missionaries. "Does it not shine on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thousand headed Sesha-Ananta, in the depths of Patala, the Hindu Naraka or Hell"? It does: but what is Ananta? As Sesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric cycle of time, and becomes infinite Time itself, when called Ananta, the great seven-headed Serpent, on which rests Vishnu, the eternal Deity, during Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do with this highly metaphysical symbol? The Svastica is the most philosophically scientific of all symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary in a few lines of the whole work of creation, or evolution, as one should rather say, from Cosmo-theogony down to Anthro-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 99 THE HAMMER OF THOR.
pogony, from the indivisible unknown Parabrahm to the humble moneron of materialistic science, whose genesis is as unknown to that science as is that of the All-Deity itself. The Svastica is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is the "Worker's Hammer" in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the "Hammer" just referred to in the "Book of Concealed Mystery " (Ch. I., §§ 1, 2, 3, 4,
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etc.), "which striketh sparks from the flint" (Space), those sparks becoming worlds. It is "Thor's Hammer," the magic weapon forged by the dwarfs against the Giants, or the pre-cosmic Titanic forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the region of matter, will not be subdued by the Gods, the Agents of Universal Harmony, but have first to be destroyed. This is why the world is formed out of the relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastica is the Miolnir, the "storm-hammer"; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy gods, after having been purified by fire (the fire of passions and suffering in their life-incarnations), become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal peace, then Miolnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of Hel (the goddess-queen of the region of the Dead) will bind them no longer, for the kingdom of evil will have passed away. "Surtur's flames had not destroyed them, nor yet had the raging waters" of the several deluges. . . . . "Then came the sons of Thor. They brought Miolnir with them, no longer as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heaven and the new Earth. . . . . "*
Verily many are its meanings! In the Macrocosmic work, the "HAMMER OF CREATION," with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Kosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the cycles of Time
of the world's axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastica meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. Applied to the Microcosm, Man, it shows him to be a link between heaven and Earth: the right hand being raised at the end of a horizontal arm, the left pointing to the Earth. In the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, the uplifted right hand is inscribed with the word "Solve," the left with the word "Coagula." It is at one and the same time an Alchemical, Cosmogonical, Anthropological, and Magical sign, with seven keys to its inner meaning. It is not too much to say that the compound symbolism of this universal and most suggestive of signs contains the key to the seven great mysteries of Kosmos. Born in the mystical conceptions of the early Aryans, and by them placed at the very threshold of eternity, on the head of the serpent Ananta, it found
* See "Asgard and the Gods ": "The renewal of the World."
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its spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediaeval Anthropomorphists. It is the Alpha and the Omega of universal creative Force, evolving from pure Spirit and ending in gross Matter. It is also the key to the cycle of Science, divine and human; and he who comprehends its full meaning is for ever liberated from the toils of Mahamaya, the great Illusion and Deceiver. The light that shines from under the divine hammer, now degraded into the mallet or gavel of the Grand Masters of Masonic Lodges, is sufficient to dissipate the darkness of any human schemes or fictions.
How prophetic are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the ravens of Odin whisper of the
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past and the future, as they flutter around in their abode of crystal beneath the flowing river. The songs are all written down in the "Scrolls of Wisdom," of which many are lost but some still remain: and they repeat in poetical allegory the teachings of the archaic ages. To summarise from Dr. Wagner's "Asgard and the Gods," the "renewal of the world," which is a prophecy about the seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense.
The Miolnir had done its duty in this Round, and: --
". . . . on the field of Ida, the field of resurrection (for the Fifth Round), the sons of the highest gods assembled, and in them their fathers rose again (the Egos of all their past incarnations). They talked of the Past and the Present, and remembered the wisdom and prophecies of their ancestor which had all been fulfilled. Near them, but unseen of them, was the strong, the mighty One, who rules all things. . . . and ordains the eternal laws that govern the world. They all knew he was there, they felt his presence and his power, but were ignorant of his name. At his command the new Earth rose out of the Waters of Space. To the South above the Field of Ida, he made another heaven called Audlang, and further off, a third, Widblain. Over Gimil's cave, a wondrous palace was erected, covered with gold and shining bright in the sun." These are the three gradually ascending planets of our "Chain." There the Gods were enthroned, as they used to be. . . . From Gimil's heights (the seventh planet or globe, the highest and the purest), they looked down upon the happy descendants of LIF and LIFTHRASIR (the coming Adam and Eve of purified humanity), and signed to them to CLIMB up higher, to rise in knowledge and wisdom, step by step, from one "heaven to another," until they were at last fit to be united to the Gods in the house of All-Father (p. 305).
He who knows the doctrines of Esoteric Budhism, (or Wisdom), though so imperfectly sketched hitherto, will see clearly the allegory contained in the above.
Its more philosophical meaning will be better understood if the reader thinks carefully over the myth of Prometheus. It is examined
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 101 THE DIVINE BABE, AGNI.
further on in the light of the Hindu Pramantha. Degraded into a purely physiological symbol by some Orientalists, and taken in connection with terrestrial fire only, their interpretation is an insult to every religion, including Christianity, whose greatest mystery is thus dragged down to matter. The "friction" of divine Pramantha and Arani could suggest itself under this image only to the brutal conceptions of the German materialists -- than whom there are none worse. It is true that the Divine babe, Agni with the Sanskrit-speaking Race, who became Ignis with the Latins, is born from the conjunction of Pramantha and Arani (Svastica) during the sacrificial ceremony. But what of that? Twashtri (Viswakarman) is the "divine artist and carpenter"* and is also the Father of the gods and of creative fire in the Vedas. So ancient is the symbol and so sacred, that there is hardly an excavation made on the sites of old cities without its being found. A number of such terra cotta discs, called fusaiolos,
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were found by Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Both these forms and were excavated in great abundance, their presence being one more proof that the ancient Trojans and their ancestors were pure Aryans.
(c) Chhaya, as already explained, is the astral image. It bears this meaning in Sanskrit works. Thus Sanjna (Spiritual Consciousness), the wife of Surya, the Sun, is shown retiring into the jungle to lead an ascetic life, and leaving behind to her husband her Chhaya, shadow or image.
* The "Father of the Sacred Fire," writes Prof. Jolly, "is Twashtri . . . his mother was Maya. He himself was styled Akta (anointed, [[christos]]), after the priest had poured upon his head the spirituous (?) SOMA, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice"; ("Man before Metals, " p. 190). The source of his information is not given by the French Darwinist. But the lines are quoted to show that light begins to dawn even upon the materialists. Adalbert Kuhn, in his "Die Herabkunft des Feuers, " identifies the
two signs and with Arani , and designates them under this name. He adds: "This process of kindling fire naturally led men to the idea of sexual reproduction," etc. Why could not a more dignified idea, and one more occult, have led man to invent that symbol, in so far as it is connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.
"Agni , in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ," remarks Prof. Jolly. "Maya, Mary, his mother; Twastri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible." In the Rig Veda, Viswakarman is the highest and oldest of the Gods and their "Father." He is the "carpenter or builder," because God is called even by the monotheists, "the Architect of the Universe." Still, the original idea is purely metaphysical, and had no connection with the later Phallicism.
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16. HOW ARE THE (real) MANUSHYAS BORN? THE MANUS WITH MINDS, HOW ARE THEY MADE? (a) THE FATHERS (Barhishad (?)) CALL TO THEIR HELP THEIR OWN FIRE (the Kavyavahana, electric fire), WHICH IS THE FIRE WHICH BURNS IN EARTH. THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH CALLED TO HIS HELP THE SOLAR FIRE (Suchi, the spirit in the Sun). THESE THREE (the Pitris and the two fires) PRODUCED IN THEIR JOINT EFFORTS A GOOD RUPA. IT (the form) COULD STAND, WALK, RUN, RECLINE AND FLY. YET IT WAS STILL BUT A CHHAYA, A SHADOW WITH NO SENSE (b) . . . . . .
(a) Here an explanation again becomes necessary in the light, and with the help of the exoteric added
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to the esoteric scriptures. The "Manushyas " (men) and the Manus are here equivalent to the Chaldean "Adam" -- this term not meaning at all the first man, as with the Jews, or one solitary individual, but mankind collectively, as with the Chaldeans and Assyrians. It is the four orders or classes of Dhyan Chohans out of the seven, says the Commentary, "who were the progenitors of the concealed man," i.e., the subtle inner man. The "Lha" of the Moon, the lunar spirits, were, as already stated, only the ancestors of his form, i.e., of the model according to which Nature began her external work upon him. Thus primitive man was, when he appeared, only a senseless Bhuta* or a "Phantom." This "creation" was a failure, the reason of which will be explained in the Commentary on Sloka 20.
(b) This attempt was again a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of physical nature's unaided attempts to construct even a perfect animal -- let alone man. For the "Fathers," the lower Angels, are all Nature-
Spirits and the higher Elementals also possess an intelligence of their own; but this is not enough to construct a THINKING man. "Living Fire" was needed, that fire which gives the human mind its self-
perception and self-consciousness, or Manas ; and the progeny of Parvaka and Suchi are the animal electric and solar fires, which create animals, and could thus furnish but a physical living constitution to that first astral model of man. The first creators, then, were the Pygmalions of primeval man: they failed to animate the statue -- intellectually.
This Stanza we shall see is very suggestive. It explains the mystery of, and fills the gap between, the informing principle in man -- the
* It is not clear why "Bhutas " should be rendered by the Orientalists as meaning "evil Spirits" in the Puranas. In the Vishnu Purana, Book I, ch. 5, the Sloka simply says: "Bhutas -- fiends, frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous"; and the word in India now means ghosts, ethereal or astral phantoms, while in esoteric teaching it means elementary substances, something made of attenuated, noncompound essence, and, specifically, the astral double of any man or animal. In this case these primitive men are the doubles of the first ethereal Dhyanis or Pitris.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 103 THE DIVINE REBELS.
HIGHER SELF or human Monad -- and the animal Monad, both one and the same, although the former is endowed with divine intelligence, the latter with instinctual faculty alone. How is the difference to be explained, and the presence of that HIGHER SELF in man accounted for?
"The Sons of MAHAT are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life eternal. " . . . . "In the beginning (in the Second Race) some (of the Lords) only breathed of their essence into Manushya (men); and some took in man their abode."
This shows that not all men became incarnations of the "divine Rebels, " but only a few among them. The remainder had their fifth principle simply quickened by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the "sons of
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Mahat," speaking allegorically, skipped the intermediate worlds, in their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never have been able to reach upward from this earth, and attain through self-exertion his ultimate goal. The cyclic pilgrimage would have to be performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if not entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure spirit, that we are what we are -- self-conscious, thinking men, with the capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil. Hence the REBELS are our saviours. Let the philosopher ponder well over this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites -- Spirit and Matter -- can be cemented on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called "fables." ( Vide infra, "The Secret of Satan.")
It explains, to begin with, the statement made in Pymander: that the "heavenly MAN," the "Son of the Father," who partook of the nature and essence of the Seven Governors, or creators and Rulers of the material world, "peeped through the Harmony and, breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire, made manifest the downward-born nature."* It explains every verse in that Hermetic narrative, as also the Greek allegory of Prometheus. Most important of all, it explains the many allegorical accounts about the "Wars in Heaven," including that of Revelation with respect to the Christian dogma of the fallen angels. It explains the "rebellion" of the oldest and highest Angels, and the meaning of their being cast down from Heaven into the depths of Hell,
i.e., MATTER. It even solves the recent perplexity of the Assyriologists, who express their wonder through the late George Smith.
"My first idea of this part" (of the rebellion), he says, "was that the wars with the powers of Evil preceded the Creation ; I now think it followed the account of the fall" (Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92). In this work Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early Babylonian cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The tree has seven branches: three on the man's side, four on that of the female. These branches are typical of the seven Root-Races, in the third of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the so-called FALL into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless, then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each other. "The Dragon," says Mr. G. Smith, "which in the Chaldean account of the creation leads man to sin, is the creation of Tiamat, the living principle of the Sea, or Chaos . . . which was opposed to the deities at the creation of the world." This is an error. The Dragon is the male principle, or Phallus, personified, or rather animalized; and Tiamat, "the embodiment of the Spirit of Chaos," of the deep, or Abyss, is the female principle, the Womb. The "Spirit of Chaos and Disorder" refers to the mental perturbation which it led to. It is the sensual, attractive, magnetic principle which fascinates and seduces, the ever living active element which throws the whole world into disorder, chaos, and sin.
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The Serpent seduces the woman, but it is the latter who seduces man, and both are included in the Karmic curse, though only as a natural result of a cause produced. Says George Smith: "It is clear that the Dragon is included in the curse for the Fall, and that the Gods" (the Elohim, jealous at seeing the man of clay becoming a Creator in his turn, like all the animals,) "invoke on the head of the human Race all the evils which afflict humanity. Wisdom and knowledge shall injure him, he shall have family quarrels, he will anger the gods, he shall submit to tyranny. . . . he shall be disappointed in his desires, he shall pour out useless prayers, he shall commit future sin. . No doubt subsequent lines continue this topic, but again our narrative is broken, and it re-opens only where the gods are preparing for war with the powers of evil, which are led by Tiamat (the woman). . . . " (Babylonian Legend of Creation, p. 92.)
This account is omitted in Genesis, for monotheistic purposes. But it is a mistaken policy -- born no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic religion and its superstitions -- to have sought to restore the Chaldean fragments by Genesis, whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the fragments, which ought to be explained by the former.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 105 MAN'S FATHER, THE SUN.
17. THE BREATH (human Monad) NEEDED A FORM; THE FATHERS GAVE IT. THE BREATH NEEDED A GROSS BODY; THE EARTH MOULDED IT. THE BREATH NEEDED THE SPIRIT OF LIFE; THE SOLAR LHAS BREATHED IT INTO ITS FORM. THE BREATH NEEDED A MIRROR OF ITS BODY (astral shadow); "WE GAVE IT OUR OWN," SAID THE DHYANIS. THE BREATH NEEDED A VEHICLE OF DESIRES (Kama Rupa); "IT HAS IT," SAID THE DRAINER OF WATERS (Suchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct). THE BREATH NEEDS A MIND TO EMBRACE THE UNIVERSE; "WE CANNOT GIVE THAT," SAID THE FATHERS. "I NEVER HAD IT," SAID THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH. "THE FORM WOULD BE CONSUMED WERE I TO GIVE IT MINE," SAID THE GREAT (solar) FIRE . . . . (nascent) MAN REMAINED AN EMPTY, SENSELESS BHUTA . . . . THUS HAVE THE BONELESS GIVEN LIFE TO THOSE WHO BECAME (later) MEN WITH BONES IN THE THIRD (race) (a).
As a full explanation is found in Stanza V. ( Vide paragraph (a)), a few remarks will now suffice. The "Father" of primitive physical man, or of his body, is the vital electric principle residing in the Sun. The Moon is its Mother, because of that mysterious power in the Moon which has as decided an influence upon human gestation and generation, which it regulates, as it has on the growth of plants and animals. The "Wind" or Ether, standing in this case for the agent of transmission by which those influences are carried down from the two luminaries and diffused upon Earth, is referred to as the "nurse"; while "Spiritual Fire" alone makes of man a divine and perfect entity.
Now what is that "Spiritual Fire"? In alchemy it is HYDROGEN, in general; while in esoteric actuality it is the emanation or the Ray which proceeds from its noumenon, the "Dhyan of the first Element." Hydrogen is gas only on our terrestrial plane. But even in chemistry hydrogen "would be the only existing form of matter, in our sense of the term,"* and is very nearly allied to protyle, which is our
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layam. It is the father and generator, so to say, or rather the Upadhi (basis), of both AIR and WATER, and is "fire, air and water," in fact: one under three aspects; hence the chemical and alchemical trinity. In the world of manifestation or matter it is the objective symbol and the material emanation from the subjective and purely spiritual entitative Being in the region of noumena. Well might Godfrey Higgins have compared Hydrogen to, and even identified it with, the To ON, the "One" of the Greeks. For, as he remarks, Hydrogen is not Water, though it generates it; Hydrogen is not fire, though it manifests or creates it; nor is it Air, though air may be regarded as a product of the union of Water and
* See "Genesis of the Elements," by Prof. W. Crookes, p. 21.
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Fire -- since Hydrogen is found in the aqueous element of the atmosphere. It is three in one.
If one studies comparative Theogony, it is easy to find that the secret of these "Fires" was taught in the Mysteries of every ancient people, pre-eminently in Samothrace. There is not the smallest doubt that the Kabeiri, the most arcane of all the ancient deities, gods and men, great deities and Titans, are identical with the Kumaras and Rudras headed by Kartikeya -- a Kumara also. This is quite evident even exoterically; and these Hindu deities were, like the Kabeiri, the personified sacred Fires of the most occult powers of Nature. The several branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindu and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature, if not their importance. As in the case of the Kumaras, the number of the Kabeiri is uncertain. Some say that there were three or four only; others say seven. Aschieros, Achiosersa, Achiochersus, and Camillus may very well stand for the alter egos of the four Kumaras -- Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana. The former deities, whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscuri, Corybantes, Anaces, etc.; just as the Kumara, whose reputed father is Brahma, (or rather, the "Flame of his Wrath," which prompted him to perform the ninth or Kumara creation, resulting in Rudra or Nilalohita (Siva) and the Kumaras), were confounded with the Asuras, the Rudras, and the Pitris, for the simple reason that they are all one -- i.e., correlative Forces and Fires. There is no space to describe these "fires" and their real meaning here, though we may attempt to do so if the third and fourth volumes of this work are ever published. Meanwhile a few more explanations may be added.
The foregoing are all mysteries which must be left to the personal intuition of the student for solution, rather than described. If he would learn something of the secret of the FIRES, let him turn to certain works of the Alchemists, who very correctly connect fire with every element, as do the Occultists. The reader must remember that the ancients considered religion, and the natural sciences along with philosophy, to be closely and inseparably linked together. AEsculapius was the Son of Apollo -- the Sun or FIRE of Life; at once Helios, Pythios, and the god of oracular Wisdom. In exoteric religions, as much as in esoteric philosophy, the Elements -- especially fire, water, and air -- are made the progenitors of our five physical senses, and hence are directly connected (in an occult way) with them. These physical senses pertain even to a lower creation than the one called in the Puranas Pratisarga, or secondary Creation. "Liquid fire proceeds from indiscrete fire," says an Occult axiom.
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"The Circle is the THOUGHT; the diameter (or the line) is the WORD;
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 107 BATH-KOL, DAUGHTER OF THE VOICE.
and their union is LIFE." In the Kabala, Bath-Kol is the daughter of the Divine Voice, or primordial light, Shekinah. In the Puranas and Hindu exotericism, Vach (the Voice) is the female Logos of Brahma -- a permutation of Aditi, primordial light. And if Bath-Kol, in Jewish mysticism, is an articulate praeternatural voice from heaven, revealing to the "chosen people" the sacred traditions and laws, it is only because Vach was called, before Judaism, the "Mother of the Vedas," who entered into the Rishis and inspired them by her revelations; just as Bath-Kol is said to have inspired the prophets of Israel and the Jewish High-Priests. And both exist to this day, in their respective sacred symbologies, because the ancients associated sound or Speech with the Ether of Space, of which Sound is the characteristic. Hence Fire, Water and Air are the primordial Cosmic Trinity. "I am thy Thought, thy God, more ancient than the moist principle, the light that radiates within Darkness (Chaos), and the shining Word of God (Sound) is the Son of the Deity." ("Pymander," § 6.)*
Thus we have to study well the "Primary creation," before we can understand the Secondary. The first Race had three rudimentary elements in it; and no fire as yet; because, with the Ancients, the evolution of man, and the growth and development of his spiritual and physical senses, were subordinate to the evolution of the elements on the Cosmic plane of this Earth. All proceeds from Prabhavapyaya, the evolution of the creative and sentient principles in the gods, and even of the so-called creative deity himself. This is found in the names and appellations given to Vishnu in exoteric scriptures. As the Protologos (the Orphic), he is called Purvaja, "pregenetic," and then the other names connect him in their descending order more and more with matter.
The following order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution of the Elements and the Senses; or in Cosmic terrestrial "MAN" or "Spirit," and mortal physical man: --
1. Ether ... Hearing ... Sound.
2. Air ... Touch ... Sound and Touch.
3. Fire, or Light ... Sight ... Sound, Touch and Colour.
4. Water ... Taste ... Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste.
* The opponents of Hinduism may call the above Pantheism, Polytheism, or anything they may please. If Science is not entirely blinded by prejudice, it will see in this account a profound knowledge of natural Sciences and Physics, as well as of Metaphysics and Psychology. But to find this out, one has to study the personifications, and then convert them into chemical atoms. It will then be found to satisfy both physical and even purely materialistic Science, as well as those who see in evolution the
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work of the "Great Unknown Cause" in its phenomenal and illusive aspects.
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predecessor; as each Root-Race adds the characterizing sense of the preceding Race. The same is true in the septenary creation of man, who evolves gradually in seven stages, and on the same principles, as will be shown further on.
Thus, while Gods or Dhyan Chohans (Devas) proceed from the First Cause -- which is not Parabrahm, for the latter is the ALL CAUSE, and cannot be referred to as the "First Cause," -- which First Cause is called in the Brahmanical Books Jagad-Yoni, "the womb of the world," mankind emanates from these active agents in Kosmos. But men, during the first and the second races, were not physical beings, but merely rudiments of the future men: Bhutas, which proceeded from Bhutadi, "origin," or the "original place whence sprung the Elements." Hence they proceeded with all the rest from Prabhavapyaya, "the place whence is the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things," as explained by the Commentator. Whence also our physical senses. Whence even the highest "created" deity itself, in our philosophy. As one with the Universe, whether we call him Brahma, Iswara, or Purusha, he is a manifested deity, -- hence created, or limited and conditioned. This is easily proven, even from the exoteric teachings.
After being called the incognizable, eternal Brahma (neuter or abstract), the Punda-Rikaksha, "supreme and imperishable glory," once that instead of Sadaika-Rupa, "changeless" or "immutable" Nature, he is addressed as Ekanaka-Rupa, "both single and manifold," he, the cause, becomes merged with his own effects; and his names, if placed in esoteric order, show the following descending scale: --
1. Mahapurusha or Paramatman ... Supreme Spirit.
2. Atman or Purvaja (Protologos) ...The living Spirit of Nature. 3. Indriyatman, or Hrishikesa ..........Spiritual or intellectual soul (One with the senses).
5. Bhutatman ................................ . The living, or Life Soul.
6. Kshetrajna .................................. Embodied soul, or the Universe of Spirit and Matter. 7. Bhrantidarsanatah .........................False perception -- Material Universe.
The last name means something perceived or conceived of, owing to false and erroneous apprehension, as a material form; but, in fact, only Maya, illusion, as all is in our physical universe.
It is in strict analogy with ITS attributes in both the spiritual and material worlds, that the evolution of the Dhyan Chohanic Essences takes place; the characteristics of the latter being reflected, in their turn, in Man, collectively, and in each of his principles; every one of which contains in itself, in the same progressive order, a portion of their various "fires " and elements.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 109 THE TABULA SMARAGDINA.
STANZA V.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND RACE.
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§§ (18) The Sons of Yoga. (19) The Sexless Second Race. (20) The Sons of the Sons of Twilight. (21) The "Shadow," or the Astral Man, retires within, and man develops a physical body.
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18. THE FIRST (Race) WERE THE SONS OF YOGA. THEIR SONS, THE CHILDREN OF THE YELLOW FATHER AND THE WHITE MOTHER.
In the later Commentary, the sentence is translated: --
"The Sons of the Sun and of the Moon, the nursling of ether (or the wind ) (a) . . . . . . .
"They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords (b). They (the shadows) expanded. The Spirits of the Earth clothed them; the solar Lhas warmed them (i.e. preserved the vital fire in the nascent physical forms). The Breaths had life, but had no understanding. They had no fire nor water of their own (c).
(a) Remember in this connection the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes, the esoteric meaning of which has seven keys to it. The Astro-Chemical is well known to students, the anthropological may be given now. The "One thing" mentioned in it is MAN. It is said: "The Father of THAT ONE ONLY THING is the Sun; its Mother the Moon; the Wind carries it in his bosom, and its nurse is the Spirituous Earth." In the occult rendering of the same it is added: "and Spiritual Fire is its instructor (Guru)."
This fire is the higher Self, the Spiritual Ego, or that which is eternally reincarnating under the influence of its lower personal Selves, changing with every re-birth, full of Tanha or desire to live. It is a strange law of Nature that, on this plane, the higher (Spiritual) Nature should be, so to say, in bondage to the lower. Unless the Ego takes refuge in the Atman, the ALL-SPIRIT, and merges entirely into the essence thereof, the personal Ego may goad it to the bitter end. This cannot be thoroughly understood unless the student makes himself familiar with the mystery of evolution, which proceeds on triple lines -- spiritual, psychic and physical.
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That which propels towards, and forces evolution, i.e., compels the growth and development of Man towards perfection, is (a) the MONAD,
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or that which acts in it unconsciously through a force inherent in itself; and (b) the lower astral body or the personal SELF. The former, whether imprisoned in a vegetable or an animal body, is endowed with, is indeed itself, that force. Owing to its identity with the ALL-FORCE, which, as said, is inherent in the Monad, it is all-potent on the Arupa, or formless plane. On our plane, its essence being too pure, it remains all-potential, but individually becomes inactive: e.g., the rays of the Sun, which contribute to the growth of vegetation, do not select this or that plant to shine upon. Uproot the plant and transfer it to a piece of soil where the sunbeam cannot reach it, and the latter will not follow it. So with the Atman: unless the higher Self or EGO gravitates towards its Sun the Monad -- the lower Ego, or personal Self, will have the upper hand in every case. For it is this Ego, with its fierce Selfishness and animal desire to live a Senseless life (Tanha), which is "the maker of the tabernacle," as Buddha calls it in Dhammapada (153 and 154). Hence the expression, "the Spirits of the Earth clothed the shadows and expanded them." To these "Spirits" belong temporarily the human astral selves; and it is they who give, or build, the physical tabernacle of man, for the Monad and its conscious principle, Manas, to dwell in. But the "Solar" Lhas, Spirits, warm them, the shadows. This is physically and literally true; metaphysically, or on the psychic and spiritual plane, it is equally true that the Atman alone warms the inner man; i.e., it enlightens it with the ray of divine life and alone is able to impart to the inner man, or the reincarnating Ego, its immortality. Thus, as we shall find, for the first three and a half Root-
Races, up to the middle or turning point, it is the astral shadows of the "progenitors," the lunar Pitris, which are the formative powers in the Races, and which build and gradually force the evolution of the physical form towards perfection -- this, at the cost of a proportionate loss of spirituality. Then, from the turning point, it is the Higher Ego, or incarnating principle, the nous or Mind, which reigns over the animal Ego, and rules it whenever it is not carried down by the latter. In short, Spirituality is on its ascending arc, and the animal or physical impedes it from steadily progressing on the path of its evolution only when the selfishness of the personality has so strongly infected the real inner man with its lethal virus, that the upward attraction has lost all its power on the thinking reasonable man. In sober truth, vice and wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this period of our human evolution -- at least they ought to be so. The fact that mankind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now, civilized nations having succeeded in making of the first an ethical characteristic, of the second an art, is an additional proof of the exceptional nature of the phenomenon.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 111 THE SHELLS OF SHEBA HACHALOTH.
The entire scheme is in the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," and even in the Zohar, if one only understood the meaning of the apocalyptic hints. First comes En-Soph, the "Concealed of the Concealed," then the Point, Sephira and the later Sephiroth; then the Atzilatic World, a World of Emanations that gives birth to three other worlds -- called the Throne, the abode of pure Spirits; the second, the World of Formation, or Jetzira, the habitat of the Angels who sent forth the Third, or
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World of Action, the Asiatic World, which is the Earth or our World; and yet it is said of it that this world, also called Kliphoth, containing the (six other) Spheres, [[diagram]], and matter, is the residence of the "Prince of Darkness." This is as clearly stated as can be; for Metatron, the Angel of the second or Briatic World, means Messenger [greek char], Angel, called the great Teacher; and under him are the Angels of the third World, Jetzira, whose ten and seven classes are the Sephiroth,* of whom it is said that "they inhabit and vivify this world as Essential Entities and Intelligences, whose correlatives and contraries inhabit the third or Asiatic World. " These "Contraries" are called "the Shells," [[daigam]], or demons,** who inhabit the seven habitations called Sheba Hachaloth, which are simply the seven zones of our globe. Their prince is called in the Kabala Samael, the Angel of Death, who is also the seducing serpent Satan; but that Satan is also Lucifer, the bright angel of Light, the Light and Life-bringer, the "Soul" alienated from the Holy Ones, the other angels, and for a period, anticipating the time when they would have descended on Earth to incarnate in their turn.
"The Souls (Monads) are pre-existent in the world of Emanations," (Book of Wisdom viii., 20); and the Zohar teaches that in the "Soul" "is the real man, i.e., the Ego and the conscious I AM: 'Manas.' "
"They descend from the pure air to be chained to bodies," says Josephus repeating the belief of the Essenes (De Bello Judaeo, 11, 12). "The air is full of Souls," states Philo, "they descend to be tied to mortal bodies, being desirous to live in them." (De Gignat, 222 c.; De Somniis, p. 455)***; because through, and in, the human form they will become progressive beings, whereas the nature of the angel is purely intransitive, therefore man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brahmin, the twice-born, who rules the gods or devas; and Paul repeated it in
* See Vol. 1. Part III., "Gods, Monads and Atoms." It is symbolised in the Pythagorean Triangle, the 10 dots within, and the seven points of the Triangle and the Cube.
** Whence the Kabalistic name of Shells given to the astral form, the body called Kama Rupa, left behind by the higher angels in the shape of the higher Manas, when the latter leaves for Devachan, forsaking its residue.
*** Which shows that the Essenes believed in re-birth and many reincarnations on Earth, as Jesus himself did, a fact we can prove from the New Testament itself.
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I Corinthians vi., 3: "Know ye not that we (the Initiates) shall judge angels"?
Finally, it is shown in every ancient scripture and Cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a luminous incorporeal form, over which, like the molten brass round the clay model of the sculptor, the physical frame of his body was built by, through, and from, the lower forms and types of animal terrestrial life. "The Soul and the Form when descending on Earth put on an earthly garment," says the
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Zohar. His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal frames are fashioned. "When Adam dwelt in the garden of Eden, he was clothed in the celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light. . . . light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden," (Zohar II 229 B). "Man (the heavenly Adam) was created by the ten Sephiroth of the Jetziric world, and by the common power they (the seven angels of a still lower world) engendered the earthly Adam . . . . First Samael fell, and then deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also."
(b) The sentence: "They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords," i.e., the progenitors created man out of their own astral bodies, explains an universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East with having no shadows of their own. "The devas cast no shadows," and this is the sure sign of a good holy Spirit.
Why had they "no fire or water of their own"?* Because: --
(c) That which Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its noumenon is in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its trinitarian latent nature is mirrored in its three
* It is corroborated, however, as we have shown, by the esotericism of Genesis. Not only are the animals created therein after the "Adam of Dust," but vegetation is shown in the Earth before "the heavens and the Earth were created." "Every plant of the field before it (the day that the heavens and the Earth were made, v. 4) was in the Earth" (v. 5). Now, unless the Occult interpretation is accepted, which shows that in this 4th Round the Globe was covered with vegetation, and the first (astral) humanity was produced before almost anything could grow and develop thereon, what can the dead letter mean? Simply that the grass was in the earth of the Globe before that Globe was created? And yet the meaning of verse 6, which says that "there went up a mist from the Earth" and watered the whole face of the Earth before it rained, and caused the trees, etc., to grow, is plain enough. It shows also in what geological period it occurred, and further what is meant by "Heaven and Earth." It meant the firmament and dry incrustated land, separated and ridden of its vapours and exhalations. Moreover, the student must bear in mind that, as Adam Kadmon, "the male and female being" of Genesis, ch. I., is no physical human being but the host of the Elohim, among which was Jehovah himself -- so the animals mentioned in that chapter as "created" before man in the dead letter text, were no animals, but the Zodiacal signs and other sidereal bodies.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 113 THE SECRET WORK OF CHIRAM.
active emanations from the three higher principles in man, namely, "Spirit, Soul, and Mind," or Atma, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the material human basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the "air" or the "wind," becomes the perfect man later on; when, with the development of "Spiritual fire," the noumenon of the "Three in One" within his Self, he acquires from his inner Self, or Instructor, the Wisdom of Self-Consciousness, which he does not possess in the beginning. Thus here again divine Spirit is symbolised by the Sun or Fire; divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both standing for the Father and Mother of Pneuma, human Soul, or Mind, symbolised by the Wind or air,
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for Pneuma, means "breath."
Hence in the Smaragdine Tablet, disfigured by Christian hands: --
"The Superior agrees with the Inferior; and the Inferior with the Superior; to effect that one truly wonderful Work" -- which is MAN. For the secret work of Chiram, or King Hiram in the Kabala, "one in Essence, but three in Aspect," is the Universal Agent or Lapis Philosophorum. The culmination of the Secret Work is Spiritual Perfect Man, at one end of the line; the union of the three elements is the Occult Solvent in the "Soul of the World," the Cosmic Soul or Astral Light, at the other; and, on the material plane, it is Hydrogen in its relation to the other gases. The To ON, truly; the ONE "whom no person has seen except the Son"; this sentence applying both to the metaphysical and physical Kosmos, and to the spiritual and material Man. For how could the latter understand the To ON the "One Father," if his Manas, the "Son," does not become (as) "One with the Father," and through this absorption receive enlightenment from the "divine instructor," Guru -- Atma-Buddhi?
"If thou would'st understand the SECONDARY ("Creation," so-called), oh Lanoo, thou should'st first study its relation to the PRIMARY." (Commentary, Book of Dzyan, III. 19.)
The first Race had three elements, but no living Fire. Why? Because: --
"We say four elements, my Son, but ought to say three," says Hermes Trismegistus. "In the Primary
Circle" (creation) that which is marked reads "Root," as in the Secondary likewise.
Thus in Alchemy or Western Hermetism (a variant on Eastern Esotericism) we find: --
X. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X.
Sulphur . . . . . . Flamma . . . . . . Spiritus
Hydrargyum . . Natura . . . . . . . Aqua
Sal . . . . . . . . . . Mater . . . . . . . Sanguis
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And these three are all quaternaries completed by their Root, Fire. The Spirit, beyond manifested Nature, is the fiery BREATH in its absolute Unity. In the manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the Spirit of Nature, the terrestrial god. And in, on, and around the Earth, the fiery Spirit thereof -- air, fluidic fire; water, liquid fire; Earth, solid fire. All is fire -- ignis, in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of which is O (nought) in our conceptions, the All in nature and its mind. Pro-Mater is divine fire. It is the Creator, the Destroyer, the Preserver. The primitive names of the gods are all connected with fire, from AGNI,
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the Aryan, to the Jewish god who "is a consuming fire." In India, God is called in various dialects, Eashoor, Esur, Iswur, and Is' Vara, in Sanskrit the Lord, from Isa, but this is primarily the name of Siva, the Destroyer; and the three Vedic chief gods are Agni (ignis), Vayu, and Surya -- Fire, Air, and
the Sun, three occult degrees of fire. In the Hebrew (aza), means to illuminate, and (asha) is fire. In Occultism, "to kindle a fire" is synonymous to evoking one of the three great fire-
powers, or "to call on God." In Sanskrit Osch or Asch is fire or heat; and the Egyptian word Osiris is compounded (as shown by Schelling) of the two primitives aish and asr, or a "fireenchanter." Aesar in the old Etruscan meant a God (being perhaps derived from Asura of the Vedas). Aeswar and Eswara are analogous terms, as Dr. Kenealy thought. In the Bhagavad Gita we read, "Iswara resides in every mortal being and puts in motion, by his supernatural power, all things which mount on the Wheel of Time." It is the creator and the destroyer, truly. "The primitive fire was supposed to have an insatiable appetite for devouring. Maximus of Tyre relates that the ancient Persians threw into the fire combustible matter crying: 'Devour, oh Lord!' In the Irish language Easam, or Asam, means 'to create,' and Aesar was the name of an ancient Irish god, meaning 'to light a fire' " (Kenealy). The Christian Kabalists and symbologists who disfigured Pymander -- prominent among them the Bishop of Ayre, Francois de Tours, in the 16th century -- divide the elements in this way: --
The four elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature represented by --
. . . St. Matthew. . Angel-Man . . Water . . (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man, Mikael)
* To those who would inquire "What has Hydrogen to do with air or oxygena- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 115 SONS OF YOGA.
H, THE QUINTESSENCE, [[HEPHLOX]], FLAMMA-VIRGO (virgin oil), FLAMMA DURISSIMA, VIRGO, LUCIS AETERNA MATER.
The first race of men were, then, simply the images, the astral doubles, of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most progressed Entities from a preceding though lower sphere, the shell of which is now our Moon. But even this shell is all-potential, for, having generated the Earth, it is the phantom of the Moon which, attracted by magnetic affinity, sought to form its first inhabitants, the pre-human monsters, (vide supra, Stanza II.). To assure himself of this, the student has again to turn to the Chaldean Fragments, and read what Berosus says. Berosus obtained his information, he tells us, from Ea, the male-female deity of Wisdom. While the gods were generated in its androgynous bosom (Svabhavat, Mother-space) its (the Wisdom's) reflections became on Earth the woman Omoroka, who is the Chaldean Thavatth, or the Greek Thalassa, the Deep or the Sea, which esoterically and even
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exoterically is the Moon. It was the Moon (Omoroka) who presided over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings which were slain by the Dyanis. ( Vide Hibbert Lectures, p. 370 et seq.; also in Part II. "Adam-Adami.")
Evolutionary law compelled the lunar "Fathers" to pass, in their monadic condition, through all the forms of life and being on this globe; but at the end of the Third Round, they were already human in their divine nature, and were thus called upon to become the creators of the forms destined to fashion the tabernacles of the less progressed Monads, whose turn it was to incarnate. These "Forms" are called "Sons of Yoga," because Yoga (union with Brahma exoterically) is the supreme condition of the passive infinite deity, since it contains all the divine energies and is the essence of Brahma, who is said (as Brahma) to create everything through Yoga power. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva are the most powerful energies of God, Brahma, the Neuter, says a
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] tion?" it is answered: "Study first the ABC of Occult Alchemy." In their anxiety, however, to identify Pymander, "the mouth of Mystery," with St. John the Baptist prophetically, they thus identified also the 7 Kabeiri and the Assyrian Bulls with the Cherubs of the Jews and the Apostles. Having, moreover, to draw a line of demarcation between the four and the three -- the latter being the Fallen Angels ; and furthermore to avoid connecting these with the "Seven Spirits of the Face," the Archangels, they unceremoniously threw out all they did not choose to recognise. Hence the perversion in the order of the Elements, in order to make them dovetail with the order of the Gospels, and to identify the Angel-Man with Christ. With the Chaldees, the Egyptians, from whom Moses adopted the Chroub (Cherubs in their animal form), and the Ophites; with all these, the Angels, the Planets, and the Elements, were symbolized mystically and alchemically by the Lion (Mikael); the Bull (Uriel); the Dragon (Raphael); the Eagle (Gabriel); the Bear (Thot-Sabaoth); the Dog (Erataoth); the Mule (Uriel or Thartharaoth). All these have a qualificative meaning.
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Puranic text. Yoga here is the same as Dhyana, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan text, where the "Sons of Yoga" are called "Sons of Dhyana," or of that abstract meditation through which the Dhyani-Buddhas create their celestial sons, the Dhyani-Bodhisattvas. All the creatures in the world have each a superior above. "This superior, whose inner pleasure it is to emanate into them, cannot impart efflux until they have adored" -- i.e., meditated as during Yoga. (Sepher M'bo Ska-arim, translated by Isaac Myer, Qabbalah, pp. 109-111.)
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19. THE SECOND RACE (was) THE PRODUCT BY BUDDING AND EXPANSION; THE A-
SEXUAL (form ) FROM THE SEXLESS (shadow). THUS WAS, O LANOO, THE SECOND RACE PRODUCED (a).
(a) What will be most contested by scientific authorities is this a-sexual Race, the Second, the fathers
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of the "Sweat-born" so-called, and perhaps still more the Third Race, the "Egg-born" androgynes. These two modes of procreation are the most difficult to comprehend, especially for the Western mind. It is evident that no explanation can be attempted for those who are not students of Occult metaphysics. European language has no words to express things which Nature repeats no more at this stage of evolution, things which therefore can have no meaning for the materialist. But there are analogies. It is not denied that in the beginning of physical evolution there must have been processes in Nature, spontaneous generation, for instance, now extinct, which are repeated in other forms. Thus we are told that microscopic research shows no permanence of any particular mode of reproducing life. For "it shows that the same organism may run through various metamorphoses in the course of its life-
cycle, during some of which it may be sexual, and in others a-sexual; i.e., it may reproduce itself alternately by the co-operation of two beings of opposite sex, and also by fissure or budding from one being only, which is of no sex."* "Budding" is the very word used in the Stanza. How could these Chhayas reproduce themselves otherwise; viz., procreate the Second Race, since they were ethereal, a-
sexual, and even devoid, as yet, of the vehicle of desire, or Kama Rupa, which evolved only in the Third Race? They evolved the Second Race unconsciously, as do some plants. Or, perhaps, as the Amoeba, only on a more ethereal, impressive, and larger scale. If, indeed, the cell-theory applies equally to Botany and Zoology, and extends to Morphology, as well as to the Physiology of organisms,
* See Laing's "Modern Science and Modern Thought, " p. 90.
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and if the microscopic cells are looked upon by physical science as independent living beings -- just as Occultism regards the "fiery lives"* -- there is no difficulty in the conception of the primitive process of procreation.
Consider the first stages of the development of a germ-cell. Its nucleus grows, changes, and forms a
double cone or spindle, thus, within the cell. This spindle approaches the surface of the cell, and one half of it is extruded in the form of what are called the "polar cells. " These polar cells now die, and the embryo develops from the growth and segmentation of the remaining part of the nucleus which is nourished by the substance of the cell. Then why could not beings have lived thus, and been created in this way -- at the very beginning of human and mammalian evolution?
This may, perhaps, serve as an analogy to give some idea of the process by which the Second Race was formed from the First.
The astral form clothing the Monad was surrounded, as it still is, by its egg-shaped sphere of aura, which here corresponds to the substance of the germ-cell or ovum. The astral form itself is the nucleus, now, as then, instinct with the principle of life.
When the season of reproduction arrives, the sub-astral "extrudes" a miniature of itself from the egg of
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surrounding aura. This germ grows and feeds on the aura till it becomes fully developed, when it gradually separates from its parent, carrying with it its own sphere of aura; just as we see living cells reproducing their like by growth and subsequent division into two.
The analogy with the "polar cells " would seem to hold good, since their death would now correspond to the change introduced by the separation of the sexes, when gestation in utero, i.e., within the cell, became the rule.
"The early Second (Root) Race were the Fathers of the 'Sweat-born'; the later Second (Root) Race were 'Sweat-born' themselves."
This passage from the Commentary refers to the work of evolution from the beginning of a Race to its close. The "Sons of Yoga," or the primitive astral race, had seven stages of evolution racially, or collectively; as every individual Being in it had, and has now. It is not Shakespeare only who divided the ages of man into a series of seven, but Nature herself. Thus the first sub-races of the Second Race were born at first by the process described on the law of analogy; while the last began gradually, pari passu with the evolution of the human body, to be formed otherwise. The process of reproduction had seven stages also
in each Race, each covering aeons of time. What physiologist or biologist could tell whether the present mode of generation, with all its phases of gestation, is older than half a million, or at most one million of years, since their cycle of observation began hardly half a century ago.
Primeval human hermaphrodites are a fact in Nature well known to the ancients, and form one of Darwin's greatest perplexities. Yet there is certainly no impossibility, but, on the contrary, a great probability that hermaphroditism existed in the evolution of the early races; while on the grounds of analogy, and on that of the existence of one universal law in physical evolution, acting indifferently in the construction of plant, animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken theories of mono-genesis, and the descent of man from the mammals instead of the reverse, are fatal to the completeness of evolution as taught in modern schools on Darwinian lines, and they will have to be abandoned in view of the insuperable difficulties which they encounter. Occult tradition -- if the terms Science and Knowledge are denied in this particular to antiquity -- can alone reconcile the inconsistencies and fill the gap. "If thou wilt know the invisible, open thine eye wide on the visible," says a Talmudic axiom.
In the "Descent of Man "* occurs the following passage; which shows how near Darwin came to the acceptance of this ancient teaching.
"It has been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts
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appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex. . . . Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous** . . . But here we encounter a singular difficulty. In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the Vesiculae prostaticae; they bear also rudiments of mammae, and some male marsupials have traces of a marsupial sac. Other analogous facts could be added. Are we then to suppose that some extremely ancient mammal continued androgynous after it had acquired the chief distinctions of its class, and therefore after it had diverged from the lower classes of the vertebrate kingdom? This seems very improbable,*** for we have to look to fishes, the lowest of all the classes, to find any still existent androgynous forms."
Mr. Darwin is evidently strongly disinclined to adopt the hypothesis which the facts so forcibly suggest, viz., that of a primeval androgynous
** And why not all the progenitive first Races, human as well as animal; and why one "remote progenitor"?
*** Obviously so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the mammalia to some amphibian ancestor.
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stem from which the mammalia sprang. His explanation runs: -- "The fact that various accessory organs proper to each sex, are found in a rudimentary condition in the opposite sex may be explained by such organs having been gradually acquired by the one sex and then transmitted in a more or less imperfect condition to the other." He instances the case of "spurs, plumes, and brilliant colours, acquired for battle or for ornament by male birds" and only partially inherited by their female descendants. In the problem to be dealt with, however, the need of a more satisfactory explanation is evident, the facts being of so much more prominent and important a character than the mere superficial details with which they are compared by Darwin. Why not candidly admit the argument in favour of the hermaphroditism which characterises the old fauna? Occultism proposes a solution which embraces the facts in a most comprehensive and simple manner. These relics of a prior androgyne stock must be placed in the same category as the pineal gland, and other organs as mysterious, which afford us silent testimony as to the reality of functions which have long since become atrophied in the course of animal and human progress, but which once played a signal part in the general economy of primeval life.
The occult doctrine, anyhow, can be advantageously compared with that of the most liberal men of science, who have theorised upon the origin of the first man.
Long before Darwin, Naudin, who gave the name of Blastema to that which the Darwinists call
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protoplasm, put forward a theory half occult and half scientifico-materialistic. He made Adam, the a-
sexual, spring suddenly from the clay, as it is called in the Bible, the Blastema of Science. "It is from this larval form of mankind that the evolutive force effected the completion of species. For the accomplishment of this great phenomenon, Adam had to pass through a phase of immobility and unconsciousness, very analogous to the nymphal state of animals undergoing metamorphosis," explains Naudin. For the eminent botanist, Adam was not one man, however, but mankind, "which remained concealed within a temporary organism . . . . distinct from all others and never contracting alliance with any of these." He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by "a process of germination similar to that of Medusae and Ascidians." Mankind, thus constituted physiologically, "would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid production of the various great human races."
De Quatrefages criticises this position in the "Human Species. " It is unscientific, he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin's ideas "do not form a scientific theory," inasmuch as primordial Blastema is connected
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in his theory with the First Cause, which is credited with having made potentially in the Blastema all past, present, and future beings, and thus of having in reality created these beings en masse; moreover, Naudin does not even consider the secondary Causes, or their action in this evolution of the organic world. Science, which is only occupied with Secondary Causes, has thus "nothing to say to the theory of Naudin" (p . 125).
Nor will it have any more to say to the occult teachings, which are to some extent approached by Naudin. For if we but see in his "primordial Blastema" the Dhyan-Chohanic essence, the Chhaya or double of the Pitris, which contains within itself the potentiality of all forms, we are quite in accord. But there are two real and vital differences between our teachings. M. Naudin declares that evolution has progressed by sudden leaps and bounds, instead of extending slowly over millions of years; and his primordial Blastema is endowed only with blind instincts -- a kind of unconscious First Cause in the manifested Kosmos -- which is an absurdity. Whereas it is our Dhyan Chohanic essence -- the causality of the primal cause which creates physical man -- which is the living, active and potential matter, pregnant per se with that animal consciousness of a superior kind, such as is found in the ant and the beaver, which produces the long series of physiological differentiations. Apart from this his "ancient and general process of creation" from proto-organisms is as occult as any theory of Paracelsus or Khunrath could be.
Moreover, the Kabalistic works are full of the proof of this. The Zohar, for instance, says that every type in the visible has its prototype in the invisible Universe. "All that which is in the lower (our) world is found in the upper. The Lower and the Upper act and react upon each other." (Zohar, fol. 186.) Vide infra, Part II., "Esoteric Tenets corroborated in every Scripture. "
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20. THEIR FATHERS WERE THE SELF-BORN. THE SELF-BORN, THE CHHAYA FROM THE
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BRILLIANT BODIES OF THE LORDS, THE FATHERS, THE SONS OF TWILIGHT (a).
(a) The "shadows," or Chhayas, are called the sons of the "self-born," as the latter name is applied to all the gods and Beings born through the WILL, whether of Deity or Adept. The Homunculi of Paracelsus would, perhaps, be also given this name, though the latter process is on a far more material plane. The name "Sons of Twilight" shows that the "Self-born" progenitors of our doctrine are identical with the Pitris
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 121 LEDA, CASTOR AND POLLUX.
of the Brahmanical system, as the title is a reference to their mode of birth, these Pitris being stated to have issued from Brahma's "body of twilight." (See the Puranas.)
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21. WHEN THE RACE BECAME OLD, THE OLD WATERS MIXED WITH THE FRESHER WATERS (a); WHEN THE DROPS BECAME TURBID, THEY VANISHED AND DISAPPEARED, IN THE NEW STREAM, IN THE HOT STREAM OF LIFE. THE OUTER OF THE FIRST BECAME THE INNER OF THE SECOND. (b). THE OLD WING BECAME THE SHADOW, AND THE SHADOW OF THE WING (c).
(a) The old (primitive) Race merged in the second race, and became one with it.
(b) This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution of mankind. The material of the first forms -- shadowy, ethereal, and negative -- was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary explains this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed of the astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course neither astral nor physical bodies of their own -- this Race never died. Its "men" melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own "sweat-born" progeny, more solid than their own. The old form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent material was used for the formation of the new being, to form the body and even the inner or lower principles or bodies of the progeny.
(c) When the shadow retires, i.e. when the astral body becomes covered with more solid flesh, man develops a physical body. The "wing," or the ethereal form that produced its shadow and image, became the shadow of the astral body and its own progeny. The expression is queer but original.
As there may be no occasion to refer to this mystery later, it is as well to point out at once the dual meaning contained in the Greek myth bearing upon this particular phase of evolution. It is found in the several variants of the allegory of Leda and her two sons Castor and Pollux, which variants have each a special meaning. Thus in Book XI. of the Odyssey, Leda is spoken of as the spouse of Tyndarus, who gave birth by her husband "to two sons of valiant heart" -- Castor
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 122 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and Pollux. Jupiter endows them with a marvellous gift and privilege. They are semi-immortal; they live and die, each in turn, and every alternate day; [[eteremeroi*]]. As the Tyndaridae, the twin brothers are an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives, Phoebe and Hilasira, the daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight.** Again, in the allegory where Zeus is shown as the father of the two heroes -- born from the egg to which Leda gives birth -- the myth is entirely theogonical. It relates to that group of cosmic allegories in which the world is described as born from an egg. For Leda assumes in it the shape of a white swan when uniting herself to the Divine Swan.*** Leda is the mythical bird, then, to which, in the traditions of various peoples of the Aryan race, are attributed various ornithological forms of birds which all lay golden eggs.**** In the Kalevala (the Epic Poem of Finland), the beauteous daughter of the Ether, "the Water Mother," creates the world in conjunction with a "Duck" (another form of the Swan or Goose, Kalahansa), who lays six golden eggs, and the seventh, "an egg of iron," in her lap. But the variant of the Leda allegory which has a direct reference to mystic man is found in Pindar***** only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric hymns.****** Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri (of Apollodorus III. 10, 7); but become the highly significant symbol of the dual man, the Mortal and the Immortal. Not only this, but as will now be seen, they are also the symbol of the Third Race, and its transformation from the animal man into a god-man with only an animal body.
Pindar shows Leda uniting herself in the same night to her husband and also to the father of the gods -- Zeus. Thus Castor is the son of the Mortal, Pollux the progeny of the Immortal. In the allegory made up for the occasion, it is said that in a riot of vengeance against the Apherides******* Pollux kills Lynceus -- "of all mortals he whose sight is the most penetrating" -- but Castor is wounded by Idas, "he who sees and knows." Zeus puts an end to the fight by hurling his thunderbolt and killing the last two combatants. Pollux finds his brother dying.******** In
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******** Castor's tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias (III., 13, 1); and Plutarch says that he was called at Argos the demi-mortal or demi-hero [[mizarchagetas]]. (See Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, 23.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 123 THE ALLEGORY OF CASTOR AND POLLUX.
his despair he calls upon Zeus to slay him also. "Thou canst not die altogether," answers the master of the Gods; "thou art of a divine race." But he gives him the choice: Pollux will either remain immortal, living eternally in Olympus; or, if he would share his brother's fate in all things, he must pass half his existence underground, and the other half in the golden heavenly abodes. This semi-immortality, which is also to be shared by Castor, is accepted by Pollux.* And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night.**
Is this a poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those "solar myth" interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to soar? Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the "Egg-born," Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, i.e., unconscious in its personality, and having nothing within itself to survive***; and the latter half of which becomes immortal in its individuality, by reason of its fifth principle being called to life by the informing gods, and thus connecting the Monad with this Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor represents the personal, mortal man, an animal of not even a superior kind, when unlinked from the divine individuality. "Twins" truly; yet divorced by death forever, unless Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship, bestows on his less favoured mortal brother a share of his own divine nature, thus associating him with his own immortality.
Such is the occult meaning of the metaphysical aspect of the allegory. The widely spread modern interpretation of it -- so celebrated in antiquity, Plutarch tells us,**** as symbolical of brotherly devotion -- namely, that it was an image borrowed from the spectacle of Nature -- is weak and inadequate to explain the secret meaning. Besides the fact that the Moon, with the Greeks, was feminine in exoteric mythology, and could therefore hardly be regarded as Castor -- and at the same time be identified with Diana -- ancient symbologists who held the Sun, the King of all sidereal orbs, as the visible image of the highest deity, would not have personified it by Pollux, a demi-god only.*****
** Schol. Eurip. "Orestes," 463, Dindorf. See Decharme's "Mythol., " etc., p. 654.
*** The Monad is impersonal and a god per se, albeit unconscious on this plane. For, divorced from its third (often called fifth) principle, Manas, which is the horizontal line of the first manifested triangle or trinity, it can have no consciousness or perception of things on this earthly plane. "The highest sees through the eye of the lowest" in the manifested world; Purusha (Spirit) remains blind
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without the help of Prakrit (matter) in the material spheres; and so does Atma-Buddhi without Manas.
**** "Morals, " p. 484 f.
***** This strange idea and interpretation are accepted by Decharme in his "Mythologie de la Grece Antique. " "Castor and Pollux," he says, "are nothing but the Sun and
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If from Greek mythology we pass to the Mosaic allegories and symbolism, we shall find a still more striking corroboration of the same tenet under another form. Unable to trace in Genesis the "Egg-
born," we shall still find there unmistakably the androgynes, and the first three races of the Secret Doctrine hidden under most ingenious symbology in the first four chapters of Genesis.
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THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE.
An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught, after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so desecrated. Of these sciences several have now become exoteric -- such as Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas and tenets, being all symbolised and left to the sole guardianship of parable and allegory, have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted. Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction?
It is this secrecy which led the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the re-establishment of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and symbolism. Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution of the human races from the divine, and especially from the androgynous Race -- the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages! Divine wisdom incarnating on earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated under the shade of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil -- a secret first known only to the Elohim, the SELF-INITIATED, "higher gods" -- on earth only.*
In the Book of Enoch we have Adam,** the first divine androgyne, Moon, conceived as twins . . . The Sun, the immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening from the horizon and descends under the Earth, as though he would make room for the fraternal orb which comes to life with night, is Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor; Castor, who, inferior to his brother, owes to him his immortality: for the Moon, says Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun." (De Ventis 17. See Decharme, p. 655.)
** Adam (Kadmon) is, like Brahma and Mars, the symbol of the generative and creative power typifying Water and Earth -- an alchemical secret. "It takes Earth and Water to create a human soul," said Moses. Mars is the Hindu Mangala, the planet Mars, identical with Kartikeya, the "War-God," born of Gharma-ja (Siva's sweat) and of the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 125 JAH-HOVAH ANDROGYNOUS.
separating into man and woman, and becoming JAH-HEVA in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel* (male and female) in its other form or Race -- the double-sexed Jehovah** -- an echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahma-Vach. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind*** -- that is to say, Races of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no longer sexless semi-spirits and androgynes, as were the two Races which precede them. This fact is hinted at in every Anthropogony. It is found in fable and allegory, in myth and revealed Scriptures, in legend and tradition. Because, of all the great Mysteries, inherited by Initiates from hoary antiquity, this is one of the greatest. It accounts for the bi-sexual element found in every creative deity, in Brahma-Viraj-Vach, as in Adam-
Jehovah-Eve, also in "Cain-Jehovah-Abel." For "The Book of the Generations of Adam" does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only: "Male and female created he them. . . and called their name Adam" (ch. v. 5). Then it proceeds to say: "And Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth" (v. 3); after which he begets other sons and daughters, thus proving that Cain and Abel are his own allegorical permutations. Adam stands for the primitive human race, especially in its cosmo-sidereal sense. Not so, however, in its theo-anthropological meaning. The compound name of Jehovah, or Jah-Hovah, meaning male life and female life -- first androgynous, then separated into sexes -- is used in this sense in Genesis from ch. v. onwards. As the author of "The Source of Measures" says (p. 159): "The two words of which Jehovah is composed make up the original idea of male-female, as the birth originators"; for the Hebrew letter Jod was the membrum virile and Hovah was Eve, the mother of all living, or the procreatrix, Earth and Nature. The author believes, therefore, that "It is seen that the perfect one " (the perfect female circle or Yoni, 20612, numerically), "as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth-origin, as Hermaphrodite one ; hence the phallic form and use."
Precisely; only "the phallic form and use" came long ages later; and the first and original meaning of Enos, the son of Seth, was the First Race born in the present usual way from man and woman --for Seth is no man, but a race. Before him humanity was hermaphrodite.
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Earth. He is Lokita, the red, like Brahma also and Adam. The Hindu Mars is, like Adam, born from no woman and mother. With the Egyptians, Mars was the primeval generative Principle, and so are Brahma, in exoteric teaching, and Adam, in the Kabala.
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* Abel is Chebel, meaning "Pains of Birth," conception.
** See "Isis Unveiled ," Vol. II, p. 398, where Jehovah is shown to be Adam and Eve blended, and Hevah, and Abel, the feminine serpent.
*** See "Isis Unveiled, " Vol. I., 305: "The union of the two create a third Race, etc."
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While Seth is the first result (physiologically) after the FALL, he is also the first man ; hence his son Enos is referred to as the "Son of man." ( Vide infra.) Seth represents the later Third Race.
To screen the real mystery name of AIN-SOPH -- the Boundless and Endless No-Thing -- the Kabalists have brought forward the compound attribute-appellation of one of the personal creative Elohim, whose name was Yak and Jab, the letters i or j or y being interchangeable, or Jah-Hovah, i.e. male and female;* Jah-Eve an hermaphrodite, or the first form of humanity, the original Adam of Earth, not even Adam Kadmon, whose " mind-born son" is the earthly Jah-Hovah, mystically. And knowing this, the crafty Rabbin-Kabalist has made of it a name so secret, that he could not divulge it later on without exposing the whole scheme; and thus he was obliged to make it sacred.
How close is the identity between Brahma-Prajapati and Jehovah-Sephiroth, between Brahma-Viraj and Jehovah-Adam, the Bible and the Puranas compared can alone show. Analysed and read in the same light, they afford cogent evidence that they are two copies of the same original -- made at two periods far distant from each other. Compare once more in relation to this subject Genesis ch. 4. verses 1 and 26 and Manu I., and they will both yield their meaning. In Manu (Book I. 32) Brahma, who is also both man and god, and divides his body into male and female, stands in his esoteric meaning, as does Jehovah or Adam in the Bible, for the symbolical personification of creative and generative power, both divine and human. The Zohar affords still more convincing proof of identity, while some Rabbins repeat word for word certain original Puranic expressions; e.g., the "creation" of the world is generally considered in the Brahmanical books to be the Lila, delight or sport, the amusement of the Supreme Creator, "Vishnu being thus discrete and indiscrete substance, spirit, and time, sports like a playful boy in frolics." (Vishnu Purana, Book I., ch. ii.) Now compare this with what is said in the Book, "Nobeleth' Hokhmah": "The Kabalists say that the entering into existence of the worlds happens through delight, in that Ain-Soph (? !) rejoiced in Itself, and flashed and beamed from Itself to Itself . . . . which are all called delight," etc. (Quoted in Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 110). Thus it is not a "curious idea of the Qabbalists," as the author just quoted remarks, but a purely Puranic, Aryan idea. Only, why make of Ain-Soph a Creator?
The "Divine Hermaphrodite" is then Brahma-Vach-Viraj; and that of the Semites, or rather of the Jews, is Jehovah-Cain-Abel. Only the "Heathen" were, and are, more sincere and frank than were the
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perfect one; but it is also the number 10, male and female, when divided.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 127 SETH OUR PROGENITOR.
later Israelites and Rabbis, who undeniably knew the real meaning of their exoteric deity. The Jews regard the name given to them -- the Yah-oudi -- as an insult. Yet they have, or would have if they only wished it, as undeniable a right to call themselves the ancient Yah-oudi, "Jah-hovians," as the Brahmins have to call themselves Brahmins, after their national deity. For Jah-hovah is the generic name of that group or hierarchy of creative planetary angels, under whose star their nation has evolved. He is one of the planetary Elohim of the regent group of Saturn. Verse 26 of Genesis, ch. iv., when read correctly, would alone give them such a right, for it calls the new race of men sprung from Seth and Enos, Jehovah, something quite different from the translation adopted in the Bible: -- "To him also, was born a son, Enos; then began men to call themselves Jah or Yah-hovah," to with men and women, the "lords of creation." One has but to read the above-mentioned verse in the original Hebrew text and by the light of the Kabala, to find that, instead of the words as they now stand translated, it is: -
- "Then began men to call themselves Jehovah," which is the correct translation, and not "Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord"; the latter being a mistranslation, whether deliberate or not. Again the well-known passage: "I have gotten a man from the Lord," should read: "I have gotten a man, even Jehovah."* Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman Catholics quite differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it: "Cain -- I have gotten Kain, from Kanithi, I have gotten." Luther: "I have gotten a man 0-- even the Lord" (Jehovah); and the author of "The Source of Measures": "I have measured a man, even Jehovah." The last is the correct rendering, because (a) a famous Rabbin, a Kabalist, explained the passage to the writer in precisely this way, and (b) because this rendering is identical with that in the Secret Doctrine of the East with regard to Brahma. In "Isis Unveiled, "** it was explained by the writer that "Cain . . . is the son of the 'Lord' not of Adam (Genesis iv. I)" The "Lord" is Adam Kadmon, the "father" of Yodcheva, "Adam-Eve," or Jehovah, the son of sinful thought, not the progeny of flesh and blood. Seth, on the other hand, is the leader and the progenitor of the Races of the Earth; for he is the son of Adam, exoterically, but esoterically he is the progeny of Cain and Abel, since Abel or Hebel is a female, the counterpart and female half of the male Cain, and Adam is the collective name for man and woman: "male and female (Zachar va Nakobeh) created he them . . . and called their name Adam." The verses in Genesis from chs. i. to v., are purposely mixed up for Kabalistic reasons. After MAN of
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Kadmon, the sexless (the first) Logos, Adam and Eve once separated, come finally Jehovah-Eve and Cain-Jehovah. These represent distinct Root-Races, for millions of years elapsed between them.
Hence the Aryan and the Semitic Theo-anthropographies are two leaves on the same stem; their respective personifications and symbolic personages standing in relation to each other in this way.
I. The Unknowable, referred to in various ways in Rig Vedic verse, such as "Nought Was," called, later
on "Parabrahm;" the (Ain, nothing, or the "Ain-Soph" of the Kabalists), and again, the "Spirit" (of God) that moves upon the face of the waters, in Genesis. All these are identical. Moreover, in Genesis, ch. i., v. 2, is placed as verse 1 in the secret Kabalistic texts, where it is followed by the Elohim "creating the Heaven and the Earth." This deliberate shifting of the order of the verses was necessary for monotheistic and Kabalistic purposes. Jeremiah's curse against those Elohim (gods) who have not created the Heavens and the Earth, ch. x., v. 11, shows that there were other Elohim who had.
II. The "Heavenly" Manu-Swayambhuva, who sprang from Swayambhu-Narayana, the "Self-existent," and Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and the androgyne MAN of Genesis ch. 1 are also identical.
III. Manu-swayambhuva is Brahma, or the Logos; and he is Adam Kadmon, who in Genesis iv., 5, separates himself into two halves, male and female, thus becoming Jah-Hovah or Jehovah-Eve; as Manu Swayambhuva or Brahma separates himself to become "Brahma-Viraj and Vach-Viraj," male and female; all the rest of the texts and versions being blinds.
IV. Vach is the daughter of Brahma and is named Sata-Rupa, "the hundred-formed," and Savitri, "generatrix, " the mother of the gods and of all living. She is identical with Eve, "the mother (of all the lords or gods or) of all living." Besides this there are many other occult meanings.
What is written in "Isis, " although scattered about and very cautiously expressed at the time, is correct:
Explaining esoterically Ezekiel's wheel,* it is said of Jodhevah or Jehovah: -
"When the ternary is taken in the beginning of the Tetragram, it expresses the divine creation spiritually, without any carnal sin; taken at its opposite end it expresses the latter: it is feminine. The name of Eva is composed of three letters, that of the primitive or heavenly
Adam, is written with one letter, Jod or Yodh; therefore it must not be read Jehovah but Ieva, or Eve. The Adam of the first chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure, androgyne Adam Kadmon. When woman issues from the rib of the second Adam (of dust), the pure Virgo is separated, and falling "into
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generation," or the downward cycle, becomes Scorpio, emblem of sin and matter. While the ascending cycle points to the purely spiritual races, or the ten prediluvian patriarchs, the Prajapatis and Sephiroth are led on by the creative Deity itself, who is Adam Kadmon or Yod-cheva. Spiritually, the lower one (Jehovah) is that of the terrestrial races, led on by Enoch or Libra, the seventh; who, because he is half-
divine, half-terrestrial, is said to have been taken by God alive. Enoch, Hermes, and Libra, are one."
This is only one of the several meanings. No need to remind the scholar that Scorpio is the astrological sign of the organs of reproduction. Like the Indian Rishis, the Patriarchs are all convertible in their numbers, as well as interchangeable. According to the subject to which they relate they become ten, twelve, seven or five, and even fourteen, and they have the same esoteric meaning as the Manus or Rishis.
Moreover, Jehovah, as may be shown, has a variety of etymologies, but only those are true which are found in the Kabala. (Ieve) is the Old Testament term, and was pronounced Ya-va. Inman
suggests that it is contracted from the two words Yaho-Iah, Jaho-Jah, or Jaho is Jah.
Punctuated it is which is, however, a Rabbinical caprice to associate it with the name Adoni
or , which has the same points. It is curious, and indeed hardly conceivable, that the Jews
anciently read the name (Adoni), when they had so many names of which Jeho and Jah and Iah constituted a part. But so it was; and Philo Byblus, who gives us the so-called fragment of Sanchoniathon, spelt it in Greek letters [[IEUO]], Javo or Jevo. Theodoret says that the Samaritans
pronounced Yahva, and the Jews Yaho. Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests its punctuation thus: ( Ye-
hou-vih); and he cut the Gordian knot of its true occult meaning. For in this last form, as a Hebrew
verb, it means "he will -- be."* It was also derived from the Chaldaic verb or eue (eva) or eua (Eva) "to be." And so it was, since from Enosh, the "Son of Man," only, were the truly human races to begin and "to be," as males and females. This statement receives further corroboration,
inasmuch as Parkhurst makes the verb to mean: (1) "To
* See for comparison Hosea, xii. 6, where it is so punctuated.
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fall down" (i.e. into generation or matter); and (2) "To be, to continue " -- as a Race. The aspirate of the word eua (Eva) "to be" being Heve (Eve), which is the feminine of and the same as Hebe, the Grecian goddess of youth and the Olympian bride of Heracles, makes the name Jehovah appear still more clearly in its primitive double-sexed form.
Finding in Sanskrit such syllables as Jah and Yah, e.g., Jah (navi) "Ganges" and Jagan-natha, "Lord of
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the World," it becomes clear why Mr. Rawlinson is so very confident in his works of an Aryan or Vedic influence on the early mythology of Babylon. Nor is it to be much wondered at that the alleged ten tribes of Israel disappeared during the captivity period, without leaving a trace behind them, when we are informed that the Jews had de facto but two tribes -- those of Judah and of Levi. The Levies, moreover, were not a tribe at all, but a priestly caste. The descendants have only followed their progenitors, the various patriarchs, into thin, sidereal air. There were Brahms and A-brahms, in days of old, truly, and before the first Jew had been born. Every nation held its first god and gods to be androgynous; nor could it be otherwise, since they regarded their distant primeval progenitors, their dual-sexed ancestors, as divine Beings and Gods, just as do the Chinese to this day. And they were divine in one sense, as also were their first human progeny, the "mind-born" primitive humanity, which were most assuredly bi-sexuals as all the more ancient symbols and traditions show. Under the emblematical devices and peculiar phraseology of the priesthood of old, lie latent hints of sciences as yet undiscovered during the present cycle. Well acquainted as may be a scholar with the hieratic writing and hieroglyphical system of the Egyptians, he must first of all learn to sift their records. He has to assure himself, compasses and rule in hand, that the picture writing he is examining fits, to a line, certain fixed geometrical figures which are the hidden keys to such records, before he ventures on an interpretation."
"But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators of every Cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (AEther), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona -- the former god also representing AEther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light; the goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras, the rock-born god, the symbol of the male mundane fire, or the personified primordial light, and Mithra, the fire goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or Matter, the female or passive element of cosmical generation" -- all these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.
§§ (22) The evolution of the three races continued. (23) The second race creates the Third and perishes.
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22. THEN THE SECOND EVOLVED THE SWEAT-BORN, THE THIRD (Race). THE SWEAT GREW, ITS DROPS GREW, AND THE DROPS BECAME HARD AND ROUND. THE SUN WARMED IT; THE MOON COOLED AND SHAPED IT; THE WIND FED IT UNTIL ITS RIPENESS. THE WHITE SWAN FROM THE STARRY VAULT (the Moon), OVERSHADOWED THE BIG DROP. THE EGG OF THE FUTURE RACE, THE MAN-SWAN (Hamsa) OF THE LATER THIRD (a). FIRST MALE-FEMALE, THEN MAN AND WOMAN (b).
(a) The text of the Stanza clearly implies that the human embryo was nourished ab extra by Cosmic forces, and that the "Father-Mother" furnished apparently the germ that ripened: in all probability a "sweat-born egg," to be hatched out, in some mysterious way, disconnected from the "double" parent. It is comparatively easy to conceive of an oviparous humanity, since even now man is, in one sense, "egg-born." Magendie, moreover, in his Precis Elementaire de Physiologie, citing "a case where the umbilical cord was ruptured and perfectly cicatrized," yet the infant was born alive, pertinently asks, "How was the circulation carried on in this organ?" On the next page he says: "Nothing is at present known respecting the use of digestion in the foetus;" and respecting its nutrition, propounds this query: "What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the foetus? Physiological works contain only vague conjectures on this point." "Ah, but," the sceptic may urge, "Magendie's book belongs to the last generation, and Science has since made such strides that his stigma of ignorance can no longer be fixed upon the profession." Indeed; then let us turn to a very great authority upon Physiology, viz., Sir M. Foster (Text-Book of Physiology, third edition, 1879, p. 623); and to the disadvantage of modern Science we shall find him saying, "Concerning the rise and development of the functional activities of the embryo, our knowledge is almost a blank. We know scarcely anything about the various steps by which the primary fundamental qualities of the protoplasm of the ovum are differentiated into the complex phenomena which we have attempted in
this book to explain." The students of Trin. Coll. Cantab. will now kindly draw a veil before the statue of Hygeia and bandage the eyes of the busts of Galen and Hippocrates, lest they look reproachfully at their degenerate descendants. One further fact we must note. Sir M. Foster is discreetly silent about the case of the ruptured umbilical cord cited by his great French confrere.
This is a very curious statement as explained in the Commentaries. To make it clear: The First Race having created the Second by "budding," as just explained, the Second Race gives birth to the Third -- which itself is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform ball -- or shall we say egg? -- which served as an extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a foetus and child, the mode of procreation by the later races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of the earlier races were entirely sexless -- shapeless even for all one knows*; but those of the later races were born androgynous. It is in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally the man-
bearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women. And now let us search for corroboration of these statements in the religious legends of East and West. Let us take the "Egg-born Race" first. Think of Kasyapa, the Vedic sage, and the most prolific of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahma's mind-born son; and he is made to become the father of the Nagas, or Serpents, among other beings. Exoterically, the Nagas are semi-
divine beings which have a human face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of Nagas, said to be a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung from Kadra, Kasyapa's wife, for the purpose of peopling Patala, which is undeniably America, as will be shown; and there was a NAGA-Dwipa, one of the seven divisions of Bharata-Varsha, India, inhabited by a people bearing the same name, who are allowed, even by some Orientalists, to be historical, and to have left many a trace behind them to this day.
Now the point most insisted upon at present is that, whatever origin be claimed for man, his evolution took place in this order: (1) Sexless, as all the earlier forms are; (2) then, by a natural transition, he became,
"a solitary hermaphrodite," a bi-sexual being; and (3) finally separated and became what he is now. Science teaches us that all the primitive forms, though sexless, "still retained the power of undergoing the processes of A-Sexual multiplication;" why, then, should man be excluded from that law of
Nature? Bi-sexual reproduction is an evolution, a specialized and perfected form on the scale of matter of the fissiparous act of reproduction. Occult teachings are pre-eminently panspermic, and the early history of humanity is hidden only "from ordinary mortals;" nor is the history of the primitive Races buried from the Initiates in the tomb of time, as it is for profane science. Therefore, supported on the one hand by that science which shows to us progressive development and an internal cause for every external modification, as a law in Nature; and, on the other hand, by an implicit faith in the wisdom -- we may say pansophia even -- of the universal traditions gathered and preserved by the Initiates, who have perfected them into an almost faultless system -- thus supported, we venture to state the doctrine clearly.
In an able article, written some fifteen years ago, our learned and respected friend Prof. Alex. Wilder, of New York, shows the absolute logic and necessity of believing "The Primeval Race Double-
Sexed," and gives a number of scientific reasons for it.* He argues firstly, "that a large part of the vegetable creation exhibits the phenomenon of bisexuality . . . the Linnaean classification enumerating thus almost all plants. This is the case in the superior families of the vegetable kingdoms as much as in the lower forms, from the Hemp to the Lombardy Poplar and Ailanthus. In the animal kingdom, in insect life, the moth generates a worm, as in the Mysteries the great secret was expressed: "Taurus Draconem genuit, et Taurum Draco. " The coral-producing family, which, according to Agassiz, 'has spent many hundreds of thousands of years, during the present geological period, in building out the peninsula of Florida . . . . produce their offspring from themselves like the buds and ramifications in a tree.' Bees are somewhat in the same line . . . . The Aphides or plant lice keep house like Amazons, and virgin parents perpetuate the Race for ten successive generations."
What say the old sages, the philosopher-teachers of antiquity. Aristophanes speaks thus on the subject in Plato's "Banquet ": "Our nature of old was not the same as it is now. It was androgynous, the form and name partaking of, and being common to both the male and female. . . . Their bodies were round, and the manner of their running
* See Extracts from that Essay in "The Theosophist," of February, 1883.
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circular.* They were terrible in force and strength and had prodigious ambition. Hence Zeus divided each of them into two, making them weaker; Apollo, under his direction, closed up the skin."
Meshia and Meshiane were but a single individual with the old Persians. "They also taught that man was the product of the tree of life, growing in androgynous pairs, till they were separated at a subsequent modification of the human form.**"
In the Toleduth (generation) of Adam, the verse "God created (bara, brought forth) man in his image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them," if read esoterically will yield the true sense, viz.: "The Elohim (Gods) brought forth from themselves (by modification) man in their
image . . . . created they him (collective humanity, or Adam), male and female created he (collective deity) them."*** This will show the esoteric point. The sexless Race was their first production, a modification of and from themselves, the pure spiritual existences; and this was Adam solus. Thence came the second Race: Adam-Eve or Jod-Heva, inactive androgynes; and finally the Third, or the "Separating Hermaphrodite," Cain and Abel, who produce the Fourth, Seth-Enos, etc. It is that Third, the last semi-spiritual race, which was also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, ingenerate in the Enochs, the Seers of that Mankind. The Fourth, which had tasted from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil -- Wisdom united already to earthy, and therefore impure, intelligence **** had consequently to acquire that Wisdom by initiation and great struggle. And the union of Wisdom and Intelligence, the former ruling the latter, is called in the Hermetic books "the God possessing the double fecundity of the two sexes." Mystically Jesus was held to be man-woman. See also in the Orphic hymns, sung during the Mysteries, we find:
* Compare Ezekiel's vision (chap. i) of the four divine beings who "had the likeness of a man" and yet had the appearance of a wheel, "when they went they went upon their four sides . . . . for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheel."
** See Prof. Wilder's Essay "The Primeval Race Double-Sexed."
*** Eugibinus, a Christian, and the Rabbis Samuel, Manasseh ben Israel, and Maimonides taught that "Adam had two faces and one person, and from the beginning he was both male and female -- male on one side and female on the other (like Manu's Brahma), but afterwards the parts were separated." The one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm of David recited by Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eliazar is evidence of this. "Thou hast fashioned me behind and before," not beset as in the Bible, which is absurd and meaningless, and this shows, as Prof. Wilder thinks, "that the primeval form of mankind was androgynous."
**** See the union of Chochmah, Wisdom, with Binah, Intelligence, or Jehovah, the Demiurge, called Understanding in the Proverbs of Solomon, ch. vii. Unto men Wisdom (divine occult Wisdom) crieth: "Oh, ye simple, understand Wisdom; and ye fools, be of an understanding heart. " It is spirit and matter, the nous and the psyche; of the latter of which St. James says that it is "earthly, sensual, and devilish."
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"Zeus is a male, Zeus is an immortal maid." The Egyptian Ammon was the goddess Neith, in his other half. Jupiter has female breasts, Venus is bearded in some of her statues, and Ila, the goddess, is also Su-Dyumna, the god, as Vaivasvata's progeny.
"The name Adam, " says Professor A. Wilder, "or man, itself implies this double form of existence. It is identical with Athamas, or Thomas (Tamil Tam), which is rendered by the Greek Didumos, a twin; if, therefore, the first woman was formed subsequently to the first man, she must, as a logical
necessity, be 'taken out of man' . . . and the side which the Elohim had taken from man, 'made he a woman' (Gen. ii.). The Hebrew word here used is Tzala, which bears the translation we have given. It is easy to trace the legend in Berosus, who says that Thalatth (the Omoroca, or Lady of Urka) was the beginning of creation. She was also Melita, the queen of the Moon. . . . The two twin births of Genesis, that of Cain and Abel, and of Esau and Jacob, shadow the same idea. The name 'Hebel' is the same as Eve, and its characteristic seems to be feminine," continues the author. "Unto thee shall be his desire," said the Lord God to Cain, "and thou shalt rule over him." The same language had been uttered to Eve: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." . . .
Thus the pristine bi-sexual unity of the human Third Root-Race is an axiom in the Secret Doctrine. Its virgin individuals were raised to "Gods," because that Race represented their "divine Dynasty." The moderns are satisfied with worshipping the male heroes of the Fourth Race, who created gods after their own sexual image, whereas the gods of primeval mankind were "male and female."
As stated in Book I, the humanities developed coordinately, and on parallel lines with the four Elements, every new Race being physiologically adapted to meet the additional element. Our Fifth Race is rapidly approaching the Fifth Element -- call it interstellar ether, if you will -- which has more to do, however, with psychology than with physics. We men have learned to live in every climate, whether frigid or tropical, but the first two Races had nought to do with climate, nor were they subservient to any temperature or change therein. And thus, we are taught, men lived down to the close of the Third Root-Race, when eternal spring reigned over the whole globe, such as is now enjoyed by the inhabitants of Jupiter; a "world," says M. Flammarion, "which is not subject like our own to the vicissitudes of seasons nor to abrupt alternations of temperature, but which is enriched with all the treasures of eternal spring." ( "Pluralite des Mondes," p. 69.) Those astronomers who maintain that Jupiter is in a molten condition, in our sense of the term, are invited to settle their dispute with this learned French
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Astronomer.* It must, however, be always borne in mind that the "eternal spring" referred to is only a condition cognised as such by the Jovians. It is not "spring" as we know it. In this reservation is to be found the reconciliation between the two theories here cited. Both embrace partial truths.
It is thus a universal tradition that mankind has evolved gradually into its present shape from an almost transparent condition of texture, and neither by miracle nor by sexual intercourse. Moreover, this is in full accord with the ancient philosophies; from those of Egypt and India with their Divine Dynasties down to that of Plato. And all these universal beliefs must be classed with the "presentiments" and "obstinate conceptions," some of them ineradicable, in popular faiths. Such beliefs, as remarked by Louis Figuier, are "frequently the outcome of the wisdom and observation of an infinite number of generations of men." For, "a tradition which has an uniform and universal existence,
* An hypothesis evolved in 1881 by Mr. Mattieu Williams seems to have impressed Astronomers but little. Says the author of "The Fuel of the Sun," in Knowledge, Dec. 23, 1881: "Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of Solar existence . . . I conclude that the Sun has no nucleus, either solid, liquid, or gaseous, but is composed of dissociated matter in the critical state, surrounded, first, by a flaming envelope, due to the recombination of the dissociated matter, and outside of this, by another envelope of vapours due to this combination."
This is a novel theory to be added to other hypotheses, all scientific and orthodox. The meaning of the "critical state" is explained by Mr. M. Williams in the same journal (Dec. 9, 1881), in an article on "Solids, Liquids, and Gases." Speaking of an experiment by Dr. Andrews on carbonic acid, the scientist says that "when 88 [[degrees]] is reached, the boundary between liquid and gas vanished; liquid and gas have blended into one mysterious intermediate fluid; an indefinite fluctuating something is there filling the whole of the tube -- an etherealised liquid or a visible gas. Hold a red-
hot poker between your eye and the light; you will see an upflowing wave of movement of what appears like liquid air. The appearance of the hybrid fluid in the tube resembles this, but is sensibly denser, and evidently stands between the liquid and gaseous states of matter, as pitch or treacle stands between solid and liquid."
The temperature at which this occurs has been named by Dr. Andrews the "critical temperature"; here the gaseous and the liquid states are "continuous," and it is probable that all other substances capable of existing in both states have their own particular critical temperatures.
Speculating further upon this "critical" state, Mr. Mattieu Williams emits some quite occult theories about Jupiter and other planets. He says: "Our notions of solids, liquids, and gases are derived from our experiences of the state of matter here upon this Earth. Could we be removed to another planet, they would be curiously changed. On Mercury water would rank as one of the condensible gases; on Mars, as a fusible solid; but what on Jupiter?"
"Recent observations justify us in regarding this as a miniature sun, with an external envelope of cloudy matter, apparently of partially-condensed water, but red-hot, or probably still hotter within. His vaporous atmosphere is evidently of enormous depth, and the force of gravitation being on his visible outer surface two-and-a-half [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 137 EGYPTIAN BELIEF.
has all the weight of scientific testimony."* And there is more than one such tradition in the Puranic allegories, as has been shown. Moreover, the doctrine that the first Race of mankind was formed out of the chhayas (astral images) of the Pitris, is fully corroborated in the Zohar. "In the Tzalam (shadow image) of Elohim (the Pitris), was made Adam (man). (Cremona, Ed. iii., 76a; Brody, Ed. iii., 159a; "Qabbalah," Isaac Myer, p. 420.)
It has been repeatedly urged as an objection that, however high the degree of metaphysical thought in ancient India, yet the old Egyptians had nothing but crass idolatry and zoolatry to boast of; Hermes, as
alleged, being the work of mystic Greeks who lived in Egypt. To this, one answer can be given -- a direct proof that the Egyptians believed in the Secret Doctrine is, that it was taught to them at Initiation. Let the objectors open the "Eclogae Physicae et Ethicae " of Stobaeus, the Greek compiler of ancient fragments, who lived in the fifth century, A.D. The following is a transcription by him of an old Hermetic fragment, showing the Egyptian theory of the Soul. Translated word for word, it says: --
"From one Soul, that of ALL, spring all the Souls, which spread themselves as if purposely distributed through the world. These souls undergo many transformations; those which are already creeping creatures turn into aquatic animals; from these aquatic animals are derived land animals; and from the latter the birds. From the beings who live aloft in the air (heaven) men are born. On reaching that
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] times greater than that on our Earth's surface, the atmospheric pressure, in descending below this visible surface, must soon reach that at which the vapour of water would be brought to its critical condition. Therefore we may infer that the oceans of Jupiter are neither of frozen, liquid, nor gaseous water, but are oceans or atmospheres of critical water. If any fish or birds swim or fly therein, they must be very critically organized."
As the whole mass of Jupiter is 300 times greater than that of the Earth, and its compressing energy towards the centre proportional to this, its materials, if similar to those of the Earth, and no hotter, would be considerably more dense, and the whole planet would have a higher specific gravity; but we know by the movement of its satellites that, instead of this, its specific gravity is less than a fourth of that of the Earth. This justifies the conclusion that it is intensely hot; for even hydrogen, if cold, would become denser than Jupiter under such pressure.
"As all elementary substances may exist as solids, liquids, or gases, or, critically, according to the conditions of temperature and pressure, I am justified in hypothetically concluding that Jupiter is neither a solid, a liquid, nor a gaseous planet, but a critical planet, or an orb composed internally of associated elements in the critical state, and surrounded by a dense atmosphere of their vapours and those of some of their compounds such as water. The same reasoning applies to Saturn and other large and rarified planets."
It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.
* "The Day After Death," p. 23.
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status of men, the Souls receive the principle of (conscious) immortality, become Spirits, then pass into the choir of gods."
23. THE SELF-BORN WERE THE CHHAYAS, THE SHADOWS FROM THE BODIES OF THE SONS OF TWILIGHT. NEITHER WATER NOR FIRE COULD DESTROY THEM. THEIR SONS WERE (so destroyed) (a).
(a) This verse cannot be understood without the help of the Commentaries. It means that the First Root-Race, the "Shadows" of the Progenitors, could not be injured, or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal and so little human in constitution, they could not be affected by any element -- flood or fire. But their "Sons," the Second Root-Race, could be and were so destroyed. As the "progenitors" merged wholly in their own astral bodies, which were their progeny; so that progeny was absorbed in its descendants, the "Sweat-born." These were the second Humanity -- composed of the most heterogeneous gigantic semi-human monsters -- the first attempts of material nature at building human bodies. The ever-blooming lands of the Second Continent (Greenland, among others) were transformed, in order, from Edens with their eternal spring, into hyperborean Hades. This transformation was due to the displacement of the great waters of the globe, to oceans changing their beds; and the bulk of the Second Race perished in this first great throe of the evolution and consolidation of the globe during the human period. Of such great cataclysms there have already been four.* And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time.
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A FEW WORDS ABOUT "DELUGES" AND "NOAHS."
The accounts in the various Puranas about our Progenitors are as contradictory in their details as everything else. Thus while, in the Rig Veda, Ida (or Ila) is called the Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu, Sayana makes of her a goddess presiding over the Earth, and the Sathapatha Brahmana shows her to be the Manu's daughter, an offering of his sacrifice, and, later on, his (Vaivasvata's) wife, by whom he begat the race of Manus. In the Puranas, again, she is Vaivasvata's daughter, yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma) and the planet Jupiter's (Brihhaspati's) wife, Tara. All this, which seems a jumble to the profane, is full of philosophical meaning to the Occultist. On the very face of the narrative a secret and sacred meaning is per-
*The first occurred when what is now the North Pole was separated from the later Continents.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 139 WHAT THE FLOOD MEANS.
ceivable, all the details, however, being so purposely mixed up that the experienced eye of an Initiate alone can follow them and place the events in their proper order.
The story as told in the "Mahabharata" strikes the key-note, and yet it needs to be explained by the
secret sense contained in the Bhagavad Gita. It is the prologue to the drama of our (Fifth) Humanity. While Vaivasvata was engaged in devotion on the river bank, a fish craves his protection from a bigger fish. He saves and places it in a jar, where, growing larger and larger, it communicates to him the news of the forthcoming deluge. It is the well-known "Matsya Avatar," the first Avatar of Vishnu, the Dagon* of the Chaldean Xisuthrus, and many other things besides. The story is too well known to need repetition. Vishnu orders a ship to be built, in which Manu is said to be saved along with the seven Rishis, the latter, however, being absent from other texts. Here the seven Rishis stand for the seven Races, the seven principles, and various other things; for there is again a double mystery involved in this manifold allegory.
We have said elsewhere that the great Flood had several meanings, and that it referred, as also does the FALL, to both spiritual and physical, cosmic and terrestrial, events: as above, so it is below. The ship or ark -- navis -- in short, being the symbol of the female generative principle, is typified in the heavens by the Moon, and on Earth by the Womb: both being the vessels and bearers of the seeds of life and being, which the sun, or Vishnu, the male principle, vivifies and fructifies.** The First Cosmic Flood refers to primordial creation, or the formation of Heaven and the Earths; in which case Chaos and the great Deep stand for the "Flood," and the Moon for the "Mother," from whom proceed all the life-germs.*** But the terrestrial Deluge and
* We must remember that at the head of all the Babylonian gods were Ea, Anu, and the primeval Bel; and that Ea, the first, was the God of Wisdom, the great "God of Light" and of the DEEP, and that he was identified with Oannes, or the Biblical Dagon -- the man-fish who rose out of the Persian Gulf.
** See Part. II. § "The Holy of Holies."
*** It is far later on that the Moon became a male god; with the Hindus it was Soma, with the Chaldeans Nannak or Nannar, and Sin, the son of Mulil, the older Bel. The "Akkadians" called him the "Lord of Ghosts"; and he was the god of Nipoor (Niffer) in northern Babylonia. It is Mulil who caused the waters of the Flood to fall from heaven on Earth, for which Xisuthrus would not allow him to approach his altar. As the modern Assyriologists have now ascertained, it is the northern Nipoor which is the centre whence Chaldean (black) magic spread; and Eridu (the Southern) which was the primitive seat of the worship of the culture god, the god of divine wisdom -- the Sun-God being the supreme deity everywhere. With the Jews, the Moon is connected with Israel's Jehovah and his seed, because Ur was the chief seat of the worship of the Moon-god, and because Abraham is said to have come from Ur, when from A-bra(h)m, he becomes Abraham.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 140 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
its story has also its dual application. In one case it has reference to that mystery when mankind was saved from utter destruction, by the mortal woman being made the receptacle of the human seed at the end of the Third Race,* and in the other to the real and historical Atlantean submersion. In both cases the "Host" -- or the Manu which saved the seed -- is called Vaivasvata Manu. Hence the diversity
between the Puranic and other versions; while in the Sathapatha Brahmana, Vaivasvata produces a daughter and begets from her the race of Manu; which is a reference to the first human Manushyas, who had to create women by will (Kriyasakti), before they were naturally born from the hermaphrodites as an independent sex, and who were, therefore, regarded as their creator's daughters. The Puranic accounts make of her (Ida or Ila) the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the latter version referring to the events of the Atlantean flood, when Vaivasvata, the great Sage on Earth, saved the Fifth Root-
race from being destroyed along with the remnants of the Fourth.
This is shown very clearly in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna is made to say: --
"The Seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my essence, were born from my mind: from them sprung (were born) the human races and the world." (Chapter X., verse 6).
Here the four preceding "Manus," out of the seven, are the four Races** which have already lived, since Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata
* When Narada, the virgin-ascetic, threatened to put an end to the human race by preventing Daksha's sons from procreating it.
** This is corroborated by a learned Brahmin. In his most excellent lectures on the Bhagavad Gita (see "Theosophist," April, 1887, p. 444) the lecturer says: "There is a peculiarity to which I must call your attention. He (Krishna) speaks here of four Manus. Why does he speak of four? We are now in the seventh Manvantara, that of Vaivasvata. If he is speaking of the past Manus, he ought to speak of six, but he only mentions four. In some commentaries an attempt has been made to interpret this in a peculiar manner. The word 'Chatvaraha' is separated from the word 'Manavaha,' and is made to refer to Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatkumara, and Sanatsujata, who are also included among the mind-born sons of Prajapati. But this interpretation will lead to a most absurd conclusion, and make the sentence contradict itself. The persons alluded to in the text have a qualifying clause in the sentence. It is well known that Sanaka and the other three refused to create, though the other sons had consented to do so; therefore, in speaking of those persons from whom humanity has sprung into existence, it would be absurd to include those four also in the list. The passage must be interpreted without splitting the compound into two nouns. The number of Manus will then be four, and the statement would then contradict the Puranic account, though it would be in harmony with the occult theory. You will recollect that it is stated (in Occultism) that we are now in the Fifth Root-Race. Each Root-Race is considered as the Santhathi of a particular Manu. Now, the Fourth Race has passed, or, in other words, there have been four past Manus. . . . . "
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 141 VARIOUS DELUGES.
Manu, the son of Surya (the Sun), and the saviour of our Race, is connected with the Seed of Life, both physically and spiritually. But, at present, while speaking of all, we have to concern ourselves only with the first two.
The "Deluge" is undeniably an universal tradition. "Glacial periods" were numerous, and so were the "Deluges," for various reasons. Stockwell and Croll enumerate some half dozen Glacial Periods and subsequent Deluges -- the earliest of all being dated by them 850,000, and the last about 100,000, years ago.* But which was our Deluge? Assuredly the former, the one which to this date remains recorded in the traditions of all the peoples, from the remotest antiquity; the one that finally swept away the last peninsulas of Atlantis, beginning with Ruta and Daitya and ending with the (comparatively) small island mentioned by Plato. This is shown by the agreement of certain details in all the legends. It was the last of its gigantic character. The little deluge, the traces of which Baron Bunsen found in Central Asia, and which he places at about 10,000 years B.C., had nothing to do with either the semi-universal Deluge, or Noah's flood -- the latter being a purely mythical rendering of old traditions -- nor even with the submersion of the last Atlantean island; at least, only a moral connection.
Our Fifth Race (the non-initiated portions), hearing of many deluges, confused them, and now know of but one. This one altered the whole aspect of the globe in its interchange and shifting of land and sea.
We may compare the traditions of the Peruvians: -- "The Incas, seven in number, have repeopled the Earth after the deluge," they say (Coste I, IV., p. 19); Humboldt mentions the Mexican version of the same legend, but confuses somewhat the details of the still-preserved legend concerning the American Noah. Nevertheless, the eminent Naturalist mentions twice seven companions and the divine bird which preceded the boat of the Aztecs, and thus makes fifteen elect instead of the seven and the fourteen. This was written probably under some involuntary reminiscence of Moses, who is said to have mentioned fifteen grandsons of Noah, who escaped with their grandsire. Then again Xisuthrus, the Chaldean Noah, is saved and translated alive to heaven -- like Enoch -- with the seven gods, the Kabirim, or the seven divine Titans; again the Chinese Yao has seven figures which sail with him and which he will animate when he lands, and use for "human seed." Osiris, when he enters the ark, or solar boat, takes seven Rays with him, etc., etc.
Sanchoniathon makes the Aletae or Titans (the Kabirim) contemporary
* "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," xviii.; "American Journal of Science, " III., xi., 456; and Croll's "Climate and Time." Lemuria was not submerged by a flood, but was destroyed by volcanic action, and afterwards sank.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with Agruerus, the great Phoenician god (whom Faber sought to identify with Noah*); further, it is suspected that the name of "Titan" is derived from Tit-Ain -- "the fountains of the chaotic abyss"** (Tit-Theus, or Tityus is "the divine deluge"); and thus the Titans, who are seven, are shown to be connected with the Flood and the seven Rishis saved by Vaivasvata Manu.***
They are the sons of Kronos (Time) and Rhea (the Earth); and as Agruerus, Saturn and Sydyk are one and the same personage, and as the seven Kabiri are said to be the sons of Sydyk or Kronos-Saturn, the Kabiri and Titans are identical. For once the pious Faber was right in his conclusions when he wrote: "I have no doubt of the seven Titans and Kabiri being the same as the seven Rishis of the Hindu mythology (?), who are said to have escaped in a boat along with Manu, the head (?) of the family."
But he is less fortunate in his speculations when he adds "The Hindoos, in their wild legends have variously perverted the history of the Noachidae (? !), yet it is remarkable that they seem to have religiously adhered to the number seven."**** Hence Captain (Col.) Wilford very judiciously observes: that "Perhaps the seven Manus, the seven Brahmadicas and the seven Rishis are the same, and make only seven individual persons.***** The seven Brahmadicas were Prajapatis, or lords 'of the prajas or creatures.' From them mankind was born, and they are probably the same with the seven Manus. . . . These seven grand ancestors of the human race were created for the purpose of replenishing the Earth with inhabitants." (Asiatic Researches, Vol. V. p. 246); and Faber adds that: "the mutual resemblance of the Kabirs, the Titans, the Rishis, and the Noetic family, is too striking to be the effect of mere accident."******
Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural
* Agruerus is Kronos, or Saturn, and the prototype of the Israelitish Jehovah. As connected with Argha, the Moon or Ark of salvation, Noah is mythologically one with Saturn. But then this cannot relate to the terrestrial flood. (But see Faber's "Kabiri," Vol. I, pp. 35, 43, and 45.)
** See ibid., Vol. II., p. 240.
*** Sanchoniathon says that the Titans were the sons of Kronos, and seven in number; and he calls them fire-worshippers, Aletae (sons of Agni?), and diluvians. Al-ait is the god of fire.
**** Of which seven, let us remark, the Aryans, and not the Semites, were the originators, while the Jews got that number from the Chaldeans.
***** Seven individual sons of God, or Pitars and Pitris; also in this case the sons of Kronos or Saturn (Kala "time") and Arkites, like the Kabiri and Titans, as their name -- "lunar ancestors" -- shows, the Moon being the Ark, or Argha, on the watery abyss of space.
Japhet is on the list of the Titans contained in a verse of the Orphic hymns. According to Orpheus the names of the seven "Arkite" Titans (whom Faber refuses to identify with the impious Titans, their descendants) were Koeus, Kroeus, Phorcys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperion, and Iapetus: --
[[Koion te, Kroion te melan, Phorkun te krataion, Kai Kronon, Okeanon d, 'Huperioa te Iapeponet.]]
-- (Orph. apud Proclum. In Tim. lib. v. p. 295.
But why could not the Babylonian Ezra have adopted the name of Iapetos for one of Noah's sons? The Kabiri, who are the Titans, are also called Manes and their mother Mania, according to Arnobius. (Adversum Gentes, lib. III., p. 124.) The Hindus can therefore claim with far more reason that the Manes mean their Manus, and that Mania is the female Manu. (See Ramayana .) Mania is Ila or Ida, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu, from whom "he begat the race of Manus." Like Rhea, the mother of the Titans, she is the Earth (Sayana making her the goddess of the Earth), and she is but the second edition and repetition of Vach. Both Ida and Vach are turned into males and females; Ida becoming Sudyumna, and Vach, "the female Viraj," turning into a woman in order to punish the Gandharvas; one version referring to cosmic and divine theogony, the other to the later period. The Manes and Mania of Arnobius are names of Indian origin, appropriated by the Greeks and Latins and disfigured by them.
Thus it is no accident, but the result of one archaic doctrine common to all, of which the Israelites, through Ezra, the author of the modernised Mosaic books, were the latest adapters. So unceremonious were they with other people's property, that Berosus (Antiquitates Libyae, I, fol. 8), shows that Titea -- of whom Diodorus makes the mother of the Titans or Diluvians (See Bibl. lib. III. p. 170) -- was the wife of Noah. For this Faber calls him the "pseudo-Berosus, " yet accepts the information in order to register one proof more that the pagans have borrowed all their gods from the Jews, by transforming patriarchal material. According to our humble opinion, this is one of the best proofs possible of exactly the reverse. It shows as clearly as facts can show, that it is the Biblical pseudo -personages which are all borrowed from pagan myths, if myths they must be. It shows, at any rate, that Berosus was well aware of the source of Genesis, and that it bore the same cosmic astronomical character as the allegories of Isis-Osiris, and the Ark, and other older "Arkite" symbols. For, Berosus says that "Titea magna" was afterwards called Aretia,* and worshipped with the Earth; and this
*Aretia is the female form of Artes (Egyptian Mars). Thence the Chaldean (and now Hebrew) word (Aretz) "Earth." The author of "Beitrage zur Kenntniss" (Art. under "Artes" Mars) quotes: "Addit Cedrenus (Salem I., 3): Stella Martis ab [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
identifies "Titea," Noah's consort, with Rhea, the mother of the Titans, and with Ida -- both being goddesses who preside over the Earth, and the mothers of the Manus and Manes (or Tit-an-Kabiri).
And "Titea-Aretia" was worshipped as Horchia, says the same Berosus, and this is a title of Vesta, goddess of the Earth. "Sicanus deificavit Aretiam, et nominavit eam lingua Janigena Horchiam." (Ibid. lib. V. fol. 64.)
Scarce an ancient poet of historic or prehistoric days who failed to mention the sinking of the two continents -- often called isles -- in one form or another. Hence the destruction, besides Atlantis, of the Phlegyae. (See Pausanias and Nonus, who both tell how:
"From its deep-rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stern Neptune shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Faber felt convinced that the "insulae Phlegyae" were Atlantis. But all such allegories are more or less distorted echoes of the Hindu tradition about that great Cataclysm, which befell the Fourth, really human, though gigantic, Race, the one which preceded the Aryan. Yet, as just said, like all other legends, that of "the Deluge has more than one meaning. It refers in Theogony, to pre-cosmic transformations, to spiritual correlations -- however absurd the term may sound to a scientific ear -- and also to subsequent Cosmogony; to the great FLOOD of WATERS (matter) in CHAOS, awakened and fructified by those Spirit-Rays which were swamped by, and perished in, the mysterious differentiation -- a pre-cosmic mystery, the Prologue to the drama of Being. Anu, Bel, and Noah preceded Adam Kadmon, Adam the Red, and Noah; just as Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva preceded Vaivasvata and the rest." (See "Isis Unveiled., " Vol. II., pp. 420 et seq., where one or two of the seven meanings are hinted at.)
All this goes to show that the semi-universal deluge known to geology (first glacial period) must have occurred just at the time allotted to it by the Secret Doctrine: namely, 200,000 years (in round numbers) after the commencement of our FIFTH RACE, or about the time assigned by Messrs. Croll and Stockwell for the first glacial period: i.e., about 850,000 years ago. Thus, as the latter disturbance is attributed by geologists and astronomers to "an extreme eccentricity of the Earth's
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Egyptiis vocatur Ertosi (plantare, generare). Significat autem hoc omnis generis procreationem et vivificationem, omnisque substantiae et materiae naturam et vim ordinantem atque procreantem." It is Earth as "source of being"; or, as explained by the author of "The Source of Measures," Arts is the same in Hebrew and Egyptian, and both combine the primeval idea of Earth as source; precisely as in the Hebrew itself, under another form, Adam and Madim, (Mars) are the same, and combine the idea of Earth with Adam under the form of H-Adam-H.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 145 THE JEWISH NOAH AND THE CHALDEAN NUAH.
orbit," and as the Secret Doctrine attributes it to the same source, but with the addition of another factor, the shifting of the Earth's axis -- a proof of which may be found in the Book of Enoch,* if the
veiled language of the Puranas is not understood -- all this should tend to show that the ancients knew something of the "modern discoveries" of Science. Enoch, when speaking of "the great inclination of the Earth," which "is in travail," is quite significant and clear.
Is not this evident? Nuah is Noah, floating on the waters in his ark; the latter being the emblem of the Argha, or Moon, the feminine principle; Noah is the "spirit" falling into matter. We find him, as soon as he descends upon the Earth, planting a vineyard, drinking of the wine, and getting drunk on it, i.e., the pure spirit becomes intoxicated as soon as it is finally imprisoned in matter. The seventh chapter of Genesis is only another version of the First. Thus, while the latter reads: "and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," in ch. 7 it is said " . . . and the waters prevailed . . . and the ark went (with Noah, the spirit) upon the face of the waters." Thus Noah, if identical with the Chaldean Nuah, is the spirit vivifying matter, which latter is Chaos, represented by the DEEP, or the Waters of the Flood. In the Babylonian legend (the pre-cosmical blended with the terrestrial event) it is Ishtar (Astaroth or Venus, the lunar goddess) who is shut up in the ark and sends out "a dove in search of dry land." ("Isis Unveiled " Vol. II, pp. 423 and 424).
George Smith notes in the "Tablets," first the creation of the moon, and then that of the sun: "Its beauty and perfection are extolled, and the regularity of its orbit, which led to its being considered the type of a judge and the regulator of the world." If this story related simply to a cosmogonical cataclysm -- even were this latter universal -- why should the goddess Ishtar or Astoreth, the Moon, speak of the creation of the sun after the deluge? The waters might have reached as high as the mountain of Nizir (Chaldean version), or Jebel Djudi (the deluge mountains of the Arabian legend), or yet Ararat (of the Biblical narrative), and even the Himalaya (of the Hindu tradition), and yet not reach the sun: the Bible itself stopped short of such a miracle! It is evident that the deluge of the people who first recorded it had another meaning, less problematical and far more philosophical than that of an universal deluge, of which there are no geological traces whatever.
As all such Cataclysms are periodical and cyclical, and as Manu Vaivasvata figures as a generic character, under various circumstances and events (vide infra: "The Seven Manus of Humanity"), there seems to be no
serious objection to the supposition that the first "great flood" had an allegorical, as well as a cosmic meaning, and that it happened at the end of the Satya Yuga, the "age of Truth," when the Second Root Race, "The Manu with bones," made its primeval appearance as "the Sweat-Born."*
The Second Flood -- the so-called "universal" -- which affected the Fourth Root Race (now conveniently regarded by theology as "the accursed race of giants," the CAINITES, and "the sons of Ham") is that flood which was first perceived by geology. If one carefully compares the accounts in
the various legends of the Chaldees and other exoteric works of the nations, it will be found that all of them agree with the orthodox narratives given in the Brahmanical books. And it may be perceived that while, in the first account, "there is no God or mortal yet on Earth," when Manu Vaivasvata lands on the Himavan; in the second, the Seven Rishis are allowed to keep him company: thus showing that whereas some accounts refer to the sidereal and cosmic FLOOD before the so-called creation, the others treat, one of the Great Flood of Matter on Earth, and the other of a real watery deluge. In the Satapatha Brahmana, Manu finds that "the Flood had swept away all living creatures, and he alone was left" -- i.e., the seed of life alone remained from the previous dissolution of the Universe, or Mahapralaya, after a "Day of Brahma"; and the Mahabharata refers simply to the geological cataclysm which swept away nearly all the Fourth Race to make room for the Fifth. Therefore is Vaivasvata Manu shown under three distinct attributes in our esoteric Cosmogony:** (a) as the "Root-
* All such expressions are explained in the "Anthropogenesis " of this Book, and elsewhere.
** One has to remember that, in the Hindu philosophy, every differentiated unit is such only through the cycles of Maya, being one in its essence with the Supreme or One Spirit. Hence arises the seeming confusion and contradiction in the various Puranas, and at times in the same Purana, about the same individual. Vishnu -- as the many-formed Brahma, and as Brahma (neuter) -- is one, and yet he is said to be all the 28 Vyasas ( Vishnu Purana). "In every Dvapara (third) age, Vishnu, in the person of Vyasa, divides the Veda, which is one, into four and many portions. Twenty-eight times have the Vedas been arranged by the great Rishis in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, in the Dvapara Yuga . . . and, consequently, twenty-eight Vyasas have passed away . . . they who were all in the form of Veda-
Vyasas, who were the Vyasas of their respective eras. . . . " (Book III., Ch . III.) "This world is Brahma in Brahma, from Brahma . . . nothing further to be known." Then, again . . . "There were in the First Manvantara seven celebrated sons of Vasishta, who in the Third Manvantara, were sons of Brahma (i.e., Rishis), the illustrious progeny of Urja." This is plain: the Humanity of the First Manvantara is that of the seventh and of all the intermediate ones. The mankind of the First Root-Race is the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. To the last it forms a cyclic and constant reincarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyan Chohans of our Planetary chain.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 147 AGREEMENT OF DATES.
on Globe A in the First Round; (b) as the "seed of life" on Globe D in the Fourth Round; and (c) as the "Seed of Man" at the beginning of every Root-Race -- in our Fifth Race especially. The very commencement of the latter witnesses, during the Dvapara Yuga,* the destruction of the accursed sorcerers; "of that island (Plato speaking only of its last island) beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean, from which there was an easy transition to other islands in the neighbourhood of another large Continent" (America). It is this "Atlantic" land which was connected with the "White Island, " and this White Island was Ruta; but it was not the Atala and the "White Devil" of Colonel Wilford (see "Asiatic Researches," Vol. VIII., p. 280), as already shown. It may well be remarked here that the Dvapara Yuga lasts 864,000 years, according to the Sanskrit texts; and that, if the Kali Yuga
began only about 5,000 years ago, that it is just 869,000 since that destruction took place. Again, these figures are not very widely different from those given by the geologists, who place their "glacial period" 850,000 years ago.
Then "a woman was produced who came to Manu and declared herself his daughter, with whom he lived and begat the offspring of Manu." This refers to the physiological transformation of sexes during the Third Root-Race. And the allegory is too transparently clear to need much explanation. Of course, as already remarked, in the separation of sexes an androgyne being was supposed to divide his body into two halves (as in the case of Brahma and Vach, and even of Adam and Eve), and thus the female is, in a certain sense, his daughter, just as he will be her son, "the flesh of his (and her) flesh and the bone of his (and her) bone." Let it be also well remembered that not one of our Orientalists have yet learned to discern in those "contradictions and amazing nonsense," as some call the Puranas, that a reference to a Yuga may mean a Round, a Root-Race, and often a Sub-Race, as well as form a page torn out of pre-cosmic theogony. This double and triple meaning is proved by various references to one and the same individual apparently, under an identical name, while it refers, in fact, to events divided by entire Kalpas. A good instance is that of Ila. She is first represented as one thing and then as another. In the exoteric legends it is said that Manu Vaivasvata, desiring to create sons, instituted a sacrifice to Mitra and Varuna; but, through a mistake of the officiating
* The Dvapara Yuga differs for each Race. All races have their own cycles, which fact causes a great difference. For instance, the Fourth Sub-Race of the Atlanteans was in its Kali-Yug, when destroyed, whereas the Fifth was in its Satya or Krita Yuga. The Aryan Race is now in its Kali Yuga, and will continue to be in it for 427,000 years longer, while various "family Races," called the Semitic, Hamitic, etc., are in their own special cycles. The forthcoming 6th Sub Race -- which may begin very soon -- will be in its Satya (golden) age while we reap the fruit of our iniquity in our Kali Yuga.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 148 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Brahman, a daughter only was obtained -- Ila. Then, "through the favour of the gods," her sex is changed and she becomes a man, Su-dyumna. Then she is again turned into a woman, and so on; the fable adding that Siva and his consort were pleased that "she would be male one month and female another." This has a direct reference to the Third Root-Race, whose men were androgynes. But some very learned Orientalists think (see "Hindu Classical Dictionary ") and have declared that "Ila was primarily food, nourishment, or a libation of milk; thence a stream of praise, personified as the goddess of speech." The "profane" are not told, however, the reason why "a libation of milk," or "a stream of praise," should be male and female by turn: unless, indeed there is some "internal evidence" which the occultists fail to perceive.
In their most mystical meanings, the union of Swayambhuva Manu with Vach-Sata-Rupa, his own daughter (this being the first "euhemerization" of the dual principle of which Vaivasvata Manu and Ila are a secondary and a third form), stands in Cosmic symbolism as the Root-life, the germ from which spring all the Solar Systems, the worlds, angels and the gods. For, as says Vishnu: --
"From Manu all creation, gods, Asuras, man must be produced, By him the world must be created, that which moves and moveth not. . . . ."
But we may find worse opponents than even the Western Scientists and Orientalists. If, on the question of figures, Brahmins may agree with our teaching, we are not so sure that some of them, orthodox conservatives, may not raise objections to the modes of procreation attributed to their Pitar Devatas. We shall be called upon to produce the works from which we quote, while they will be invited by us to read their own Puranas a little more carefully and with an eye to the esoteric meaning. And then, we repeat again, they will find, under the veil of more or less transparent allegories, every statement made herein corroborated by their own works. One or two instances have already been given as regards the appearance of the Second Race, which is called the "Sweat-Born." This allegory is regarded as a fairy-tale, and yet it conceals a psycho-physiological phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature.
But in view of the chronological statements made herein, it is natural to ask: --
COULD MEN EXIST 18,000,000 YEARS AGO?
To this Occultism answers in the affirmative, notwithstanding all scientific objectors. Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivasvata-Manu Man, i.e., the male and female entity already separated into
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 149 HOW OLD IS HUMANITY?
distinct sexes. The two and a half Races that preceded that event may have lived 300,000,000 years ago for all that science can tell. For the geological and physical difficulties in the way of the theory could not exist for the primeval, ethereal man of the Occult teachings. The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter. Paul d'Assier, the Positivist, seems to have proven the fact pretty plainly,* not to speak of the accumulated testimony of the ages, and that of the modern spiritualists and mystics. It will be found difficult to reject this fact in our age of proofs, tests, and ocular demonstrations.
The Secret Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms and disturbances of our globe, which -- owing to its being the period of its greatest physical development, for the Fourth Round is the middle-point of the life allotted to it -- were far more terrible and intense than during any of the three preceding Rounds (the cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual life and of its semi-
ethereal conditions) physical Humanity has existed upon it for the last 18,000,000 years.** This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to accept the theory of a "boneless," purely ethereal, man, will object. Science, which knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic theology still more so. The first will object on logical and reasonable grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the last on a tissue of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought forward by theologians, is based on the
virtual assumption that mankind (read Christians) on this planet have the honour of being the only human beings in the whole Kosmos, who dwell on a globe, and that they are consequently, the best of their kind.***
* "Posthumous Humanity " -- translated by H. S. Olcott, London, 1887.
** Professor Newcomb says: "The heat evolved by contraction would last only 18,000,000 years" ("Popular Astronomy, " p. 500); but "a temperature permitting the existence of water could not be reached earlier than 10,000,000 years ago" ( Winchell's "World-Life," p. 356). But Sir W. Thomson says that the whole age of the incrustation of the Earth is 18,000,000 years, though, this year, he has again altered his opinion and allows only 15,000,000 years as the age of the Sun. As will be shown in the Addenda, the divergence of scientific opinions is so great that no reliance can ever be placed upon scientific speculation.
*** The essay on "The Plurality of Worlds" (1853) -- an anonymous work, yet well known to have been the production of Dr. Whewell -- is a good proof of this. No Christian ought to believe in either the plurality of worlds or the geological age of the globe, argues the Author; because, if it is asserted that this world is only one among the many of its kind, which are all the work of God, as it is itself; that all are the seat [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 150 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The Occultists, who believe firmly in the teachings of the mother-philosophy, repel the objections of both theologians and scientists. They maintain, on their side, that, during those periods when there must have been insufferable heat, even at the two poles, successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an impediment to human life and organization, such as is assigned by them to the early mankind. Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious gases, nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First and Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous, or the Silurian age itself.
Thus the Monads destined to animate future Races were ready for the new transformation. They had passed their phases of immetalization, of plant and animal life, from the lowest to the highest, and were waiting for their human, more intelligent form. Yet, what could the plastic modellers do but follow the laws of evolutionary Nature? Could they, as claimed by the Biblical dead-letter, form "Lord-
God"-like, or as Pygmalion in the Greek allegory, Adam-Galatea out of volcanic dust, and breathe a living soul into Man? No: because the soul was already there, latent in its Monad, and needed but a coating. Pygmalion, who fails to animate his statue, and Bahak-Zivo of the Nazarean Gnostics, who fails to construct "a human soul in the creature," are, as conceptions, far more philosophical and scientific than Adam, taken in the dead-letter sense, or the Biblical Elohim-Creators. Esoteric philosophy, which teaches spontaneous generation -- after the Sishta and Prajapati have thrown the seed of life on the Earth -- shows the lower angels able to construct physical man only, even with the
help of Nature, after having evolved the ethereal form out of themselves, and leaving the physical form to evolve gradually from its ethereal, or what would now be called, protoplasmic model.
This will again be objected to: "Spontaneous Generation" is an exploded theory, we shall be told. Pasteur's experiments disposed of it twenty years ago, and Professor Tyndall is against it. Well, suppose he is? He ought to know that, should spontaneous generation
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of life, all the realm and dwelling of intelligent creatures endowed with will, subject to law and capable of free-will; then, it would become extravagant to think that our world should have been the subject of God's favours and His special interference, of His communications and His personal visit . . . . . . . Can the Earth presume to be considered the centre of the moral and religious Universe, he asks, if it has not the slightest distinction to rely upon in the physical Universe? Is it not as absurd to uphold such an assertion (of the plurality of inhabited worlds), as it would be to-day to uphold the old hypothesis of Ptolemy, who placed Earth in the centre of our system? . . . The above is quoted from memory, yet almost textually. The author fails to see that he is bursting his own soap-bubble with such a defence.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 151 SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.
be indeed proven impossible in our present world-period and actual conditions -- which the Occultists deny -- still it would be no demonstration that it could not have taken place under different cosmic conditions, not only in the seas of the Laurentian period, but even on the then convulsed Earth. It would be interesting to know how Science could ever account for the appearance of species and life on Earth, especially of Man, once that she rejects both the Biblical teachings and spontaneous generation. Pasteur's observations, however, are far from being perfect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud reject their importance and show that they have none. The question is so far left sub judice, as well as that other one "when, at what period, life appeared on the Earth?" As to the idea that Haeckel's Moneron -- a pinch of salt! -- has solved the problem of the origin of life, it is simply absurd. Those materialists, who feel inclined to pooh-pooh the theory of the "Self-existent," the "Self-born heavenly man," represented as an ethereal, astral man, must excuse even a tyro in Occultism laughing, in his turn, at some speculations of modern thought. After proving most learnedly that the primitive speck of protoplasm (moneron) is neither animal nor plant, but both, and that it has no ancestors among either of these, since it is that moneron which serves as a point of departure for all organized existence, we are finally told that the Monera are their own ancestors. This may be very scientific, but it is very metaphysical also; too much so, even for the Occultist.
If spontaneous generation has changed its methods now, owing perhaps to accumulated material on hand, so as to almost escape detection, it was in full swing in the genesis of terrestrial life. Even the simple physical form and the evolution of species show how Nature proceeds. The scale-bound, gigantic sauria, the winged pterodactyl, the Megalosaurus, and the hundred-feet long Iguanodon of the later period, are the transformations of the earliest representatives of the animal kingdom found in the sediments of the primary epoch. There was a time when all those above enumerated "antediluvian"
monsters appeared as filamentoid infusoria without shell or crust, with neither nerves, muscles, organs nor sex, and reproduced their kind by gemmation: as do microscopical animals also, the architects and builders of our mountain ranges, agreeably to the teachings of science. Why not man in this case? Why should he not have followed the same law in his growth, i.e., gradual condensation? Every unprejudiced person would prefer to believe that primeval humanity had at first an ethereal -- or, if so preferred, a huge filamentoid, jelly-like form, evolved by gods or natural "forces," which grew, condensed throughout millions of ages, and became gigantic in its physical impulse and tendency, until it settled into the huge, physical form of the Fourth Race Man, -- rather
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 152 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
than believe him created of the dust of the Earth (literally), or from some unknown anthropoid ancestor.
Nor does our esoteric theory clash with scientific data, except on first appearance, as Dr. A. Wilson, F.R.S., says, in a letter to "Knowledge, " (Dec. 23, 1881). "Evolution -- rather Nature, in the light of evolution -- has only been studied for some twenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought." And just because of that we do not lose all hope that materialistic science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the esoteric teachings -- if even at first divorced from their (to science) too metaphysical elements.
Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? "Each . . . . answer to the great Question (Man's Real Place in Nature), invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty," writes Prof. Huxley; "but, as invariably, time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth -- tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors"! ! Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his pithecoid ancestry being assignable to the list of "wholly intolerable beliefs," in the "larger knowledge" of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere "rising to the civilized state" does not account for the evolution of form.
In the same letter, "The Evolution of Man," Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put to "Knowledge " by "G. M.": --
" 'Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?' . . . If we refuse to admit (as science does) that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition -- that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution. We do not yet know, because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals. But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies 'evolution,' and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his 'evolution' very difficult to trace."
This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if "man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded?" At best it can only apply
to the outward, physical man. As remarked in "Isis Unveiled, " Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from the universals. The Aristotle-
Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has undeniably already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from the Universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of modern science, than was Aristotle. For he opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the earth and even of its rotundity. "Almost all those," he wrote, "who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary. . . ." Because (a) the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and (b) they followed the deductive method. Whereas, Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that "the centre of our system was occupied by the Sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day" ( Vide De Caelo, Book II., c. 13.) The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which can -- without falling into the absurdity of a "miraculous" man created out of the dust of the Earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, (the ex-protoplasmic moneron) -- account for his appearance on Earth.
Analogy is the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of physical scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of Fire-mist becoming gradually -- as it rolls through aeons of time in the interstellar spaces -- a planet, a self-luminous globe, to settle into a man-bearing world or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-
nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the sarcode* of the moneron, then passes from its protistic state** into the form of an animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindles again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical
* Or what is more generally known as Protoplasm. This substance received its name of "Sarcode" from Prof. Dujardin Beaumetz far earlier.
** The Monera are indeed Protista. They are neither animals "nor plants," writes Haeckel; " . . . the whole body of the Moneron represents nothing more than a single thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition." ("Journal of Microscopical Science, " Jan., 1869, p . 28.)
regions, and the universally common lizard* -- how can man alone escape the general law? "There were giants on earth in those days," says Genesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on anthropological and physiological fact.
And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, "a thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition," so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early "coat of skin," plus an immortal spiritual monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Haeckelian Moneron is, strictly "an organism without organs," an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.
No man of science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brahmins preposterous in the question of Chronology; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by esoteric science. This may easily be shown.
Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000 [[degrees]] to 200' Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western science (including geology) seems generally to allow our globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir W. Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago -- a statement respectfully contradicted by the archaic records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of science. Meanwhile, some geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. "Volger . . . . calculates, that the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years . . . . " Both time and space are infinite and eternal. "The Earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time" (Burmeister). "We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, what no astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable." (See Czolbe).**
Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Aryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. "They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth."
* Behold the Iguanodon of the Mesozoic ages -- the monster 100 feet long -- now transformed into the small Iguana lizard of South America. Popular traditions about giants in days of old, and their mention in every mythology, including the Bible, may some day be shown to be founded on fact. In nature, the logic of analogy alone ought to make us accept these traditions as scientific verities.
** "Force and Matter "; by L. Buchner, edited by J. F. Collingwood, F.R.S.L., p. 61.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 155 THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN THE PURANAS.
(Coleman.) To this the Vishnu Purana contains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very widely.
. . . "The Sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against midnight, in all the Dwipas (continents), Maitreya! But the rising and the setting of the Sun being perpetually opposite to each other -- and in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya; people speak of the rising of the Sun where they see it; and where the Sun disappears, there, to them, is his setting. Of the Sun, which is always in one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising, for what is called rising and setting are only the seeing and the not seeing the Sun." (Vishnu Purana, Book IL, ch. viii.)
To this Fitzedward Hall remarks, "The Heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on." Contradicted purposely, because it was a secret temple-
teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Aryans any longer.
To return to the Chronology of the geologists and anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that "of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer," is all that can be urged, so far. That man was not the last member in the mammalian family, but the first in this Round, is something that science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.
That man can be shown to have lived in the mid-Tertiary period, and in a geological age when there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that science cannot deny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.* But even supposing his existence in the Eocene period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous period? We are aware of the fact that only the boldest geologists dare to place man further back than the Miocene age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question: "We do not know." This ought to show that the men of science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Prof. Huxley, "the time represented by the coal formation would be six millions of years,** how many more millions would be required to cover
the time from the Jurassic period, or the middle of the so-called "Reptilian" age (when the Third Race appeared), up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?*
The writer is well aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the globe and man are the most liberal, always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day (in the Encyclopaedias) along with Cagliostro, and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that "Mesmerism" under its new name of Hypnotism -- a false nose on a very old face -- is accepted by science, it does not strengthen one's respect for that majority, when one sees the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of "Hypnotism," "Telepathic Impacts," and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed in it since the days of Solomon, and had never called its votaries, only a few years ago, "lunatics and impostors!"**
The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years, claimed by esoteric philosophy as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says: --
"The mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the will-born with bones"; adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago -- has yet a chance of being accepted by future scientists.
As far as XIXth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, to the effect that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld, and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine
** The same fate is in store for spiritualistic phenomena and all the other psychological manifestations of the inner Man. Since the days of Hume, whose researches culminated in a nihilistic idealism, Psychology has gradually shifted its position to one of crass materialism. Hume is regarded as a psychologist, and yet he denied a priori the possibility of phenomena in which millions now believe, including many men of science. The Hylo-idealists of to-day are rank Annihilationists. The schools of Spencer and Bain are respectively positivist and materialist, and not metaphysical at all. It is psychism and not psychology; it reminds one as little of the Vedantic teaching as the pessimism of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann recalls the esoteric philosophy, the heart and soul of true Buddhism.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 157 THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND OF SCIENCE.
Races with certainty to either the early Secondary, or the Primary ages of geology, one thing is clear: that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration of sexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene Man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the secondary or "Reptilian" age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of the ethereal astral races proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution -- the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages, astral evolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,* though developing on parallel lines, had no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-like ethereal man is related by virtue of his organization -- if such it can be called -- only to that plane from which the substance of his Upadhi is derived.
There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing -- but not all-seeing -- eyes of our modern naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates "Special creation" and the "Evolutionist" Anthropogenesis equally.
Again, to take up the question of "Spontaneous generation"; life -- as science shows -- has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane.
* It must be noted that, though the astral and physical planes of matter ran parallel with one another even in the earliest geological ages, yet they were not in the same phases of manifestation in which they are now. The Earth did not reach its present grade of density till 18,000,000 years ago. Since then both the physical and astral planes have become grosser.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 158 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There was a time when even the Haeckelian Moneron -- that simple globule of Protoplasm -- had not
yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came the Impulse which caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic "slime," now christened protoplasm. What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other globes already formed, Sir W. Thomson's wild theory to this effect, notwithstanding. And if they have so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other planets; who, or what, had carried them into those planets? Here, again, unless the Occult teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face a miracle; to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the philosophers of Eastern Aryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the monotheists; between which two it stands on its own entirely neutral ground. Hylozoism demands absolute Divine Thought, which would pervade the numberless active, creating Forces, or "Creators"; which entities are moved by, and have their being in, from, and through that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or their creations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active "Creators" are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by the inner man in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an ABSOLUTE Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living god, without immediate degradation of the ideal.* A Deity that manifests in Space and Time -- these two being simply the forms of THAT which is the Absolute ALL -- can be but a fractional part of the
* The conception and definition of the Absolute by Cardinal Cusa may satisfy only the Western mind, prisoned, so unconsciously to itself, and entirely degenerated by long centuries of scholastic and theological sophistry. But this "Recent philosophy of the Absolute," traced by Sir W. Hamilton to Cusa, would never satisfy the more acutely metaphysical mind of the Hindu Vedantin.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 159 OCEANS OF CARBONIC ACID?
whole. And since that "all" cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore that sensed creator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mere aspect thereof. To use the same metaphor -- inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand -- these creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring -- the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth -- in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God -- [[aprepes toi theo]]. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation, -- [[autournein hapanta]].
This Cudworth calls "Hylozoism." As old Zeno is credited by Laertius with having said, "Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted."*
Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its incipient physical form, i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of "geological periods."
But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the "Azoic" age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesised by the Naturalists. Not all the physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans -- i.e., since the Laurentian period, the Pyrolithic age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof -- as the experiments of the latter scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with carbon and nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans
of liquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the primary age -- let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.
The conditions that were necessary for the earliest race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal "jelly-speck" evolved in the ocean of crude Cosmic Matter, -- billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Moneron in its drops, called Oceans -- needed no "elements." The "Manu with soft bones" could well dispense with calcic phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the being which became primitive Man and the "Father of man," after evolving on planes of existence undreamt of by science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The
primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg's "Popul-Vuh, " who -- in the Mexican legends -- could act and live with equal ease under ground and water as upon the Earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre -
diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to physical science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? "Universal Genesis starts from the one, breaks into three, then five, and finally culminates into seven, to return into four, three, and one." (Commentary.)
For additional proofs consult Part II. of this Volume, "The Septenary in Nature."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 7
fThe Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 161 A SUGGESTIVE STANZA.
STANZA VII.
FROM THE SEMI-DIVINE DOWN TO THE FIRST
HUMAN RACES.
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§§ (24) The higher creators reject in their pride the forms evolved by the "Sons of Yoga." (25) They will not incarnate in the early "Egg-born." . . (26) They select the later androgynes. (27) The first man endowed with mind.
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24. THE SONS OF WISDOM, THE SONS OF NIGHT (issued from the body of Brahma when it became Night), READY FOR RE-BIRTH, CAME DOWN. THEY SAW THE (intellectually) VILE FORMS OF THE FIRST THIRD (still senseless Race) (a). "WE CAN CHOOSE," SAID THE LORDS, "WE HAVE WISDOM." SOME ENTERED THE CHHAYAS. SOME PROJECTED A SPARK. SOME DEFERRED TILL THE FOURTH (Race). FROM THEIR OWN ESSENCE THEY FILLED (intensified) THE KAMA (the vehicle of desire). THOSE WHO RECEIVED BUT A SPARK REMAINED DESTITUTE OF (higher) KNOWLEDGE. THE SPARK BURNT LOW (b). THE THIRD REMAINED MIND-LESS. THEIR JIVAS (Monads) WERE NOT READY. THESE WERE SET APART AMONG THE SEVEN (primitive human species ). THEY (became the) NARROW-
HEADED. THE THIRD WERE READY. IN THESE SHALL WE DWELL, SAID THE LORDS OF THE FLAME AND OF THE DARK WISDOM (c).
This Stanza contains, in itself, the whole key to the mysteries of evil, the so-called Fall of the angels, and the many problems that have puzzled the brains of the philosophers from the time that the memory of man began. It solves the secret of the subsequent inequalities of intellectual capacity, of birth or social position, and gives a logical explanation to the incomprehensible Karmic course throughout the aeons which followed. The best explanation which can be given, in view of the difficulties of the subject, shall now be attempted.
(a) Up to the Fourth Round, and even to the later part of the Third Race in this Round, Man -- if the ever-changing forms that clothed the Monads during the first three Rounds and the first two and a half races of the present one can be given that misleading name -- is, so far, only an animal intellectually. It is only in the actual midway Round that he develops in himself entirely the fourth principle as a fit vehicle for the
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fifth. But Manas will be relatively fully developed only in the following Round, when it will have an opportunity of becoming entirely divine until the end of the Rounds. As Christian Schoettgen says in Horae Hebraic, etc., the first terrestrial Adam "had only the breath of life," Nephesh, but not the living Soul.
(b) Here the inferior Races, of which there are still some analogues left -- as the Australians (now fast dying out) and some African and Oceanic tribes -- are meant. "They were not ready" signifies that the Karmic development of these Monads had not yet fitted them to occupy the forms of men destined for incarnation in higher intellectual Races. But this is explained later on.
(c) The Zohar speaks of "Black Fire," which is Absolute Light-Wisdom. To those who, prompted by old theological prejudice, may say: "But the Asuras are the rebel Devas, the opponents of the Gods -- hence devils, and the spirits of Evil," it is answered: Esoteric philosophy admits neither good nor evil per se, as existing independently in nature. The cause for both is found, as regards the Kosmos, in the necessity of contraries or contrasts, and with respect to man, in his human nature, his ignorance and passions. There is no devil or the utterly depraved, as there are no Angels absolutely perfect, though there may be spirits of Light and of Darkness; thus LUCIFER -- the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought -- is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the LOGOS in his highest, and the "Adversary" in his lowest aspect -- both of which are reflected in our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of Christ, makes the LOGOS, the Word, the first-born brother of Satan, the "first of all creatures." (Inst. div . Book II., c. viii., "Qabbalah," 116.)
The Vishnu Purana describes these primeval creatures (the Arvaksrota) with crooked digestive canals: They were "endowed with inward manifestations, but mutually in ignorance about their kind and nature." The twenty-eight kinds of Badha, or imperfections, do not apply, as Wilson thought, to the animals now known and specified by him,* for these did not exist in those geological periods. This is quite plain in the said work, in which the first created (on this globe) are the "five-fold immovable creation," minerals and vegetables; then come those fabulous animals, Tiryaksrota, (the monsters of the abyss slain by the "Lords," see Stanzas II. and III.); then the Urdhwasrotas, the happy celestial beings, which feed on ambrosia; then lastly, the Arvaksrotas, human beings -- Brahma's
seventh creation so-called. But these "creations," including the latter, did not occur on this globe, wherever else they may have taken place. It is not Brahma who creates things and men on this Earth, but the chief and Lord of the Prajapati, the Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation.* Obeying the
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command of Brahma, Daksha (the synthesis, or the aggregate, of the terrestrial creators and progenitors, Pitris included) made superior and inferior (vara and avara) things "referring to putra " progeny, and "bipeds and quadrupeds, and subsequently by his will (the Sons of Will and Yoga) made females," i.e., separated the androgynes. Here again, we have "bipeds" or men, created before the "quadrupeds" as in the esoteric teachings. (Vide supra and Stanza XII as explained.)
Since, in the exoteric accounts, the Asuras are the first beings created from the "body of night," while the Pitris issue from that of Twilight; the "gods" being placed by Parasara ( Vishnu Purana) between the two, and shown to evolve from the "body of the day," it is easy to discover a determined purpose to veil the order of creation. Man is the Arvaksrota coming from the "Body of the Dawn"; and elsewhere, man is again referred to, when the creator of the world, Brahma, is shown "creating fierce beings, denominated Bhutas and eaters of flesh," or as the text has it, "fiends frightful from being monkey-
coloured and carnivorous."** Whereas the Rakshasas are generally translated by "Evil Spirits" and "the enemies of the gods," which identifies them with the Asuras. In the Ramayana, when Hanuman is reconnoitering the enemy in Lanka, he finds there Rakshasas, some hideous, "while some were beautiful to look upon," and, in Vishnu Purana, there is a direct reference to their becoming the Saviours of "Humanity," or of Brahma.
The allegory is very ingenious. Great intellect and too much knowledge are a two-edged weapon in life, and instruments for evil as well as for good. When combined with Selfishness, they will make of the whole of Humanity a footstool for the elevation of him who possesses them, and a means for the attainment of his objects; while, applied to altruistic humanitarian purposes, they may become the means of the salvation of many. At all events, the absence of self-consciousness and intellect will make of man an idiot, a brute in human form. Brahma is Mahat -- the universal Mind -- hence the too-selfish among the Rakshasas showing the desire to become possessed of it all -- to "devour" Mahat. The allegory is transparent.
At any rate, esoteric philosophy identifies the pre-Brahmanical
Asuras, Rudras,* Rakshasas and all the "Adversaries" of the Gods in the allegories, with the Egos, which, by incarnating in the still witless man of the Third Race, made him consciously immortal. They are, then, during the cycle of Incarnations, the true dual Logos -- the conflicting and two-faced divine Principle in Man. The Commentary that follows, and the next Stanzas may, no doubt, throw more light on this very difficult tenet, but the writer does not feel competent to give it out fully. Of the succession of Races, however, they say: --
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"First come the SELF-EXISTENT on this Earth. They are the 'Spiritual Lives' projected by the absolute WILL and LAW, at the dawn of every rebirth of the worlds. These LIVES are the divine 'Sishta,' (the seed-Manus, or the Prajapati and the Pitris)."
From these proceed --
1. The First Race, the "Self-born," which are the (astral) shadows of their Progenitors.** The body was devoid of all understanding (mind, intelligence, and will). The inner being (the higher self or Monad), though within the earthly frame, was unconnected with it. The link, the Manas, was not there as yet.
2. From the First (race) emanated the second, called the "Sweat-born"*** and
* Whom Manu calls "our paternal grandfathers" (III., 284). The Rudras are the seven manifestations of Rudra-Siva, "the destroying god," and also the grand Yogi and ascetic.
** See § II, §§ 1, Commentary.
*** To speak of life as having arisen, and of the human race as having originated, in this absurdly unscientific way, in the face of the modern Pedigrees of Man, is to court instantaneous annihilation. The esoteric doctrine risks the danger, nevertheless, and even goes so far as to ask the impartial reader to compare the above hypothesis (if it is one) with Haeckel's theory -- now fast becoming an axiom with science -- which is quoted verbatim: --
". . . How did life, the living world of organisms, arise? And, secondly, the special question: How did the human race originate? The first of these two inquiries, that as to the first appearance of living beings, can only be decided empirically (! !) by proof of the so-called Archebiosis, or equivocal generation, or the spontaneous production of organisms of the simplest conceivable kind. Such are the Monera (Protogenes, Protamoeba, etc), exceedingly simple microscopic masses of protoplasm without structure or organisation, which take in nutriment and reproduce themselves by division. Such a Moneron as that primordial organism discovered by the renowned English zoologist Huxley, and named Bathybius Haeckelii, appears as a continuous thick protoplasmic covering at the greatest depths of the ocean, between 3,000 and 30,000 feet. It is true that the first appearance of such Monera has not up to the present moment been actually observed; but there is nothing intrinsically improbable in such an evolution." (The "Pedigree of Man, " Aveling's translation, p 33.)
The Bathybius protoplasm having recently turned out to be no organic substance at all, there remains little to be said. Nor, after reading this, does one need to consume further time in refuting the further assertion that . . . . "in that case man also [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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the "Boneless. " This is the Second Root-Race, endowed by the preservers (Rakshasas)* and the incarnating gods (Asuras and the Kumaras) with the first primitive and weak spark (the germ of intelligence) . . And from these in turn proceeds: - -
3. The Third Root-Race, the "Two-fold" (Androgynes). The first Races hereof are shells, till the last is "inhabited" (i.e., informed) by the Dhyanis.
The Second Race, as stated above, being also sexless, evolved out of itself, at its beginning, the Third Androgyne Race by an analogous, but already more complicated process. As described in the Commentary, the very earliest of that race were: --
"The 'Sons of Passive Yoga.* They issued from the second Manushyas
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] has beyond a doubt (to the minds of Haeckel and his like) arisen from the lower mammalia, apes and the earlier simian creatures, the still earlier Marsupialia, Amphibia, Pisces, by progressive transformations," all produced by "a series of natural forces working blindly. . . . . . . . . aim, without design" (p. 36).
The above-quoted passage bears its criticism on its own face. Science is made to teach that which, up to the present time, "has never been actually observed." She is made to deny the phenomenon of an intelligent nature and a vital force independent of form and matter, and to find it more scientific to teach the miraculous performance of "natural forces working blindly without aim or design." If so, then we are led to think that the physico-mechanical forces of the brains of certain eminent Scientists are leading them on as blindly to sacrifice logic and common sense on the altar of mutual admiration. Why should the protoplasmic Moneron producing the first living creature through self-division be held as a very scientific hypothesis, and an ethereal pre-human race generating the primeval men in the same fashion be tabooed as unscientific superstition? Or has materialism obtained a sole monopoly in Science?
* The Rakshasas, regarded in Indian popular theology as demons, are called the "Preservers" beyond the Himalayas. This double and contradictory meaning has its origin in a philosophical allegory, which is variously rendered in the Puranas. It is stated that when Brahma created the demons, Yakshas (from Yaksh, to eat) and the Rakshasas, both of which kinds of demons, as soon as born, wished to devour their creator, those among them that called out "Not so! oh, let him be saved (preserved)" were named Rakshasas ( Vishnu Purana Book I. ch. v.). The Bhagavata Purana (III, 20, 19-21) renders the allegory differently. Brahma transformed himself into night (or ignorance) invested with a body, upon which the Yakshas and Rakshasas seized, exclaiming "Do not spare it; devour it." Brahma then cried out, "Do not devour me, spare me." This has an inner meaning of course. The "body of Night" is the darkness of ignorance, and it is the darkness of silence and secrecy. Now the Rakshasas are shown in almost every case to be Yogis, pious Saddhus and Initiates, a rather unusual occupation for demons. The meaning then is that while we have power to dispel the darkness of ignorance, "devour it," we have to preserve the sacred truth from profanation. "Brahma is for the Brahmins alone," says that proud caste. The moral of the fable is evident.
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** The gradual evolution of man in the Secret Doctrine shows that all the later (to the profane the earliest) Races have their physical origin in the early Fourth Race. But it is the sub-race, which preceded the one that separated sexually, that is to be [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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(human race), and became oviparous. The emanations that came out of their bodies during the seasons of procreation were ovulary; the small spheroidal nuclei developing into a large soft, egg-like vehicle, gradually hardened, when, after a period of gestation, it broke and the young human animal issued from it unaided, as the fowls do in our race. "
This must seem to the reader ludicrously absurd. Nevertheless, it is strictly on the lines of evolutionary analogy, which science perceives in the development of the living animal species. First the moneron-
like procreation by self-division (vide Haeckel); then, after a few stages, the oviparous, as in the case of the reptiles, which are followed by the birds; then, finally, the mammals with their ovoviviparous modes of producing their young ones.
If the term ovoviviparous is applied to some fish and reptiles, which hatch their eggs within their bodies, why should it not be applied to female mammalians, including woman? The ovule, in which, after impregnation, the development of the foetus takes place, is an egg.
At all events, this conception is more philosophical than that of Eve with a suddenly created placenta giving birth to Cain, because of the Apple, when even the marsupial, the earliest of mammals, is not placental yet.
Moreover, the progressive order of the methods of reproduction, as unveiled by science, is a brilliant confirmation of esoteric Ethnology. It is only necessary to tabulate the data in order to prove our assertion. (Cf. especially Schmidt's "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 39, et. seq., and Laing's "A Modern Zoroastrian, " pp. 102-111.)I
1. Fission: --
(a) As seen in the division of the homogeneous speck of protoplasm, known as Moneron or Amoeba, into two.
(b) As seen in the division of the nucleated cell, in which the cell-nucleus splits into two sub-nuclei, which either develop within the original cell-wall or burst it, and multiply outside as independent entities. (Cf., the First Root-Race.)
II. Budding: --
A small portion of the parent structure swells out at the surface and finally parts company, growing to the size of the original organism; e.g., many vegetables, the sea-anemone, etc. (Cf., the Second Root-
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] regarded as the spiritual ancestors of our present generations, and especially of the Eastern Aryan Races. Weber's idea that the Indo-Germanic Race preceded the Aryan Vedic Race is, to the Occultist, grotesque to the last degree.
* Every process of healing and cicatrization in the higher animal groups -- even in the case of reproduction of mutilated limbs with the Amphibians -- is effected by fission and gemmation of the elementary morphological elements.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 167 MONADS AND ROUNDS.
III. Spores: --
A single cell thrown off by the parent organism, which develops into a multicellular organism reproducing the features of the latter, e.g., bacteria and mosses.
IV. Intermediate Hermaphroditism: --
Male and female organs inhering in the same individual; e.g., the majority of plants, worms, and snails, etc.; allied to budding. (Cf. Second and early Third Root-Races.)
V. True sexual union: --
(Cf. later Third Root-Race.)
We now come to an important point with regard to the double evolution of the human race. The Sons of Wisdom, or the spiritual Dhyanis, had become "intellectual" through their contact with matter, because they had already reached, during previous cycles of incarnation, that degree of intellect which enabled them to become independent and self-conscious entities, on this plane of matter. They were reborn only by reason of Karmic effects. They entered those who were "ready," and became the Arhats, or sages, alluded to above. This needs explanation.
It does not mean that Monads entered forms in which other Monads already were. They were "Essences," "Intelligences," and conscious spirits; entities seeking to become still more conscious by uniting with more developed matter. Their essence was too pure to be distinct from the universal essence; but their "Egos," or Manas (since they are called Manasaputra, born of "Mahat," or Brahma) had to pass through earthly human experiences to become all-wise, and be able to start on the returning ascending cycle. The Monads are not discrete principles, limited or conditioned, but rays from that one universal absolute Principle. The entrance into a dark room through the same aperture of one ray of sunlight following another will not constitute two rays, but one ray intensified. It is not in the course of
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natural law that man should become a perfect septenary being, before the seventh race in the seventh Round. Yet he has all these principles latent in him from his birth. Nor is it part of the evolutionary law that the Fifth principle (Manas), should receive its complete development before the Fifth Round. All such prematurely developed intellects (on the spiritual plane) in our Race are abnormal; they are those whom we call the "Fifth-Rounders." Even in the coming seventh Race, at the close of this Fourth Round, while our four lower principles will be fully developed, that of Manas will be only proportionately so. This limitation, however, refers solely to the spiritual development. The intellectual, on the physical plane, was reached during the Fourth Root-Race. Thus, those who were "half ready," who received "but a spark," constitute the average humanity which has to acquire its intellectuality during the present Manvantaric evolution,
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after which they will be ready in the next for the full reception of the "Sons of Wisdom." While those which "were not ready" at all, the latest Monads, which had hardly evolved from their last transitional and lower animal forms at the close of the Third Round, remained the "narrow-brained" of the Stanza. This explains the otherwise unaccountable degrees of intellectuality among the various races of men -- the savage Bushman and the European -- even now. Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are very little above the level of the animals, are not the unjustly disinherited, or the unfavoured, as some may think -- nothing of the kind. They are simply those latest arrivals among the human Monads, which were not ready: which have to evolve during the present Round, as on the three remaining globes (hence on four different planes of being) so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth Round. One remark may prove useful, as food for thought to the student in this connection. The MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the "narrow-brained"* savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had. The former are spinning out Karma only now; the latter are burdened with past, present, and future Karma. In this respect the poor savage is more fortunate than the greatest genius of civilised countries.
Let us pause before giving any more such strange teachings. Let us try and find out how far any ancient Scriptures, and even Science, permit the possibility of, or even distinctly corroborate, such wild notions as are found in our Anthropogenesis.
Recapitulating that which has been said we find: -- That the Secret Doctrine claims for man, (1) a polygenetic origin. (2) A variety of modes of procreation before humanity fell into the ordinary method of generation. (3) That the evolution of animals -- of the mammalians at any rate -- follows that of man instead of preceding it. And this is diametrically opposed to the now generally accepted theories of evolution and the descent of man from an animal ancestor.
* The term here means neither the dolicho-cephalic nor the brachyo-cephalic, nor yet skulls of a smaller volume, but simply brains devoid of intellect generally. The theory which would judge of the intellectual capacity of a man according to his cranial capacity, seems absurdly illogical to one who
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has studied the subject. The skulls of the stone period, as well as those of African Races (Bushmen included) show that the first are above rather than below the average of the brain capacity of the modern man, and the skulls of the last are on the whole (as in the case of Papuans and Polynesians generally) larger by one cubic inch than that of the average Frenchman. Again, the cranial capacity of the Parisian of to-day represents an average of 1437 cubic centimetres compared to 1523 of the Auvergnat.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 169 MONOGENISM OR POLYGENISM.
Let us, by giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, examine, first of all, the chances for the polygenetic theory among the men of science.
Now the majority of the Darwinian evolutionists incline to a polygenetic explanation of the origin of Races. On this particular question, however, scientists are, as in many other cases, at sixes and sevens; they agree to disagree.
"Does man descend from one single couple or from several groups -- monogenism or polygenism? As far as one can venture to pronounce on what in the absence of witnesses (?) will never be known (?), the second hypothesis is far the most probable."* Abel Hovelacque, in his "Science of Language," comes to a similar conclusion, arguing from the evidence available to a linguistic enquirer.
In an address delivered before the British Association, Professor W. H. Flower remarked on this question: --
"The view which appears best to accord with what is now known of the characters and distribution of the races of man . . . . is a modification of the monogenistic hypothesis (!). Without entering into the difficult question of the method of man's first appearance upon the world, we must assume for it a vast antiquity, at all events as measured by any historical standard. If we had any approach to a complete palaeontological record, the history of Man could be re-constructed, but nothing of the kind is forthcoming. "
Such an admission must be regarded as fatal to the dogmatism of the physical Evolutionists, and as opening a wide margin to occult speculations. The opponents of the Darwinian theory were, and still remain, polygenists. Such "intellectual giants" as John Crawford and James Hunt discussed the problem and favoured polygenesis, and in their day there was a far stronger feeling in favour of than against this theory. It is only in 1864 that Darwinians began to be wedded to the theory of unity, of which Messrs. Huxley and Lubbock became the first coryphai.
As regards that other question, of the priority of man to the animals in the order of evolution, the answer is as promptly given. If man is really the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, then the teaching has nothing so very impossible in it, and is but logical. For, man becomes that Macrocosm for the three lower kingdoms under him. Arguing from a physical standpoint, all the lower kingdoms, save the mineral -- which is light itself, crystallised and immetallised -- from plants to the creatures which preceded the first mammalians, all have been consolidated in their physical structures by means of the
bodies, on which they fed and which gave them their outer bodies. In his turn, man grew more physical, by re-absorbing into his system that which he had given out, and which became transformed in the living animal crucibles through which it had passed, owing to Nature's alchemical transmutations. There were animals in those days of which our modern naturalists have never dreamed; and the stronger became physical material man, the giants of those times, the more powerful were his emanations. Once that Androgyne "humanity" separated into sexes, transformed by Nature into child-
bearing engines, it ceased to procreate its like through drops of vital energy oozing out of the body. But while man was still ignorant of his procreative powers on the human plane, (before his Fall, as a believer in Adam would say,) all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammal-animal forms. Evolution is an eternal cycle of becoming, we are taught; and nature never leaves an atom unused. Moreover, from the beginning of the Round, all in Nature tends to become Man. All the impulses of the dual, centripetal and centrifugal Force are directed towards one point -- MAN. The progress in the succession of beings, says Agassiz, "consists in an increasing similarity of the living fauna, and, among the vertebrates, especially, in the increasing resemblance to man. Man is the end towards which all animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first palaeozoic fishes."*
Just so; but "the palaeozoic fishes" being at the lower curve of the arc of the evolution of forms, this Round began with astral man, the reflection of the Dhyan Chohans, called the "Builders. " Man is the alpha and the omega of objective creation. As said in "Isis Unveiled, " "all things had their origin in spirit -- evolution having originally begun from above and proceeding downwards, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory."** Therefore, the tendency spoken of by the eminent naturalist above quoted, is one inherent in every atom. Only, were one to apply it to both sides of the evolution, the observations made would greatly interfere with the modern theory, which has now almost become (Darwinian) law.
But in citing the passage from Agassiz' work with approval, it must not be understood that the occultists are making any concession to the theory, which derives man from the animal kingdom. The fact that in this Round he preceded the mammalia is obviously not impugned by the consideration that the latter (mammalia) follow in the wake of man.
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** Vol. I, p. 154.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 171 A SUGGESTIVE EXPLANATION.
25. HOW DID THE MANASA, THE SONS OF WISDOM ACT? THEY REJECTED THE SELF-
BORN, (the boneless). THEY ARE NOT READY. THEY SPURNED THE (First) SWEAT-BORN.* THEY ARE NOT QUITE READY. THEY WOULD NOT ENTER THE (First) EGG-BORN.**
To a Theist or a Christian this verse would suggest a rather theological idea: that of the Fall of the Angels through Pride. In the Secret Doctrine, however, the reasons for the refusal to incarnate in half-
ready physical bodies seem to be more connected with physiological than metaphysical reasons. Not all the organisms were sufficiently ready. The incarnating powers chose the ripest fruits and spurned the rest.***
By a curious coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the continent on which the first androgynes, the Third Root-Race, separated, the writer chose, on geographical considerations, that of "Lemuria," invented by Mr. P. L. Sclater. It is only later, that reading Haeckel's "Pedigree of Man," it was found that the German "Animalist" had chosen the name for his late continent. He traces, properly enough, the centre of human evolution to "Lemuria," but with a slight scientific variation. Speaking of it as that "cradle of mankind," he pictures the gradual transformation of the anthropoid mammal into the primeval savage!! Vogt, again, holds that in America Man sprang from a branch of the platyrrhine apes, independently of the origination of the African and Asian root-stocks from the old world catarrhinians. Anthropologists are, as usual, at loggerheads on this question, as on many others. We shall examine this claim in the light of esoteric philosophy in Stanza VIII. Meanwhile, let us give a few moments of attention to the various consecutive modes of procreation according to the laws of Evolution.
Let us begin by the mode of reproduction of the later sub-races of the Third human race, by those who found themselves endowed with the sacred fire from the spark of higher and then independent Beings, who were the psychic and spiritual parents of Man, as the lower Pitar Devata (the Pitris) were the progenitors of his physical body. That Third and holy Race consisted of men who, at their zenith, were described
* This is explained in the section which follows this series of Stanzas in the allegory from the Puranas concerning Kandu, the holy sage, and Pramlocha, the nymph alleged to have hypnotised him, (Vide § II, Commentary after St.I.), a suggestive allegory, scientifically, as the drops of perspiration, which she exuded, are the symbols of the spores of science ( Vide infra).
** This will be explained as we proceed. This unwillingness to fashion men, or create, is symbolized in the Puranas by Daksha having to deal with his opponent Narada, the "strife-making ascetic."
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*** Vide Verse 24.
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as, "towering giants of godly strength and beauty, and the depositories of all the mysteries of Heaven and Earth." Have they likewise fallen, if, then, incarnation was the Fall?
Of this presently. The only thing now to be noted of these is, that the chief gods and heroes of the Fourth and Fifth Races, as of later antiquity, are the deified images of these men of the Third. The days of their physiological purity, and those of their so-called Fall, have equally survived in the hearts and memories of their descendants. Hence, the dual nature shown in those gods, both virtue and sin being exalted to their highest degree, in the biographies composed by posterity. They were the pre-Adamite and the divine Races, with which even theology, in whose sight they are all "the accursed Cainite Races," now begins to busy itself.
But the action of "spiritual progenitors" of that Race has first to be disposed of. A very difficult and abstruse point has to be explained with regard to Stanzas 26 and 27. These say: --
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26. WHEN THE SWEAT-BORN PRODUCED THE EGG-BORN, THE TWO-FOLD (androgyne Third Race*), THE MIGHTY, THE POWERFUL WITH BONES, THE LORDS OF WISDOM SAID: "NOW SHALL WE CREATE" (a).
Why "now" -- and not earlier? This the following sloka explains.
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27. (Then) THE THIRD (race) BECAME THE VAHAN (vehicle) OF THE LORDS OF WISDOM. IT CREATED SONS OF "WILL AND YOGA," BY KRIYASAKTI (b), IT CREATED THEM, THE HOLY FATHERS, ANCESTORS OF THE ARHATS. . . .
(a) How did they create, since the "Lords of Wisdom" are identical with the Hindu Devas, who refuse "to create"? Clearly they are the
* The evolutionist Professor Schmidt alludes to "the fact of the separation of sexes, as to the derivation of which from species once hermaphrodite all (the believers in creation naturally excepted) are assuredly of one accord." Such indeed is the incontestable evidence drawn from the presence of rudimentary organs. (Cf., his "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 159.) Apart from such palpable traces of a primeval hermaphroditism, the fact may be noted that, as Laing writes, "a study of embryology. . . . shows that in the human higher animal species the distinction of sex is not developed
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until a considerable progress has been made in the growth of the embryo." ("A Modern Zoroastrian, " p.106.) The Law of Retardation -- operative alike in the case of human races, animal species, etc., when a higher type has once been evolved -- still preserves hermaphroditism as the reproductive method of the majority of plants and many lower animals.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 173 THE SONS OF KRIYASAKTI.
Kumaras of the Hindu Pantheon and Puranas, those elder sons of Brahma, "Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas," who, previously created by him "without desire or passion, remained chaste, full of holy wisdom and undesirous of progeny?"*
The power, by which they first created, is just that which has since caused them to be degraded from their high status to the position of evil spirits, of Satan and his Host, created in their turn by the unclean fancy of exoteric creeds. It was by Kriyasakti, that mysterious and divine power latent in the will of every man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and developed by Yogi-training, remains dormant in 999,999 men out of a million, and gets atrophied. This power is explained in the "Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,"** as follows: --
(b) "Kriyasakti -- the mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancients held that any idea will manifest itself externally, if one's attention (and Will) is deeply concentrated upon it; similarly, an intense volition will be followed by the desired result. A Yogi generally performs his wonders by means of Itchasakti (Will-power) and Kriyasakti."
The Third Race had thus created the so-called SONS OF WILL AND YOGA, or the "ancestors" (the spiritual forefathers) of all the subsequent and present Arhats, or Mahatmas, in a truly immaculate way. They were indeed created, not begotten, as were their brethren of the Fourth Race, who were generated sexually after the separation of sexes, the Fall of Man. For creation is but the result of will acting on phenomenal matter, the calling forth out of it the primordial divine Light and eternal Life. They were the "holy seed-grain" of the future Saviours of Humanity.
Here we have to make again a break, in order to explain certain difficult points, of which there are so many. It is almost impossible to avoid such interruptions. For explanations and a philosophical account of the nature of those beings, which are now viewed as the "Evil" and rebellious Spirits, the creators by Kriyasakti, the reader is referred to the chapters on "The Fallen Angels" and "The Mystic Dragons," in Part II. of this Volume.
The order of the evolution of the human Races stands thus in the Fifth Book of the Commentaries, and was already given: --
The First men were Chhayas (1) ; the second, the "Sweat-born" (2), the Third, "Egg-born, " and the holy Fathers born by the power of Kriyasakti (3); the Fourth were the children of the Padmapani (Chenresi) (4).
Of course such primeval modes of procreation -- by the evolution of one's image, through drops of perspiration, after that by Yoga, and then by what people will regard as magic (Kriyasakti) -- are doomed beforehand to be regarded as fairy-tales. Nevertheless, beginning with the first and ending with the last, there is really nothing miraculous in them, nor anything which could not be shown natural. This must be proven.
1. Chhaya-birth, or that primeval mode of sexless procreation, the first Race having oozed out, so to say, from the bodies of the Pitris, is hinted at in a Cosmic allegory in the Puranas.* It is the beautiful allegory and story of Sanjna, the daughter of Viswakarman -- married to the Sun, who, "unable to endure the fervours of her lord," gave him her chhaya (shadow, image, or astral body), while she herself repaired to the jungle to perform religious devotions, or Tapas. The Sun, supposing the "chhaya" to be his wife begat by her children, like Adam with Lilith -- an ethereal shadow also, as in the legend, though an actual living female monster millions of years ago.
But, perhaps, this instance proves little except the exuberant fancy of the Puranic authors. We have another proof ready. If the materialised forms, which are sometimes seen oozing out of the bodies of certain mediums could, instead of vanishing, be fixed and made solid -- the creation of the first Race would become quite comprehensible. This kind of procreation cannot fail to be suggestive to the student. Neither the mystery nor the impossibility of such a mode is certainly any greater -- while it is far more comprehensible to the mind of the true metaphysical thinker - than the mystery of the conception of the foetus, its gestation and birth as a child, as we now know it.
Now to the curious and little understood corroboration in the Puranas about the "Sweat-born."
2. Kandu is a sage and a Yogi, eminent in holy wisdom and pious austerities, which, finally, awaken the jealousy of the gods, who are represented in the Hindu Scriptures as being in never-ending strife with the ascetics. Indra, the "King of the Gods,"** finally sends one of his female Apsarasas to tempt the sage. This is no worse than Jehovah sending Sarah, Abraham's wife, to tempt Pharaoh; but in truth it is those gods (and god), who are ever trying to disturb ascetics and thus make them lose the fruit of their austerities, who ought to be regarded as "tempting demons," instead of applying the term to the Rudras, Kumaras, and Asuras, whose great sanctity and chastity seem a standing reproach to the Don Juanic gods of the Pantheon. But it is
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** In the oldest MS. of " Vishnu-Purana" in the possession of an Initiate in Southern India, the god is not Indra, but Kama, the god of love and desire. See text further on.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 175 A SAINT -- HYPNOTISED.
the reverse that we find in all the Puranic allegories, and not without good esoteric reason.
The king of the gods (or Indra) sends a beautiful Apsarasas (nymph) named Pramlocha to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her unholy purpose and "907 years six months and three days"* spent in her company seem to the sage as one day. When this psychological or hypnotic state ends, the Muni curses bitterly the creature who seduced him, thus disturbing his devotions. "Depart, begone!" he cries, "vile bundle of illusions!" . . . And Pramlocha, terrified, flies away, wiping the perspiration from her body with the leaves of the trees as she passes through the air. She went from tree to tree, and as, with the dusky shoots that crowned their summits, she dried her limbs, the child she had conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores of her skin in drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and the winds collected them into one mass. "This," said Soma (the Moon), "I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till the exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely girl named Marisha."**
Now Kandu stands here for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one devoid of mind, which is hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the "Lord-god" breathes the breath of life but not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the Earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the divine Soul. Pramlocha is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan Adam; and Marisha, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the "sweat-born," and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of Mankind.
As remarked in the foot note (vide supra) it is not Indra, who now figures in the Puranas, but Kamadeva, the god of love and desire, who sends Pramlocha on Earth. Logic, besides the esoteric doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kama is the king and lord of the Apsarasas, of whom Pramlocha is one; and, therefore, when Kandu, in cursing her,
* These are the exoteric figures given in a purposely reversed and distorted way, being the figure of the duration of the cycle between the first and second human race. All Orientalists to the contrary, there is not a word in any of the Puranas that has not a special esoteric meaning.
** "Vishnu Purana," Book I., ch. 15. Cf. also Vivien's temptation of Merlin (Tennyson), the same legend in Irish tradition.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 176 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
exclaims "Thou hast performed the office assigned by the monarch of the gods, go!" he must mean by that monarch Kama and not Indra, to whom the Apsarasas are not subservient. For Kama, again, is in the Rig Veda (x . 129) the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation. He was the first movement that stirred the ONE, after its manifestation from the purely abstract principle, to create, "Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind ; and which sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity." A hymn in the Atharva Veda exalts Kama into a supreme God and Creator, and says: "Kama was born the first. Him, neither gods nor fathers (Pitara) nor men have equalled." . . . . The Atharva Veda identifies him with Agni , but makes him superior to that god. The Taittariya Brahmana makes him allegorically the son of Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Sraddha (faith). Elsewhere Kama is born from the heart of Brahma; therefore he is Atma-Bhu "Self-Existent," and Aja, the "unborn." His sending Promlocha has a deep philosophical meaning; sent by Indra -- the narrative has none. As Eros was connected in early Greek mythology with the world's creation, and only afterwards became the sexual Cupid, so was Kama in his original Vedic character, (Harivansa making him a son of Lakshmi, who is Venus). The allegory, as said, shows the psychic element developing the physiological, before the birth of Daksha, the progenitor of real physical men, made to be born from Marisha and before whose time living beings and men were procreated "by the will, by sight, by touch and by Yoga," as will be shown.
This, then, is the allegory built on the mode of procreation of the Second or the "Sweat-born." The same for the Third Race in its final development.
Marisha, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the Prachetasas, the production of the "Mind-born" sons of Brahma also*, from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha, a son of Brahma
* The text has: -- "From Brahma were born mind-engendered progeny, with forms and faculties derived from his corporeal nature, embodied spirits produced from the limbs (gatra) of Dhimat (all-
wise deity). These beings were the abode of the three qualities of deva-sarga (divine creation, which, as the five-fold creation, is devoid of clearness of perception, without reflection, dull of nature). But as they did not multiply themselves, Brahma created "other mind-born sons like himself," namely, the Brahma-rishis, or the Prajapati (ten and seven). Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas (Brahma) were previously created, but, as shown elsewhere, they were "without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the universe and undesirous of progeny" (Book I, ch. 7). These Sanandana and other Kumaras are then the Gods, who after refusing to "create progeny" are forced to incarnate in senseless men. The reader must pardon unavoidable repetitions in view of the great number of the facts given.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 177 SWEAT-BORN AND ANDROGYNES.
also, in a former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Puranas, in order to mislead, yet speaking the truth.
(3.) The early Third Race, then, is formed from drops of "sweat," which, after many a transformation, grow into human bodies. This is not more difficult to imagine or realise than the growth of the foetus from an imperceptible germ, which foetus develops into a child, and then into a strong, heavy man. But this race again changes its mode of procreation according to the Commentaries. It is said to have emanated a vis formativa, which changed the drops of perspiration into greater drops, which grew, expanded, and became ovoid bodies -- huge eggs. In these the human foetus gestated for several years. In the Puranas, Marisha, the daughter of Kandu, the sage, becomes the wife of the Prachetasas and the mother of Daksha. Now Daksha is the father of the first human-like progenitors, having been born in this way. He is mentioned later on. The evolution of man, the microcosm, is analogous to that of the Universe, the macrocosm. His evolution stands between that of the latter and that of the animal, for which man, in his turn, is a macrocosm.
Then the race becomes: --
(4.) The androgyne, or hermaphrodite. This process of men-bearing explains, perhaps, why Aristophanes* describes the nature of the old race as androgynous, the form of every individual being rounded, "having the back and sides as in a circle," whose "manner of running was circular . . . . terrible in force and strength and with prodigious ambition." Therefore, to make them weaker, "Zeus divided them (in the Third Root-Race) into two, and Apollo (the Sun), under his direction, closed up the skin." The Madagascans (the island belonged to Lemuria) have a tradition about the first man, who lived at first without eating, and, having indulged in food, a swelling appeared in his leg; this bursting, there emerged from it a female, who became the mother of their race. Truly . . . "We have our sciences of Heterogenesis and Parthenogenesis, showing that the field is yet open. . . . . The polyps . . . . produce their offspring from themselves, like the buds and ramifications of a tree. . . . " Why not the primitive human polyp? The very interesting polyp Stauridium passes alternately from gemmation into the sex method of reproduction. Curiously enough, though it grows merely as a polyp on a stalk, it produces gemmules, which ultimately develop into a sea-nettle or Medusa. The Medusa is utterly dissimilar to its parent-organism, the Stauridium. It also reproduces itself differently, by sexual method, and from the resulting eggs Stauridia once more put in
an appearance. This striking fact may assist many to understand that a form may be evolved -- as in the sexual Lemurians from Hermaphrodite parentage -- quite unlike its immediate progenitors. It is, moreover, unquestionable that in the case of human incarnations the law of Karma, racial or individual, overrides the subordinate tendencies of "Heredity," its servant.
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The meaning of the last sentence in the above-quoted Commentary on Stanza 27, namely, that the Fourth Race were the children of Padmapani, may find its explanation in a certain letter from the Inspirer of "Esoteric Buddhism " quoted on p. 68. "The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-
race of the Fourth Root-Race -- the above-mentioned Chinamen and their off-shoots and branchlets. (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hungarians, Finns, and even the Esquimaux are all remnants of this last offshoot.)"
Padmapani, or Avalokiteswara in Sanskrit, is, in Tibetan, Chenresi. Now, Avalokiteswara is the great Logos in its higher aspect and in the divine regions. But in the manifested planes, he is, like Daksha, the progenitor (in a spiritual sense) of men. Padmapani-Avalokiteswara is called esoterically Bhodhisatva (or Dhyan Chohan) Chenresi Vanchug, "the powerful and all-seeing." He is considered now as the greatest protector of Asia in general, and of Tibet in particular. In order to guide the Tibetans and Lamas in holiness, and preserve the great Arhats in the world, this heavenly Being is credited with manifesting himself from age to age in human form. A popular legend has it that whenever faith begins to die out in the world, Padmapani Chenresi, the "lotus-bearer," emits a brilliant ray of light, and forthwith incarnates himself in one of the two great Lamas -- the Dalai and Teschu Lamas; finally, it is believed that he will incarnate as "the most perfect Buddha" in Tibet, instead of in India, where his predecessors, the great Rishis and Manus had appeared in the beginning of our Race, but now appear no longer. Even the exoteric appearance of Dhyani Chenresi is suggestive of the esoteric teaching. He is evidently, like Daksha, the synthesis of all the preceding Races and the progenitor of all the human Races after the Third, the first complete one, and thus is represented as the culmination of the four primeval races in his eleven-faced form. It is a column built in four rows, each series having three faces or heads of different complexions: the three faces for each race being typical of its three fundamental physiological transformations. The first is white (moon-coloured); the second is yellow; the third, red-brown; the fourth, in which are only two faces -- the third face being left a blank -- (a reference to the untimely end of the Atlanteans) is brown-black. Padmapani (Daksha) is seated on the column, and forms the apex. In this reference
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 179 THE BIRTH-DAYS OF THE DHYANIS.
compare Stanza 39. The Dhyan Chohan is represented with four arms, another allusion to the four races. For while two are folded, the third hand holds a lotus (Padmapani, "the lotus-bearer"), this flower symbolizing generation, and the fourth holds a serpent, emblem of the Wisdom in his power.
On his neck is a rosary, and on his head the sign of water -- matter, deluge -- while on his brow rests the third eye (Siva's eye, that of spiritual insight). His name is "Protector" (of Tibet), "Saviour of Humanity." On other occasions when he has only two arms, he is Chenresi, the Dhyani and Bhodisatva, Chakna-padmakarpo, "he who holds a lotus." His other name is Chantong, "he of the 1,000 eyes," when he is endowed with a thousand arms and hands, on the palm of each of which is represented an eye of Wisdom, these arms radiating from his body like a forest of rays. Another of his names is Lokapati and Lokanatha (Sanskrit) "Lord of the World"; and Jigtengonpo (Tibetan), "Protector and Saviour against evil" of any kind.
Padmapani, however, is the "lotus-bearer" symbolically only for the profane; esoterically, it means the
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supporter of the Kalpas, the last of which, the present Maha-Kalpa (the Varaha), is called Padma, and represents one half of the life of Brahma. Though a minor Kalpa, it is called Maha, "great," because it comprises the age in which Brahma sprang from a lotus. Theoretically, the Kalpas are infinite, but practically they are divided and sub-divided in Space and Time, each division -- down to the smallest -- having its own Dhyani as patron or regent. Padmapani (Avalokiteshwara) becomes, in China, in his female aspect, Kwan-yin, "who assumes any form, at pleasure, in order to save mankind." The knowledge of the astrological aspect of the constellations on the respective "birth-days" of these Dhyanis -- Amitabha (the O-mi-to Fo, of China), included: e.g., on the 19th day of the second month, on the 17th day of the eleventh month, and on the 7th day of the third month, etc., etc. -- gives the Occultist the greatest facilities for performing what are called "magic" feats. The future of an individual is seen, with all its coming events marshalled in order, in a magic mirror placed under the ray of certain constellations. But -- beware of the reverse of the medal, SORCERY.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 180 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA VIII.
EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAMMALIANS. -- THE
FIRST FALL.
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§§ (28) How the first mammals were produced. (29) A quasi-Darwinian Evolution. (30) The animals get solid bodies. (31) Their separation into sexes. (32) The first sin of the mindless men.
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28. FROM THE DROPS OF SWEAT (a); FROM THE RESIDUE OF THE SUBSTANCE; MATTER FROM DEAD BODIES AND ANIMALS OF THE WHEEL BEFORE (previous, Third Round ); AND FROM CAST-OFF DUST; THE FIRST ANIMALS (of this Round) WERE PRODUCED.
(a) The Occult doctrine maintains that, in this Round, the mammalians were a later work of evolution than man. Evolution proceeds in cycles. The great Manvantaric cycle of Seven Rounds, beginning in the First Round with mineral, vegetable, and animal, brings its evolutionary work on the descending arc to a dead stop in the middle of the Fourth Race, at the close of the first half of the Fourth Round. It is on our Earth, then, (the Fourth sphere and the lowest) and in the present Round, that this middle point has been reached. And since the Monad has passed, after its "first inmetallization" on Globe A, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds in every degree of the three states of matter, except the last degree of the third or solid state, which it reached only at the "mid-point of evolution" it is but logical and natural that at the beginning of the Fourth Round on Globe D, Man should be the first to appear; and also that his frame should be of the most tenuous matter that is compatible with objectivity. To make it still clearer: if the Monad begins its cycle of incarnations through the three objective kingdoms on the descending curved line, it has necessarily to enter on the re-ascending curved line of the sphere as a man also. On the descending arc it is the spiritual which is gradually transformed into the material. On the middle line of the base, Spirit and Matter are equilibrized in Man. On the ascending arc, Spirit is slowly re-asserting itself at the expense of the physical, or matter, so that, at the close of the seventh Race of the Seventh Round, the Monad will find itself as
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 181 MEN, THE PROGENITORS OF ANIMALS.
free from matter and all its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the
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experience and wisdom, the fruition of all its personal lives, without their evil and temptations.
This order of evolution is found also in Genesis (ch. 1 and 2) if one reads it in its true esoteric sense, for chapter i. contains the history of the first Three Rounds, as well as that of the first Three Races of the Fourth, up to that moment when Man is called to conscious life by the Elohim of Wisdom. In the first chapter, animals, whales and fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam.* In the second, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only appear after him. Even the state of mental torpor and unconsciousness of the first two races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is symbolized, in the second chapter of Genesis, by the deep sleep of Adam. It was the dreamless sleep of mental inaction, the slumber of the Soul and Mind, which was meant by that "sleep," and not at all the physiological process of differentiation of sexes, as a learned French theorist (M. Naudin) imagined.
The Puranas, the Chaldean and Egyptian fragments, and also the Chinese traditions, all show an agreement with the Secret Doctrine as to the process and order of evolution. We find in them the corroboration of almost all our teaching. For instance: the statement concerning the oviparous mode of procreation of the Third Race, and even a hint at a less innocent mode of the procreation of the first mammal forms, "gigantic, transparent, dumb and monstrous they were," says the Commentary. Study the stories of the several Rishis and their multifarious progeny; e.g., Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents and Nagas -- the oviparous brood; Kasyapa was grandsire, through his wife Tamra, of the birds and of Garuda, king of the feathered tribe; while by his wife Surabhi, he was the parent of cows and buffaloes, etc., etc.
In the Secret Doctrine, the first Nagas -- beings wiser than Serpents -- are the "Sons of Will and Yoga," born before the complete separation of the sexes, "matured in the man-bearing eggs** produced by the power (Kriyasakti) of the holy sages" of the early Third Race.***
*An allegorical reference to the "Sacred Animals" of the Zodiac and other heavenly bodies. Some Kabalists see in them the prototypes of the animals.
** In "Hesiod," Zeus creates his third race of men out of ash-trees. In the "Popol Vuh" the Third Race of men is created out of the tree Tzita and the marrow of the reed called Sibac. But Sibac means "egg" in the mystery language of the Artufas (or Initiation caves). In a report sent in 1812 to the Cortes by Don Baptista Pino it is said: "All the Pueblos have their Artufas -- so the natives call subterranean rooms with only a single door where they (secretly) assemble. . . . . These are impenetrable temples . . . . and the doors are always closed to the Spaniards. . . . . They adore the Sun and Moon . . . . fire and the great SNAKE (the creative power), whose eggs are called Sibac."
*** There is a notable difference esoterically between the words Sarpa and Naga, [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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". . . . . In these were incarnated the Lords of the three (upper) worlds, the various classes of Rudras, who had been Tushitas, who had been Jayas, who are Adityas ;" for, as explained by Parasara, "There are a hundred appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras."
Some of the descendants of the primitive Nagas, the Serpents of Wisdom, peopled America, when its continent arose during the palmy days of the great Atlantis, (America being the Patala or Antipodes of Jambu-Dwipa, not of Bharata-Varsha). Otherwise, whence the traditions and legends -- the latter always more true than history, as says Augustin Thierry -- and even the identity in the names of certain "medicine men" and priests, who exist to this day in Mexico? We shall have to say something of the Nargals and the Nagals and also of Nagalism, called "devil-worship" by the Missionaries.
In almost all the Puranas, the story of the "Sacrifice of Daksha" is given, the oldest account of which is to be found in Vayu Purana. Allegorical as it is, there is more meaning and biological revelation in it to a Naturalist, than in all the pseudo-scientific vagaries, which are regarded as learned theories and hypotheses.
Daksha, who is regarded as the Chief Progenitor, is, moreover, pointed out as the creator of physical man in the "fable," which makes him lose his head from his body in the general strife between the gods and the Raumas. This head, being burnt in the fire, is replaced by the head of a ram (Kasi-
Khanda). Now the ram's head and horns are ever the symbol of generating power and of reproductive force, and are phallic. As we have shown, it is Daksha who establishes the era of men engendered by sexual intercourse. But this mode of procreation did not occur suddenly, as one may think, and required long ages before it became the one "natural" way. Therefore, his sacrifice to the gods is shown as interfered with by Siva, the destroying deity, evolution and PROGRESS personified, who is the regenerator at the same time; who destroys things under one form but to recall them to life under another more perfect type. Siva-Rudra creates the terrible Virabhadra (born of his breath) the "thousand-headed, thousand-armed" (etc.) monster, and commissions him to destroy the sacrifice prepared by Daksha. Then Virabhadra, "abiding in the region of the ghosts (ethereal men) . . . .
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] though they are both used indiscriminately. Sarpa (serpent) is from the root Srip, serpo to creep; and they are called "Ahi," from Ha, to abandon. "The sarpa was produced from Brahma's hair, which, owing to his fright at beholding the Yakshas, whom he had created horrible to behold, fell off from the head, each hair becoming a serpent. They are called Sarpa from their creeping and Ahi because they had deserted the head" (Wilson). But the Nagas, their serpent's tail notwithstanding, do not creep, but manage to walk, run and fight in the allegories.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 183 ARCHAIC ZOOLOGY.
created from the pores of the skin (Romakupas), powerful Raumas,* (or Raumyas)." Now, however mythical the allegory, the Mahabharata, which is history as much as is the Iliad, shows** the Raumyas and other races, as springing in the same manner from the Romakupas, hair or skin pores. This allegorical description of the "sacrifice" is full of significance to the students of the Secret Doctrine
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who know of the "Sweat-born."
In the Vayu Purana's account of Daksha's sacrifice, moreover, it is said to have taken place in the presence of creatures born from the egg, from the vapour, vegetation, pores of the skin, and, finally only, from the womb.
Daksha typifies the early Third Race, holy and pure, still devoid of an individual Ego, and having merely the passive capacities. Brahma, therefore, commands him to create (in the exoteric texts); when, obeying the command, he made "inferior and superior" (avara and vara) progeny (putra ), bipeds and quadrupeds; and by his will, gave birth to females . . . . to the gods, the Daityas (giants of the Fourth Race), the snake-gods, animals, cattle and the Danavas (Titans and demon Magicians) and other beings."
. . . . "From that period forward, living creatures were engendered by sexual intercourse. Before the time of Daksha, they were variously propagated -- by the will, by sight, by touch, and by Yoga-
power. "*** And now comes the simply zoological teaching.
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29. ANIMALS WITH BONES, DRAGONS OF THE DEEP AND FLYING SARPAS (serpents) WERE ADDED TO THE CREEPING THINGS. THEY THAT CREEP ON THE GROUND GOT WINGS. THEY OF THE LONG NECKS IN THE WATER, BECAME THE PROGENITORS OF THE FOWLS OF THE AIR (a).
(a) This is a point on which the teachings and modern biological speculation are in perfect accord. The missing links representing this transition process between reptile and bird are apparent to the veriest bigot, especially in the ornithoscelidae, hesperornis, and the archaeopteryx of Vogt.
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30. DURING THE THIRD (Race), THE BONELESS ANIMALS GREW AND CHANGED: THEY BECAME ANIMALS WITH BONES (a), THEIR CHHAYAS BECAME SOLID (also).
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31. THE ANIMALS SEPARATED THE FIRST (into mate and female) (b) . . . .
(a) Vertebrates, and after that mammalians. Before that the animals were also ethereal proto-
organisms, just as man was.
(b) The fact of former hermaphrodite mammals and the subsequent separation of sexes is now indisputable, even from the stand-point of Biology. As Prof. Oscar Schmidt, an avowed Darwinist, shows: "Use and disuse combined with selection elucidate (?) the separation of the sexes, and the existence, totally incomprehensible, of rudimentary sexual organs. In the Vertebrata especially, each sex possesses such distinct traces of the reproductive apparatus characteristic of the other, that even antiquity assumed hermaphroditism as a natural primeval form of mankind. . . . The tenacity with which the rudiments of sexual organs are inherited is remarkable. In the class of mammals, actual hermaphroditism is unheard of, although through the whole period of their development they drag along with them these residues born by their unknown ancestry, no one can say how long ago."*
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31. . . . . THEY (the animals) BEGAN TO BREED. THE TWO-FOLD MAN (then) SEPARATED ALSO. HE (man), SAID "LET US AS THEY; LET US UNITE AND MAKE CREATURES." THEY DID. . . .
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32. AND THOSE WHICH HAD NO SPARK (the "narrow-brained"** TOOK HUGE SHE-
ANIMALS UNTO THEM (a). THEY BEGAT UPON THEM DUMB RACES. DUMB THEY WERE (the "narrow-brained") THEMSELVES. BUT THEIR TONGUES UNTIED (b). THE TONGUES OF THEIR PROGENY REMAINED STILL. MONSTERS THEY BRED. A RACE OF CROOKED, RED-HAIR-COVERED MONSTERS, GOING ON ALL FOURS.*** A DUMB RACE, TO KEEP THE SHAME UNTOLD.****
(a) The animals "separated the first," says Stanza 31. Bear in mind that at that period men were different, even physiologically, from what
* "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " pp. 186-7. The "Unknown Ancestry" referred to are the primeval astral prototypes. Cf. § II., p. 260 (a).
** See verse 24.
*** These "animals," or monsters, are not the anthropoid or any other apes, but verily what the Anthropologists might call the "missing link," the primitive lower man; see infra.
**** The shame of their animal origin which our modern scientists would emphasize if they could.
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they are now, having passed the middle point of the Fifth Race. We are not told what the "huge she-
animals" were; but they certainly were as different from any we know now, as were the men.
This was the first physical "fall into matter" of some of the then existing and lower races. Bear in mind Stanza 24. The "Sons of Wisdom" had spurned the early Third Race, i.e., the non-developed, and are shown incarnating in, and thereby endowing with intellect, the later Third Race. Thus the sin of the brainless or "mindless" Races, who had no "spark" and were irresponsible, fell upon those who failed to do by them their Karmic duty.
(b) See later on concerning the beginning of human speech.
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WHAT MAY BE THE OBJECTIONS TO THE FOREGOING.
Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater clearness, however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Book I., Stanza VI.
Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that nature had built, at one time, around the human astral form an ape-like external shape, yet it is as correct that this shape was no more that of the "missing link," than were the coverings of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms of nature. Nor was it, as shown in the proper place, on this Fourth Round planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third Rounds, when MAN was, in turn, "a stone, a plant, and an animal" until he became what he was in the First Root-
Race of present humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, except when the latter is divorced from the dogma of "Natural Selection" and the like. Indeed, between the Monera of Haeckel and the Sarisripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jiva ; for the "human" Monad, whether immetallized in the stone-atom, or invegetallized in the plant, or inanimalized in the animal, is still and ever a divine, hence also a HUMAN Monad. It ceases to be human only when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms "mineral," "vegetable" and "animal" monad are meant to create a superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (jiva)
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other than divine, and consequently having been, or having to become, human. And the latter term has
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to remain meaningless unless the difference is well understood. The Monad is a drop out of the shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be correct, within the plane of primeval differentiation. It is divine in its higher and human in its lower condition -- the adjectives "higher" and "lower" being used for lack of better words -- and a monad it remains at all times, save in the Nirvanic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms. As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine Mind, and the manifested Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it, repeating an Eastern teaching, so the MONAD has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that "MAN becomes a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, a Spirit, and finally God. Thus accomplishing his cycle or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the heavenly MAN." But by "Man" the divine Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity, much less his physical body. While rejecting the immortal Soul, the men of Science now try to trace the latter through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak. The animals -- the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded man in this Fourth Round, as well as those contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races -- all are either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product (physically) of man. It is correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, i.e., during the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of nature. That he was "a stone, a plant, an animal." But (a) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth Round; and (b) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows of the present, as the Occultists express it. And finally the forms and genera of neither man, animal, nor plant were what they became later. Thus the astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which preceded (the chhayas of) Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms or models produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D.* "Produced from the residue of the substance matter; from dead bodies of men and (other extinct) animals of the wheel before," or the previous Third Round -- as Stanza 24 tells us. Hence, while the nondescript "animals"
that preceded the astral man at the beginning of this life-cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to man again. Moreover, the "ancestor" of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal.
The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought forward by the anthropologists as a demonstration of the descent of man from the animals.
The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, "The history of the embryo is an epitome of
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that of the race." That "every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a series of forms, through which, in like succession, its ancestors have passed in the long course of Earth's history.* The history of the embryo . . . . is a picture in little, and outline of that of the race. This conception forms the gist of our fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the fundamental law of organic development."**
This modern theory was known as a fact to, and far more philosophically expressed by, the Sages and Occultists from the remotest ages. A passage from "Isis Unveiled " may here be cited to furnish a few points of comparison. In Vol. I., pp. 388-9, it was asked why, with all their great learning, physiologists were unable to explain teratological phenomena? Any anatomist who has made the development and growth of the embryo "a subject of special study," can tell, without much brain-
work, what daily experience and the evidence of his own eyes show him, viz., that up to a certain period, the human embryo is facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the spawn -- tadpole. But no physiologist or anatomist seems to have had the idea of applying to the development of the human being -- from the first
* "A very strong argument in favour of variability is supplied by the science of Embryology. Is not a man in the uterus . . . . . a simple cell, a vegetable with three or four leaflets, a tadpole with branchiae, a mammal with a tail, lastly a primate (?) and a biped? It is scarcely possible not to recognise in the embryonic evolution a rapid sketch, a faithful summary, of the entire organic series." (Lefevre, Philosophy, p. 484).
The summary alluded to is, however, only that of the store of types hoarded up in man, the microcosm. This simple explanation meets all such objections, as the presence of the rudimentary tail in the foetus -
- a fact triumphantly paraded by Haeckel and Darwin as conclusively in favour of the Ape-Ancestor theory. It may also be pointed out that the presence of a vegetable with leaflets in the embryonic stages is not explained on ordinary evolutionist principles. Darwinists have not traced man through the vegetable, but Occultists have. Why then this feature in the embryo, and how do the former explain it?
** "The Proofs of Evolution," a lecture by Haeckel.
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instant of its physical appearance as a germ to its ultimate formation and birth -- the Pythagorean esoteric doctrine of metempsychosis, so erroneously interpreted by critics. The meaning of the axiom: "A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man, etc." was mentioned in another place in relation to the spiritual and physical evolution of men on this Earth. We will now add a few more words to make the matter clearer.
What is the primitive shape of the future man? A grain, a corpuscle, say some physiologists; a molecule, an ovum of the ovum, say others. If it could be analysed -- by the microscope or otherwise -- of what ought we to expect to find it composed? Analogically, we should say, of a nucleus of
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inorganic matter, deposited from the circulation at the germinating point, and united with a deposit of organic matter. In other words, this infinitesimal nucleus of the future man is composed of the same elements as a stone -- of the same elements as the Earth, which the man is destined to inhabit. Moses is cited by the Kabalists as authority for the remark that it required earth and water to make a living being, and thus it may be said that man first appears as a stone.
At the end of three or four weeks the ovum has assumed a plant-like appearance, one extremity having become spheroidal and the other tapering like a carrot. Upon dissection it is found to be composed, like an onion, of very delicate laminae or coats, enclosing a liquid. The laminae approach each other at the lower end, and the embryo hangs from the root of the umbilicus almost like the fruit from the bough. The stone has now become changed, by "metempsychosis," into a plant. Then the embryonic creature begins to shoot out, from the inside outward, its limbs, and develops its features. The eyes are visible as two black dots; the ears, nose, and mouth form depressions, like the points of a pineapple, before they begin to project. The embryo develops into an animal-like foetus -- the shape of a tadpole -- and, like an amphibious reptile, lives in water and develops from it. Its Monad has not yet become either human or immortal, for the Kabalists tell us that this only occurs at the "fourth hour." One by one the foetus assumes the characteristics of the human being, the first flutter of the immortal breath passes through its being; it moves; and the divine essence settles in the infant frame, which it will inhabit until the moment of physical death, when man becomes a spirit.
This mysterious process of a nine-months' formation, the Kabalists call the completion of the "individual cycle of evolution." As the foetus develops amidst the liquor amnii in the womb, so the Earths germinate in the universal ether, or astral fluid, in the womb of the Universe. These cosmic children, like their pigmy inhabitants, are at first nuclei; then ovules; then gradually mature; and becoming
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 189 NATURALISTS INVENTING LINKS.
mothers, in their turn, develop mineral, vegetable, animal, and human forms. From centre to circumference, from the imperceptible vesicle to the uttermost conceivable bounds of the Kosmos, those glorious thinkers, the Occultists, trace cycle merging into cycle, containing and contained in an endless series. The embryo evolving in its pre-natal sphere, the individual in his family, the family in the state, the state in mankind, the Earth in our system, that system in its central universe, the universe in the Kosmos, and the Kosmos in the ONE CAUSE . . . thus runs their philosophy of evolution, differing as we see, from that of Haeckel: --
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and (Parabrahm) the soul . . ."
These are the proofs of Occultism, and they are rejected by Science. But how is the chasm between the mind of man and animal to be bridged in this case? How, if the anthropoid and Homo primigenius had, argumenti gratia, a common ancestor (in the way modern speculation puts it), did the two groups diverge so widely from one another as regards mental capacity? True, the Occultist may be told that in every case Occultism does what Science repeats; it gives a common ancestor to ape and man, since it
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makes the former issue from primeval man. Ay, but that "primeval man" was man only in external form. He was mindless and soulless at the time he begot, with a female animal monster, the forefather of a series of apes. This speculation -- if speculation it be -- is at least logical, and fills the chasm between the mind of man and animal. Thus it accounts for and explains the hitherto unaccountable and inexplicable. The fact that, in the present stage of evolution, Science is almost certain that no issue can follow from the union of man and animal, is considered and explained elsewhere.
Now what is the fundamental difference between the accepted (or nearly so) conclusions, as enunciated in "The Pedigree of Man," viz., that man and ape have a common ancestor; and the teachings of Occultism, which deny this conclusion and accept the fact that all things and all living beings have originated from one common source? Materialistic science makes man evolve gradually to what he is now, and, starting from the first protoplasmic speck called Moneron (which we are told has, like the rest, "originated in the course of immeasurable ages from a few, or from one simple, spontaneously arising original form, that has obeyed one law of evolution"), pass through "unknown and unknowable" types up to the ape, and thence to the human being. Where the transitional shapes are discoverable we are not told; for the simple reason that no "missing links" between man and the apes have ever yet been found, though this fact in no way prevents men like Haeckel from inventing them ad libitum.
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Nor will they ever be met with; simply, again, because that link which unites man with his real ancestry is searched for on the objective plane and in the material world of forms, whereas it is safely hidden from the microscope and dissecting knife within the animal tabernacle of man himself. We repeat what we have said in Isis Unveiled: --
". . . . . . . All things had their origin in spirit -- evolution having originally begun from above and proceeded downward, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory. In other words, there has been a gradual materialization of forms until a fixed ultimate of debasement is reached. This point is that at which the doctrine of modern evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis. Arrived at this period we will find it easier to understand Haeckel's Anthropogeny, which traces the pedigree of man 'from its protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited,' according to Professor Huxley's exposition. We may believe the man (of the Third Round) evolved 'by gradual modification of an (astral) mammal of ape-like organization' still easier when we remember that (though in a more condensed and less elegant, but still as comprehensible, phraseology) the same theory was said by Berosus to have been taught many thousands of years before his time by the man-fish Oannes or Dagon, the semi-demon of Babylonia* (though on somewhat modified lines).
"But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as he is concerned nothing but 'unverifiable hypotheses.' For, as he puts it, he views all beings 'as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.'** He does not attempt to show us who these 'few beings' were. But it answers our purpose quite as well, for, in the admission of their existence at all, resort to the ancients for corroboration and elaboration of the idea
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receives the stamp of scientific approbation. . . . "
Truly, as also said in our first work: "If we accept Darwin's theory of the development of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the Unutterable. If our mortal language is inadequate to express what our spirit dimly foresees in the great 'Beyond' -- while on this earth -- it must realize it at some point in the timeless Eternity." But what lies "beyond" Haeckel's theory? Why Bathybius Haeckelii, and no more!
§§ (33) The creators repent. (34) They atone for their neglect. (35) Men become endowed with minds. (36) The fourth race develops perfect speech. (37) Every androgynous unit is separated and becomes bisexual.
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33. SEEING WHICH (the sin committed with the animals), THE LHAS (the spirits, the "Sons of Wisdom") WHO HAD NOT BUILT MEN (who had refused to create), WEPT, SAYING: --
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34. "THE AMANASA (the 'mindless') HAVE DEFILED OUR FUTURE ABODES (a). THIS IS KARMA. LET US DWELL IN THE OTHERS. LET US TEACH THEM BETTER, LEST WORSE SHOULD HAPPEN." THEY DID. . . .
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35. THEN ALL BECAME ENDOWED WITH MANAS (minds). THEY SAW THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS.
But they had already separated before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on account of the sin committed, -- even this race will find itself on the last day on one of the seven paths. For "the wise* guard the home of nature's order, they assume excellent forms in secret."** But we must see whether the "animals" tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to zoology.
* This verse in the Veda (X. 5-6), "The seven wise ones (rays of wisdom, Dhyanis) fashion seven paths (or lines as also Races in another sense). To one of these may the distressed mortal come" --
which is interpreted solely from the astronomical and cosmic aspect -- is one of the most pregnant in occult meaning. The "paths" may mean lines (maryadah), but they are primarily beams of light falling on the paths leading to wisdom. (See Rig Veda IV. 5-13.) It means "ways" or paths. They are, in short, the seven Rays which fall free from the macrocosmic centre, the seven principles in the metaphysical, the seven Races in the physical sense. All depends upon the key used.
** "Rig Veda, " X. 10, 5, 2.
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(a) The "Fall" occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the old records, as soon as Daksha (the reincarnated Creator of men and things in the early Third Race) disappeared to make room for that portion of mankind which had "separated." This is how the Commentary explains the details that preceded the "Fall": --
"In the initial period of man's Fourth evolution, the human kingdom branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles (the egg-
like, external shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated) were often tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now unknown, and which belonged to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long and live, though the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the 'Egg-Born' Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated and mated no longer. Man created no more -- he begot. But he also begot animals, as well as men in days of old. Therefore the Sages (or wise men), who speak of males who had no more will-begotten offspring, but begat various animals along with Danavas (giants) on females of other species -- animals being as (or in a manner of) Sons putative to them; and they (the human males) refusing in time to be regarded as (putative) fathers of dumb creatures -- spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this (state of things), the kings and Lords of the Last Races (of the Third and the Fourth) placed the seal of prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new (Karma).* They (the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races. **
In another we find: --
"There were blue and red-faced animal-men even in later times; not from actual intercourse (between the human and animal species), but by descent."
And still another passage mentions: --
"Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers."
* It is next to impossible to translate verbally some of these old Commentaries. We are often obliged to give the meaning only, and thus retranslate the verbatim translations.
** Rudra, as a Kumara, is Lilalohita -- red and blue.
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Homo primigenius, but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi-human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters -- those "failures" mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Haeckel's Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid* blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.
How was the separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation; as the former hides an esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race with bones was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which were "boneless." This is an esoteric tenet spread far and wide, as it is almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Araea, "red
* This, regardless of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise: "The primitive human form, whence as we think all human species sprang, has perished this long time." (This we deny; it has only decreased in size and changed in texture.) "But many facts point to the conclusion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic." (African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great measure, but the palaeolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of a large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla's cranium than that of any other now-living man). "Let us, for the time being, call this hypothetical species Homo primigenius . . . . This first species, or the Ape-man, the ancestor of all the others, PROBABLY arose in the tropical regions of the old world from ANTHROPOID APES." Asked for proofs, the evolutionist, not the least daunted, replies: "Of these NO FOSSIL REMAINS ARE AS YET KNOWN TO US, BUT THEY WERE probably AKIN TO THE GORILLA AND ORANG OF THE PRESENT DAY." And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable descendant in the first line (Pedigree of Man, p . 80).
Haeckel holds fast to Lemuria, which with East Africa and South Asia also, he mentions as the possible cradle of the primitive Ape-men; and so do many geologists. Mr. A. R. Wallace admits its reality, though in a rather modified sense, in his "Geographical Distribution of Animals." But let not Evolutionists speak so lightly of the comparative size of the brains of man and the ape, for this is very unscientific, especially when they pretend to see no difference between the two, or very little at any rate. For Vogt himself showed that, while the highest of the Apes, the gorilla, has a brain of only 30 to 51 cubic inches, the brain of the lowest of the Australian aborigines amounts to 99.35 cubic inches. The former is thus "not half of the size of the brain of a new-born babe," says Pfaff.
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Earth." Taaroa, the creative power, the chief god, "put man to sleep for long years, for several lives," which means racial periods, and is a reference to his mental sleep, as shown elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and she became a woman.*
Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may mean, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine Builder of man -- "a Progenitor." Do we then believe in such "supernatural" beings? We say, No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside nature. Nor are we Cosmolators or Polytheists for believing in "Heavenly Man" and divine men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and UNIVERSAL tradition. We reject, however, every groundless and baseless tradition, which, having outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, has found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous traditions, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following incorporeal, "Arupa, " men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in dynasties of divine beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little modern science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry.
No, certainly not. We do not believe in the supernatural but only in the superhuman, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One may easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that: "The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that every one seems ashamed of -- even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept even a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past."**
But the "supernatural" of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants
* "Polynesian Researches, " Ellis. Vol.II., p. 38.
Missionaries seem to have pounced upon this name Ivi and made of it Eve . But, as shown by Professor
Max Muller, Eve is not the Hebrew name but an European transformation of , chavah, "life," or mother of all living; "while the Tahitian Ivi and the Maori Wheva meant bone and bone only." ("False Analogies. ")
** Chaire d'Hebreu au college de France, p. 20.
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and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature 5,000 years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides geology, anthropology and ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if that same theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years -- the age of Methuselah -- five million years ago, we would have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a megalosaurus to a common lizard.
A naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. "There is no question of selection between human races," say the anti-
Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument -- one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-
animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice.
Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes.* Darwin notes such
* Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing," as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless"* and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises.
Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native -- co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora - - must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position.
"It is a very curious fact," says Jukes,** "that not only these marsupial animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several of the shells -- as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks -- much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the 0olitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain. Some-
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc.
The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are very hairy, and the brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men -- not the closest approximation to the "pithecoid man," as Haeckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. (Cf. "Esoteric Buddhism, " p.55.)
* In calling the animal "Soulless," it is not depriving the beast, from the humblest to the highest species, of a "soul," but only of a conscious surviving Ego-soul, i.e., that principle which survives after a man, and reincarnates in a like man. The animal has an astral body, that survives the physical
form for a short period; but its (animal) Monad does not re-incarnate in the same, but in a higher species, and has no "Devachan" of course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are latent.
** "Manual of Geology, " p. 302.
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thing of the Oolitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the Globe." (! !)
Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d'etre for such a "curse of retardation"? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its "virgin soil" notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.
To return, however, once more to the history of the Third Race, the "Sweat-Born," the "Egg-bearing," and the "Androgyne." Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of course. The passage from the former to the latter transformation required numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third-Race-mankind is the most mysterious of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the "How" of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs,* and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the newly born sub-races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub-race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by the same identical process as our historical generations. This required, of course, millions of years. The
* The "fables" and "myths" about Leda and Jupiter, and such like, could never have sprung up in people's fancy, had not the allegory rested on a fact in nature. Evolution, gradually transforming man into a mammal, did in his case only what it did in that of other animals. But this does not prevent man from having always stood at the head of the animal world and other organic species, and from having
reader has been made acquainted with the approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations, in Stanza II.
We are approaching the turning-point of the evolution of the Races. Let us see what occult philosophy says on the origin of language.
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36. THE FOURTH RACE DEVELOPED SPEECH.
The Commentaries explain that the first Race -- the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called "Self-
born" -- was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a "Sound-language," to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the "Sweat-born" (the early Third Race). In its second half, when the "Sweat-born" gave birth to the "Egg-born," (the middle Third Race); and when these, instead of "hatching out" (may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age) as androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually, an act which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of "one language and of one lip." This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race* from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors,** and their own already awakened minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven races is divided into four ages -- the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age -- so is every smallest division of such races.*** Speech then developed, according to occult teaching, in the following order: --
I. Monosyllabic speech; that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the close of the Third Root-race, the "golden-coloured," yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full
* To avoid confusion, let the reader remember that the term Root-Race applies to one of the seven great Races, sub-Race to one of its great Branches, and Family-Race to one of the sub-divisions, which include nations and large tribes.
** In the Section on the Divine Dynasties, the nature of these "Instructors" is explained.
*** Vide Section attached to the "Divisions into Yugas."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 199 PRIMEVAL LANGUAGE.
awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called "thought-transference," though, with the exception of the Race called the "Sons of Will and Yoga" -- the first in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had incarnated -- thought was but very little developed in nascent physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist.*
II. These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother-language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay and finally death,** so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races -- that language, which is referred to as "Rakshasi Bhasa," in old Sanskrit works -- decayed and almost died out. While the "cream" of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America.
* The present yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early branches of the Fourth Race. Of the third, the only pure and direct descendants are, as said above, a portion of the fallen and degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors belonged to a division of the seventh Sub-race of the Third. The rest are of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in stature and intellectual capacities.
** Language is certainly coeval with reason, and could never have been developed before men became one with the informing principles in them -- those who fructified and awoke to life the manasic element dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor Max Muller tells us in his "Science of Thought," "Thought and language are identical." Yet to add to this the reflection that thoughts which are too deep for words, do not really exist at all, is rather risky, as thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in eternity whether expressed or not. Logos is both reason and speech. But language, proceeding in cycles, is not always adequate to express spiritual thoughts. Moreover, in one sense, the Greek Logos is the equivalent of the Sanscrit Vach, "the immortal (intellectual) ray of spirit." And the fact that Vach (as Devasena, an aspect of Saraswati, the goddess of hidden Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate Kumara, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference to the Kumaras, those "who refused to create," but who were compelled later on to complete divine Man by incarnating in
him. All this will be fully explained in the sections that follow.
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III. The inflectional speech -- the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called "the elder sister" of the Greek, instead of its mother -- was the first language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race). At any rate, the "Semitic" languages are the bastard descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans -- degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Tchandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A-bram (No Brahmin) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those Aryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan and Kabul,* and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and invaded Arabia.
But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent. We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub-races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross-breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization, which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids.
* Ptolemy, speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitae (Kabul tribes), calls them [[Aristophuloi]], the aristocratic or noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves Ben-Issrael (children of Is(sa)rael), from Issa, "woman and also earth," Sons of Mother Earth. But if you call an Afghan Yahoudi (Jew), he will kill you. The subject is fully treated elsewhere. The names of the supposed twelve tribes and the names of the real tribes, the same in number, of the Afghans, are the same. The Afghans being far older (at any rate, their Arabic stock) than the Israelites, no one need be surprised to find such tribal names among them as Youssoufzic, "Sons of Joseph" in Punjcaure and Boonere; the Zablistanee (Zebulon); Ben-manasseh (sons of Manasseh) among the Khojar Tartars; Isaguri, or Issachar (now Ashnagor in Afghanistan), etc., etc. The whole twelve names of the so-called twelve tribes are names of the signs of the Zodiac, as is now well proven. At any rate, the names of the oldest Arabic tribes, re-
transliterated, yield the names of the zodiacal signs and of the mythical sons of Jacob likewise. Where are the traces of the Jewish twelve tribes? Nowhere. But there is a trace, and a good one, that the Jews have tried to deceive people with the help of those names. For, see what happens ages after the ten tribes had wholly disappeared from Babylon. Ptolemy Philadelphus, desiring to have the Hebrew Law translated for him into Greek (the famous Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of the Jews, Eleazar, to send him six men from each of the twelve tribes; and the seventy-two representatives (of whom sixty were ghosts apparently) came to the king in Egypt and translated the law amid miracles and wonders. See Butler's "Horae Biblicae, " Josephus, and Philo Judaeus.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 201 THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EARTH.
In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the "Lords of Wisdom" did not incarnate, as we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural "sexual selection"), originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later.*
As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.
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37. THE ONE (androgyne) BECAME TWO; ALSO ALL THE LIVING AND CREEPING THINGS, THAT WERE STILL ONE, GIANT-FISH, BIRDS, AND SERPENTS WITH SHELL-HEADS (a).
This relates evidently to the so-called age of the amphibious reptiles, during which ages science maintains that no man existed! But what could the ancients know of antediluvian prehistoric animals and monsters! Nevertheless, in Book VI. of the Commentaries is found a passage which says, freely translated: --
"When the Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men-animals, these (the animals) became ferocious, and men and they mutually destructive. Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. After (the separation) the Satya (Yuga) was at an end. The eternal spring became constant change and seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing. Then man appealed to the superior Fathers (the higher gods or angels). The Nirmanakaya of the Nagas, the wise Serpents and Dragons of Light came, and the precursors of the Enlightened (Buddhas). Divine Kings descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer in the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first Races), which had turned into a white frozen corpse."
The above is suggestive. We will see what can be inferred from this brief statement. Some may incline to think that there is more in it than is apparent at first sight.
* The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has gradually and with every generation and variety tended more and more to return to the original type of its male forefather -- the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 202 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
EDENS, SERPENTS, AND DRAGONS.
Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term "Eden"? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled. *
It was said that: "The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the
Hebrew Gan-Eden, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraean sea." (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.) In the Chaldean "Book of Numbers, " the location is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets it is rendered Ganduniyas. "Behold," says the
(Elohim) of Genesis, "the man is become as one of us." The Elohim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and in another for Aleim, or priests -- the hierophants initiated into the good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants was known as Java-Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent ( Woman and matter), tastes of the Tree of Knowledge -- the esoteric or Secret Doctrine -- unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth, the "Lord of the Eden," all wore "coats of skin." The text says: "And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his
wife 'Chitonuth our.' " The first Hebrew word, "chiton," is the Greek [[Chiton]], Chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
"Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria were in
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 203 THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COLLEGE.
any way cognate with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahminical Hindus."
And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India.
"Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or proto-
Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together."
Here, the Akkadians are called "non-Semitic," as we had insisted they were in "Isis, " which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people's history in Jewish garb -- Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle -- or rather one of the chief cradles -- of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim.
But this "college" and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [hedone], signifying voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra's heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited by the "Dragons of Wisdom," the Initiates. And according to Klaproth,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of Fo-kone-ky, places its "Garden of Wisdom" on the plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers -- Oxus, Indus, Ganges,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
and Silo -- flowing from a common source, the "Lake of the Dragons. "
But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former -- Eden Illa-
ah -- means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good and evil: man being the Knower thereof.
Renan and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves "on the most solid inductions," think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity "on the region of the Timaus." Finally, the Asiatic Journal* concludes that: "All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced."
That "primitive humanity" was in its Fifth Race, when the "four-mouthed Dragon," the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the "Sons of Wisdom," the first mind-born sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the "bower of voluptuousness" of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man occurred after the "separation." The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldean copy.
That the Fall of man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve's incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only a Jewish but an universal idea.
Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel [[ kamelomorphon]].
A "flying camel" is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description:* for we find
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall "its nature and its name," and is described as a huge serpent with a camel's neck.
"There are no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons," asserts Salverte,** " . . . grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents."
There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to "flying camels." Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, "if anything can justify the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus. "***
We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, "the Pterodactyl" (found in Germany), "78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body." That fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the "flying camel" of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability to build a "flying camel," or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.
And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed palaeontography and paleontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas
and monuments, and in the Imperial library at Pekin, many a traveller has seen and recognised perfect representations of Plesiosauri and Pterodactyls in the multiform Chinese dragons.* Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents,** and Job mentions the Leviathan.*** Now the following questions are put very directly: --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
I. How could the ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of the carboniferous and Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them orally and pictorially, unless they had either seen those monsters themselves or possessed descriptions of them in their traditions, which descriptions necessitate living and intelligent eye-witnesses?
II. And if such eye-witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palaeolithic men be no earlier than about the middle of the tertiary period? We must bear in mind that most of the men of science will not allow man to have appeared before the Quaternary period, and thus shut him out completely from the Cenozoic times. Here we have extinct species of animals, which disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of years ago, described by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said, could hardly have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either the Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the Quaternary period, or man must be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus.
It does not stand to reason, because the Occultists believe in and defend ancient wisdom and science, even though winged saurians are called "flying camels" in the translations of the Zohar, that we believe as readily in all the stories which the middle ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk
* We read in the "Memoire a l'Academie " of the "naive astonishment of Geoffrey St. Hilaire, when M. de Paravey showed to him in some old Chinese works and Babylonian tiles dragons, . . . . saurians and ornithorhynchuses (aquatic animals found only in Australia ), etc., extinct animals that he had thought unknown on earth. . . . till his own day."
** See Isaiah, xxx. 6: "The viper and the flying serpent unto the land of trouble and anguish," and the fiery serpents conquered by the brazen serpent of Moses.
*** The fossils reconstructed by science, which we know ought to be sufficient warrant for the possibility of even a Leviathan, let alone Isaiah's flying serpents, or saraph mehophep, which words are translated in all the Hebrew dictionaries as "saraph," enflamed or fiery venom, and "mehophep," flying . But, although Christian theology has always connected both (Leviathan and saraph mehophep) with the devil, the expressions are metaphorical and have nought to do with the "evil one." But the word Dracon has become a synonym for the latter. In Bretagne the word Drouk now signifies "devil," whence, as we are told by Cambry ("Monuments Celtiques, " p. 299), the devil's tomb in England, Draghedanum sepulcrum. In Languedoc the meteoric fires and will-o'-the-wisps are called Dragg, and in Bretagne Dreag, Wraie (or wraith), the castle of Drogheda in Ireland meaning the devil's castle.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 207 KIRCHER'S DRAGON.
of the Third Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit Christopher Scherer's and Father Kircher's cock-and-bull stories of their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
assertions as either dreams or fibs.* Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a poetical license that other story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of his heart.** We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea-serpent is one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it exists and lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped detection? It is a creature contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and exists no more.
* The ultramontane writers accept the whole series of draconian stories given by Father Kircher (Edipus AEgyptiacus, "De Genere Draconum, ") quite seriously. According to that Jesuit, he himself saw a dragon which was killed in 1669 by a Roman peasant, as the director of the Museo Barberini sent it to him, to take the beast's likeness, which Father Kircher did and had it published in one of his in-folios. After this he received a letter from Christopher Scherer, Prefect of the Canton of Soleure, Switzerland, in which that official certifies to his having seen himself with his own eyes, one fine summer night in 1619, a living dragon. Having remained on his balcony "to contemplate the perfect purity of the firmament," he writes, "I saw a fiery, shining dragon rise from one of the caves of Mount Pilatus and direct itself rapidly towards Fluelen to the other end of the lake. Enormous in size, his tail was still longer and his neck very extended. His head and jaws were those of a serpent. In flying he emitted on his way numerous sparks (? !) . . . . I thought at first I was seeing a meteor, but soon looking more attentively, I was convinced by his flight and the conformation of his body that I saw a veritable dragon. I am happy to be thus able to enlighten your Reverence on the very real existence of those animals"; in dreams, the writer ought to have added, of long past ages.
** As a convincing proof of the reality of the fact, a Roman Catholic refers the reader to the picture of that incident painted by Simon de Sienne, a friend of the poet, on the portal of the Church Notre Dame du Don at Avignon; notwithstanding the prohibition of the Sovereign Pontiff, who "would not allow this triumph of love to be enthroned in the holy place"; and adds: "Time has injured and rubbed out the work of art, but has not weakened its tradition." De Mirville's "Dragon-Devils" of our era seem to have no luck, as they disappear most mysteriously from the museums where they are said to have been. Thus the dragon embalmed by Ulysses Aldobranda and presented to the Musee du Senat, either in Naples or Bologna, "was there still in 1700, but is there no more." ( Vol. 2, p. 427, "Pneumatologie.")
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The reader may inquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly, because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity of the human race; and secondly, to show the difference between the zoological real meaning of the words "dragon," "Naga, " and "Serpent," and the metaphorical one, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the quid pro quos and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice.
Sed et serpens? aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the serpent of Genesis an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic force superintelligent, a "great fallen light," a spirit sidereal, aerial and tellurian at the same time, "whose influence circumambulates the globe (qui circumambulat terram), as a Christian fanatic of the dead-letter (de Mirville) has it, and which only manifested itself under the physical emblem, which was the most convenient "with respect to its moral and intellectual coils": i.e. under the ophidian form.
But what will Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the "DIVINE HEALER," if the serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil? The "Evil One" itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when it is traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit. For, if the followers of the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and AEsculapius, or Asclepios, who are, in truth, one, are "devils and sons of devils," and the wand and serpent of the latter were "the devil's wand"; how about the "brazen serpent" of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the heathen wand and the Jewish "serpent" are one and the same, namely, the Caduceus of Mercury, son of APOLLO-PYTHON. It is easy to comprehend why the Jews adopted the ophidian shape for their "seducer." With them it was purely physiological and phallic ; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on the part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once that the mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read numerically. The Occultists know that the serpent, the Naga, and the dragon have each a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the astronomical and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted lights, and the two serpents of the Gnostics, the good and the evil one; they also know that, when generalised, the conclusions of both science and theology present two most ridiculous extremes. For, when the former tells us that it is sufficient to trace the legends of the serpents to their primal source, the astrological legend, and to meditate seriously on the Sun, conqueror of Python, and the celestial virgin in the Zodiac forcing back the devouring dragon, if we would have the key of all the subsequent religious dogmas; it is easy to perceive that, instead of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 209 COBRAS AS SYMBOLS.
generalising, the author simply has his eye on Christian religion and Revelation. We call this one extreme. The other we see in this: when, repeating the famous decision of the Council of Trent, theology seeks to convince the masses that "from the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the devil has full power over him, and possesses him by right (diabolum dominationem et potestatem super homines habere et jure cos possidere)." To this Occult philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the devil as an entity, and then we may believe in such congenital possession. A very small amount of observation and knowledge of human nature may be sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma. Had SATAN any reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the ecclesiastical sense), it is the poor devil who would find himself chronically obsessed and even possessed by the wicked -- hence by the bulk of mankind. It is humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty, unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which have begotten, given birth to, and reared in love the evil one; but this is a digression.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
"The whole world of thought is reproached by the Church with having adored the serpent. The whole of humanity 'incensed and at the same time stoned it.' The Zend Avesta speaks of it as the Kings and Vedas do, as the Edda and the Bible. . . . Everywhere the sacred serpent, the naga, and its shrine and its priest; in Rome it is the Vestal who prepares its meal with the same care as she bestows on the sacred fire. In Greece, AEsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Everyone has heard of the famous Roman embassy sent by the Senate to the god of medicine and its return with the not less famous serpent, which proceeded of its own will and by itself toward its Master's temple on one of the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it (the serpent) in her hair, not an Augur but questioned it oracularly, not a necromancer whose tomb is free from its presence! The Cainites and the Ophites call it Creator, while recognizing, as Schelling did, that the serpent is 'evil in substance and its personification.' "*
Yes, the author is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the prestige which the serpent enjoys to our own day, one ought to study the matter in India and learn all that is believed about, and still attributed to, the Nagas (Cobras) in that country; one should also visit the Africans of Whydah, the Voodoos of Port-au-Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of Mexico, and the Pa, or men-serpents of China, &c. But why wonder that the serpent is "adored" and at the same time cursed, since we
* "Sacred Serpents" on p. 432 of de Mirville's "Memoire. "
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know that from the beginning it was a symbol?* In every ancient language the word dragon signified what it now does in Chinese -- (lang) i.e., "the being who excels in intelligence" and in Greek [[drakon]], or "he who sees and watches." And is it to the animal of that name that any of these epithets can apply? Is it not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the primitive meaning may have led savages now, that the said qualifications were intended to apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by serpents and dragons? These "originals" -- called to this day in China "the Dragons of Wisdom" -- were the first disciples of the Dhyanis, who were their instructors; in short, the primitive adepts of the Third Race, and later, of the Fourth and Fifth Races. The name became universal, and no sane man before the Christian era would ever have confounded the man and the symbol.
The symbol of Chnouphis, or the soul of the world, writes Champollion, "is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this reptile, the emblem of the good genius, is a veritable Agathodaemon. It is often represented bearded. . . . . That sacred animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones . . . . The serpent has various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters [[CHNOUBIS]]."** Agathodaemon was endowed "with the knowledge of good and evil," i.e., with divine Wisdom, as without the former the latter is impossible.*** Repeating Iamblichus, Champollion shows him to be "the deity called [[Eichton]] (or the fire of the celestial gods -- the great **** Thot-作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:22
* This is about as just as though -- a few millenniums hence -- a fanatic of some future new creed, who was bent on glorifying his religion at the expense of ancient Christianity, were to say: "Everywhere the quadruped lamb was adored. The nun placed it, calling it the Agnus, on her bosom; the priest laid it on the altar. It figured in every paschal meal, and was glorified loudly in every temple. And yet the Christians dreaded it and hated it, for they slew and devoured it. . . ." Heathens, at any rate, do not eat their sacred symbols. We know of no serpent, or reptile-eaters except in Christian civilized countries, where they begin with frogs and eels, and must end with real snakes, as they have begun with lamb and ended with horse-flesh.
** "Pantheon, " 3.
*** The solar Chnouphis, or Agathodaemon, is the Christos of the Gnostics, as every scholar knows. He is intimately connected with the seven sons of Sophia (Wisdom), the seven sons of Aditi (universal Wisdom), her eighth being Marttanda, the Sun, which seven are the seven planetary regents or genii. Therefore Chnouphis was the spiritual Sun of Enlightenment, of Wisdom, hence the patron of all the Egyptian Initiates, as Bel-Merodach (or Bel-Belitanus) became later with the Chaldeans.
**** Hermes, or rather Thot, was a generic name. Abul Teda shows in "Historia Anti-Islamitica " five Hermes, and the names of Hermes, Nebo, Thot were given respectively in various countries to great Initiates. Thus Nebo, the son of Merodach and Zarpanitu (whom Herodotus calls Zeus-Belos), gave his name to all the great prophets, seers and Initiates. They were all "serpents of Wisdom," as connected with the Sun astronomically, and with Wisdom spiritually.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 211 TWO SCHOOLS OF MAGIC.
Hermes), to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic."*
The "invention of magic!" A strange term to use, as though the unveiling of the eternal and actual mysteries of nature could be invented! As well attribute, millenniums hence, the invention instead of the discovery of radiant matter to Prof. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the discoverer, for, as said in the foot-note, Thot-Hermes is a generic name, as is Enoch (Enoichion, the "inner, spiritual eye"), Nebo, the prophet and seer, etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man, but a generic title of many adepts. Their connection in symbolic allegories with the serpent is due to their enlightenment by the solar and planetary gods during the earliest intellectual Race, the Third. They are all the representative patrons of the Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son of the Sun-god Apollo -- and he is Mercury; Nebo is the son of Bel-Merodach; Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son of Vivisvat -- the Sun or Surya, etc., etc. And while, astronomically, the Nagas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarasas, Gramanis (or Yakshas, minor gods) Yatudhanas and Devas, are the Sun's attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are gods and men -- when incarnated in the nether world. Let the reader be reminded, in this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir Buddhist Nagas -- which are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nagas ethnologically, but "wise men."
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The Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, is but a series of historical records of the great struggle between white and black Magic, between the Adepts of the right path, the Prophets, and those of the left, the Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. Even the students of Occultism, though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching to rely upon, find it difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the Sodales of the Right Path and those of the Left. The great schism that arose between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of "the Sons of God," is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two schools of Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob. And here it may be well to quote a few sentences from "Isis Unveiled. "
The dying Jacob thus describes his sons: "Dan," he says, "shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse-heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards (i.e., he will teach candidates black magic) . . . . I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord!" Of Simeon and Levi the patriarch remarks that they" . . . are brethren; instru-
ments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly."* Now in the original, the words "their secret" really are "their SOD."** And Sod was the name for the great mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all sun-gods and had serpents for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of the fiery serpents by saying that this was the name given to the tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in short, and that Moses was the chief of the Sodales.*** It is to the mysteries that the original meaning of the "Dragon-Slayers" has to be traced, and the question is fully treated of hereafter.
Meanwhile it follows that, if Moses was the chief of the Mysteries, he was the Hierophant thereof, and further, if, at the same time, we find the prophets thundering against the "abominations" of the people of Israel, that there were two schools. "Fiery serpents" was, then, simply the epithet given to the Levites of the priestly caste, after they had departed from the good law, the traditional teachings of Moses: and to all those who followed Black Magic. Isaiah, when referring to the "rebellious children" who will have to carry their riches into the land whence come "the viper and fiery flying serpent" (xxx. 6), or Chaldea and Egypt, whose Initiates had already greatly degenerated in his day (700 B.C.), meant the sorcerers of those lands.**** But these must be carefully distinguished from the "Fiery Dragons of Wisdom" and the "Sons of the Fire Mist."
In the "Great Book of the Mysteries" we are told that: "Seven Lords created Seven men; three Lords (Dhyan Chohans or Pitris) were holy and good, four less heavenly and full of passion. . . . The chhayas (phantoms) of the Fathers were as they."
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This accounts for the differences in human nature, which is divided into seven gradations of good and evil. There were seven tabernacles ready to be inhabited by Monads under seven different Karmic conditions. The Commentaries explain on this basis the easy spread of evil, as soon as the human Forms had become real men. Some ancient
** Dunlap, in his introduction to "Sod, the Mysteries of Adonis," explains the word "Sod" as arcanum, religious mystery, on the authority of Schindler's "Penteglott. " "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him," says Psalm xxv., 14. This is a mistranslation of the Christians, for it ought to read "Sod Ihoh (the mysteries of Ihoh) are for those who fear him" (Dunlap, "Mysteries of Adonis, " xi). "Al (El) is terrible in the great Sod of the Kadeshim (the priests, the holy, the Initiated), Psalm lxxxix, 7" (ibid.). The Kadeshim were very far from holy. ( Vide Part II., "The Holy of Holies.")
*** "The members of the priest-Colleges were called Sodales," says Freund's "Latin Lexicon" (iv. 448). "Sodalities were constituted in the Idaean Mysteries of the MIGHTY MOTHER," writes Cicero in de Senectute. ("Mysteries of Adonis. ")
**** The priests of Baal who jumped over the fires. But this was a Hebrew term and a local one. "Saraph" -- "fiery or flaming venom."
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philosophers ignored the seven in their genetical accounts and gave only four. Thus the Mexican local Genesis has "four good men" described as the four real ancestors of the human race, "who were neither begotten by the gods nor born of woman"; but whose creation was a wonder wrought by the creative Powers, and who were made only after "three attempts at manufacturing men had failed." The Egyptians had in their theology only "four sons of God," whereas in Pymander seven are given -- thus avoiding any mention of the evil nature of man; though when Seth from a god sank into Set-Typhon, he began to be called "the seventh son." Whence probably arose the belief that "the seventh son of the seventh son" is always a natural-born magician, though, at first, only a sorcerer was meant. APAP, the serpent symbolizing evil, is slain by Aker, Set's serpent;* therefore Set-Typhon could not be that evil. In the "Book of the Dead " it is commanded (v. 13) that chapter clxiii. should be read "in the presence of a serpent on two legs," which means a high Initiate, a Hierophant, for the discus and ram's horns** that adorn his "serpent's" head in the hieroglyphics of the title of the said chapter denote this. Over the "serpent" are represented the two mystic eyes of Ammon,*** the hidden "mystery god." This passage corroborates our assertion, and shows what the word "serpent" meant in antiquity.
But as to the Nagals and Nargals, whence came the similarity of names between the Indian Nagas and the American Nagals?
"The Nargal was the Chaldean and Assyrian chief of the Magi (Rab-Mag), and the Nagal was the chief
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from Nergal-Serezer, the Assyrian god, and the Hindu Nagas. Both have the same faculties and the power to have an attendant daemon, with whom they identify themselves completely. The Chaldean and Assyrian Nargal kept his daemon, in the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nagal keeps his wherever he can -- in the neighbouring lake, or wood, or in the house in the shape of some household animal."****
Such similarity cannot be attributed to coincidence. A new world is discovered, and we find that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race,
** The same ram's horns are found on the heads of Moses which were on some old medals seen by the writer in Palestine, one of which is in her possession. The horns, made to form part of the shining aureole on the statue of Moses in Rome (Michael Angelo), are vertical instead of being bent down to the ears, but the emblem is the same; hence the Brazen Serpent.
*** But see Harris's "Magic Papyrus " No. v.; and the ram-headed Ammon manufacturing men on a potter's wheel.
**** Brasseur de Bourbourg: "Mexique, " pp. 135 and 574.
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it was already an old one. That Arjuna, Krishna's companion and chela, is said to have descended into Patala, the "antipodes," and therein married Ulupi,* a Naga (or Nagini rather), the daughter of the king of the Nagas, Kauravya.**
And now it may be hoped the full meaning of the serpent emblem is proven. It is neither that of evil, nor, least of all, that of the devil; but is , indeed, the [[SEMES EILAM ABRASAX]] ("the eternal Sun-
Abrasax"), the central spiritual sun of all the Kabalists, represented in some diagrams by the circle of Tiphereth.
And here, again, we may quote from our earlier volumes and enter into further explanations.
"From this region of unfathomable depth (Bythos, Aditi, Shekinah, the veil of the unknown) issues forth a circle formed of spirals. This is Tiphereth; which, in the language of symbolism, means a grand cycle, composed of smaller ones. Coiled within, so as to follow the spirals, lies the serpent -- emblem of Wisdom and Eternity -- the dual Androgyne; the cycle representing Ennoia, or the divine mind (a power which does not create but which must assimilate), and the serpent, the Agathodaemon, the Ophis, the Shadow of the Light (non-eternal, yet the greatest divine light on our plane). Both were the Logoi of the Ophites: or the Unity as Logos manifesting itself as a double principle of Good and Evil."
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Were it light alone, inactive and absolute, the human mind could not appreciate nor even realise it. Shadow is that which enables light to manifest itself, and gives it objective reality. Therefore, shadow is not evil, but is the necessary and indispensable corollary which completes Light or Good: it is its creator on Earth.
According to the views of the Gnostics, these two principles are immutable Light and Shadow, Good and Evil being virtually one and having existed through all eternity, as they will ever continue to exist so long as there are manifested worlds.
This symbol accounts for the adoration by this sect of the Serpent, as the Saviour, coiled either around the sacramental loaf, or a Tau, the phallic emblem. As a Unity, Ennoia and Ophis are the Logos. When separated, one is the Tree of Life (spiritual), the other, the Tree
* Ulupi has an entirely Atlantean ring about it. Like Atlantis, it is neither a Greek nor a Sanskrit name, but reminds one of Mexican names.
** "Mahabharata," Adiparva, Sloka, 7788, 7789. The "Bhagavata Purana," ix., xx., 31, as explained by Sridhera, the commentator, makes Ulupi the daughter of the king of Manipura; but the late Pundit Dayanand Saraswati, certainly the greatest Sanskrit and Puranic authority in India on such questions, personally corroborated that Ulupi was daughter of the king of the Nagas at Patala, or America, 5000 years ago, and that the Nagas were Initiates.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 215 BUDDHA'S GREAT MOUNTAIN.
of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Therefore, we find Ophis urging the first human couple -- the material production of Ilda-Baoth, but which owed its spiritual principle to Sophia-Achamoth -- to eat of the forbidden fruit, although Ophis represents divine Wisdom.
The serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, are all symbols transplanted from the soil of India. The Arasa-Maram, the banyan tree, so sacred with the Hindus (since Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences), is called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death. The Java-Aleim of the Sacerdotal College are said, in the Chaldean tradition, to have taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh-tchou,* who lives in his Foh-Maeyu, or temple of Buddha, on the top of the "Kouin-long-sang,"** the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung-Ming-
Shu, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This marvellous display takes place every three years, when an immense concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy place.
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Now it may become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or the "Wise Men," for whom it is claimed that they were initiated into the mysteries of nature by the UNIVERSAL MIND, represented by the highest angels, were named the "Serpents of Wisdom" and "Dragons;" as also how the first physiologically complete couples -- after being initiated into the mystery of human creation through Ophis, the manifested Logos and the androgyne, by eating of the fruit of knowledge -- gradually began to be accused by the material spirit of posterity of having committed Sin, of having disobeyed the "Lord God," and of having been tempted by the Serpent.
So little have the first Christians (who despoiled the Jews of their Bible) understood the first four chapters of Genesis in their esoteric meaning, that they never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that actually the "Serpent" was "the Lord God" himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn.*** They
* Foh-tchou, literally, in Chinese meaning Buddha's lord, or the teacher of the doctrines of Buddha-
Foh.
** This mountain is situated south-west of China, almost between China and Tibet.
*** Let the reader be reminded that in the Zohar, and also in all the Kabalistic works, it is maintained that "Metatron united to Shekinah" (or Shekinah as the veil (grace) [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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never realised that the Cross was an evolution from the "tree and the serpent," and thus became the salvation of mankind. By this it would become the very first fundamental symbol of Creative cause, applying to geometry, to numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction. According to the Kabala the curse on man came with the formation of woman.* The circle was separated from its diameter line. "From the possession of the double principle in one, that is the Androgyne condition, the separation of the dual principle was made, presenting two opposites, whose destiny it was, for ever after, to seek reunion into the original one condition. The curse was this, viz.: that nature, impelling the search, evaded the desired result by the production of a new being, distinct from that reunion or oneness desired, by which the natural longing to recover a lost state was and is for ever being cheated. It is by this tantalizing process of a continued curse that Nature lives."** ( Vide "Cross and Circle," Part II.)
The allegory of Adam being driven away from the "Tree of Life" means, esoterically, that the newly separated Race abused and dragged the mystery of Life down into the region of animalism and bestiality. For, as the Zohar shows, that Matronethah (Shekinah, the wife of Metatron symbolically) "is the way to the great Tree of Life, the Mighty Tree," and Shekinah is divine grace. As explained: This Tree reaches the heavenly vale and is hidden between three mountains (the upper triad of principles, in
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man). From these three mountains, the Tree ascends above (the adept's knowledge aspires heavenward) and then redescends below (into the adept's Ego on Earth). This Tree is revealed in the day time and is hidden during the night, i.e., revealed to an enlightened mind and hidden to Ignorance, which is night. (See Zohar I., 172, a and b.) "The Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots of the Tree of Life." (Comm.) But then also: "In the Kabala it is plainly to be found that "the 'Tree of Life' was
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of Ain-Soph), representing the Logos, is that very Tree of Knowledge ; while Shamael -- the dark aspect of the Logos -- occupies only the rind of that tree, and has the knowledge of EVIL alone. As Lacour, who saw in the scene of the Fall (chap. iii., Genesis) an incident pertaining to Egyptian Initiation, says: -- "The Tree of the Divination, or of the Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . . is the science of Tzyphon, the genius of doubt, Tzy to teach, and phon , doubt. Tzyphon is one of the Aleim; we shall see him presently under the name of Nach, the tempter" (Les OEloim, Vol. II., p. 218). He is now known to the symbologists under the name JEHOVAH.
* This is the view taken and adopted by all the Church Fathers, but it is not the real esoteric teaching. The curse did not begin with the formation of either man or woman, for their separation was a natural sequence of evolution, but for breaking the law (See supra).
** "By which (human) nature lives," not even the animal -- but the misguided, sensual and vicious nature, which men, not nature, created.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 217 "MYTHICAL" MONSTERS A REALITY.
the ansated cross in its sexual aspect, and that the 'Tree of Knowledge' was the separation and the coming together again to fulfil the fatal condition. To display this in numbers the values of the letters
composing the word Otz ( ), tree, are 7 and 9, the seven being the holy feminine number and the nine the number of the phallic or male energy. This ansated cross is the symbol of the Egyptian female-
male, Isis-Osiris, the germinal principle in all forms, based on the primal manifestation applicable in all directions and in all senses."*
This is the Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from the more philosophical Eastern or Aryan views upon this subject.** The separation of the sexes was in the programme of nature and of natural evolution; and the creative faculty in male and female was a gift of Divine wisdom. In the truth of such traditions the whole of antiquity, from the patrician philosopher to the humblest spiritually inclined plebeian, has believed. And as we proceed, we may successfully show that the relative truth of such legends, if not their absolute exactness -- vouched for by such giants of intellect as were Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, and others -- begins to dawn upon more than one modern scientist. He is perplexed; he stands startled and confused before proofs that are being daily accumulated before him; he feels that there is no way of solving the many historical problems that stare him in the face, unless he begins by accepting ancient traditions. Therefore, in saying that we believe absolutely in ancient records and universal legends, we need hardly plead guilty before the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
impartial observer, for other and far more learned writers, among those who belong to the modern scientific school, evidently believe in much that the Occultists do: e.g., in "Dragons," not only symbolically, but also in their actual existence at one time.
"It would have indeed been a bold step for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, believed to be time-honoured fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events. Nowadays it is a less hazardous proceeding . . . . . "
Thus opens the introduction to a recent (1886) and most interesting work by Mr. Charles Gould, called "Mythical Monsters." He boldly states his belief in most of these monsters. He submits that: -- "Many of the so-called mythical animals, which, throughout long ages and in all nations, have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come
legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact natural history; and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time. . . . Traditions of creatures once co-existing with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible. For me the major part of those creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature evolved out of the imagination of an Aryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew. . . . . To me the specific existence of the Unicorn seems not incredible, and in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its origin to a lunar myth* . . . For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from 'the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature.' It seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the utterance of these oft-told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognisable, than that uncultured savages should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the present day; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions are transformations than to believe them to be inventions."**
It is shown by the same geologist that man, "successively traced to periods variously estimated from thirty thousand to one million years . . . . . , co-existed with animals which have long since become extinct (p . 20)." These animals, "weird and terrible," were, to give a few instances -- (1) "Of the genus
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, "Edens"
Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebrae show them to have attained a length of nearly two hundred feet . . . . . . " The remains of such monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length; (3) the Dinosaurians (in the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains), of still more gigantic proportions; (4) the Atlanto-Saurus immanis, a femur of which alone is over six feet in length, and which would be thus over one hundred feet in length! But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the discovery of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh-bone over twelve feet in length (p . 37). Then we read of the monstrous Sivatherium in the Himalayas, the four-horned stag, as large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic Megatherium: of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with
* "The Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation," Robert Brown, jun., F.S.A.
** Pp. 3 and 4, Introduction to "Mythical Monsters."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 219 THE FLYING DRAGONS.
crocodile jaws on a duck's head, etc., etc. All these were co-existent with man, most probably attacked man, as man attacked them; and we are asked to believe that the said man was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that, surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a gigantic flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one great man of science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why man should not have been "contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and go back as far as the Secondary Period. "*
"It appears," writes the very conservative Professor Jukes, "that the flying dragons of romance had something like a real existence in former ages of the world."** "Does the written history of man," the author goes on to ask, "comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and China, shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from others which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization;" (p. 17).
The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants, themselves smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons, and Hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely with every day. Even they have already had a few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in size in the same proportion as men did. For the remains of a pigmy elephant were found (E. Falconeri) in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were associated with the remains of pigmy Hippopotami, the former being "only two feet six inches high; or the still-existing Hippopotamus (Choeropsis) Liberiensis, which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet
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in height."***
Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that "the things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically speaking, to the things that are unknown";**** and thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 220 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
THE "SONS OF GOD" AND THE "SACRED ISLAND."
The legend given in Isis in relation to a portion of the globe which science now concedes to have been the cradle of humanity -- though it is but one of the seven cradles, in truth -- ran, condensed, and now explained, as follows: --
"Tradition says, and the records of the Great Book (the Book of Dzyan) explain, that long before the days of Ad-am, and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western prolongation. An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours."
"The last remnant" meant the "Sons of Will and Yoga," who, with a few tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it is the Third Race which inhabited the great Lemurian continent, that preceded the veritable and complete human races -- the fourth and the fifth. Therefore it was said in Isis that --
"This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the 'Sons of God'; not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real Elohim, though in the oriental Kabala they have another name. It was they who imparted Nature's most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now lost 'word.' "
The "Island," according to belief, exists to the present hour; now, as an oasis surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Desert, the Gobi -- whose sands "no foot hath crossed in the memory of man."
"This word, which is no word, has travelled once around the globe, and still lingers as a far-off dying echo in the hearts of some privileged men. The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges were aware of the existence of this island; but the 'word' was known only to the Java Aleim (Maha Chohan in another tongue), or chief lord of every college, and was passed to his successor only at the moment of death. There were many such colleges, and the old classic authors speak of them.
"There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages, known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions."*
* There are archaeologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, deny the great antiquity of even one single monument in India. In his work, "Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India," the author ventures to express the very extraordinary opinion that "Egypt had ceased to be a nation before the earliest of the cave-temples of India was excavated." In short, he does not admit the existence of any cave anterior to the reign of Asoka, and seems anxious to prove that most of these rock-cut temples were executed during a period extending from the time of that pious Buddhist king until the destruction of the Andhra dynasty of Maghada, in the beginning of the fifth century. We believe such a claim perfectly arbitrary. Further discoveries will show that it is erroneous and unwarranted.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 221 THE CONTINENT OF THE GODS.
several other cities, making thus a subterranean city of six or seven stories high. Delhi is one of them; Allahabad another -- examples of this being found even in Europe; e.g., in Florence, which is built on several defunct Etruscan and other cities. Why, then, could not Ellora, Elephanta, Karli, and Ajunta have been built on subterranean labyrinths and passages, as claimed? Of course we do not allude to the caves which are known to every European, whether de visu or through hearsay, notwithstanding their enormous antiquity, though that is so disputed by modern archaeology. But it is a fact, known to the Initiated Brahmins of India and especially to Yogis, that there is not a cave-temple in the country but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and that those underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn their caves and corridors.
"Who can tell that the lost Atlantis -- which is also mentioned in the Secret Book, but, again, under another name, pronounced in the sacred language -- did not exist yet in those days?" --
we went on to ask. It did exist most assuredly, as it was fast approaching its greatest days of glory and civilization when the last of the Lemurian continents went down.
"The great lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania?* If the hypothesis (now so much doubted, and positively denied by some learned authors, who regard it as a joke of Plato's) is ever verified, then, perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of the god-inhabited continent was not altogether a fable.** And they may then perceive that Plato's guarded hints and his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world, and, by cleverly combining truth and fiction, so disconnecting himself from a story which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to divulge.
"To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of hierophants was divided into
The Secret Doctrine by H P Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Sons of God
two distinct categories:*** those who were instructed by the 'Sons of God,' of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revelation; and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis -- if such must be its name -- and who, being of another race, (born sexually but of divine parents), were born with a sight, which embraced all living things, and was independent of both distance and material obstacle. In short, they were the Fourth Race of men mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once."
In other words, they were the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first who had
* America when discovered, was called Atlanta by some native tribes.
** Since then Donnelly's Atlantis has appeared, and soon its actual existence will have become a scientific fact.
*** It is so divided to this day, and theosophists and Occultists, who have learned something of the Occult but undeniable power of Dugpaship at their own expense, know this but too well.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 222 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
a dynasty of Spirit-Kings, not of Manes, or "ghosts," as some believe (See "Pneumatologie "), but of actual living Devas (or demi-gods or Angels, again) who had assumed bodies to rule over them, and who, in their turn, instructed them in arts and sciences. Only, as they were rupa or material Spirits, these Dhyanis were not always good. Their King Thevetata was one of the latter, and it is under the evil influence of this King-Demon that . . . . the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians.
"In consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to narrate; its substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came to an end by the submersion of the Atlantis, which finds its imitation in the stories of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood. The giants and magicians '. . . and all flesh died . . . and every man.' All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are substantially identical with the great Father of the Thhnkithians in the Popol-Vuh, or the sacred book of the Guatemaleans, which also tells of his escaping in a large boat like the Hindu Noah -- Vaivasvata.
"If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story that, from the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and the descendants of the Atlantean Noah, sprang up a mixed race of righteous and wicked. On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, various Buddhas, its numerous 'Saviours,' and great hierophants; on the other hand, its 'natural magicians' who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual enlightenment, . . . perverted their gifts to evil
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purposes. . . ."
We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and traditions. In the "Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus," the author says: --
"One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense continent which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia."
"The high plateaux of Hindustan and Asia, according to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those distant epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent . . . . . According to the Brahmans, this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindustan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the peoples which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from their speech was derived the Sanscrit. . . . . And the Indo-Hellenic tradition, preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from the plains of India, equally relates the existence of a continent and a people to which it gives the name of Atlantis and Atlantides, and which it locates in the Atlantic in the northern portion of the Tropics."
"Apart from this fact, the supposition of an ancient continent in those latitudes, the vestiges of which may be found in the volcanic islands and moun-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 223 THE MAGICIANS OF ATLANTIS.
tainous surface of the Azores, the Canaries and Cape de Verdes, is not devoid of geographical probability. The Greeks, who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond the pillars of Hercules, on account of their dread of the mysterious ocean, appeared too late in antiquity for the stories preserved by Plato to be anything else than an echo of the Indian legend. Moreover, when we cast a look on a planisphere, at the sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia, from the straits of Sunda to Easter Island, it is impossible, upon the hypothesis of continents preceding those which we inhabit, not to place there the most important of all.
"A religious belief, common to Malacca and Polynesia, that is to say, to the two opposite extremes of the Oceanic world, affirms 'that all these islands once formed two immense countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify them, the latter swallowed up the two continents, and, since, it has been impossible to make him give up his captives. Alone, the mountain-peaks and high plateaux escaped the flood, by the
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power of the gods, who perceived too late the mistake they had committed.'
"Whatever there may be in these traditions, and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India was developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly important to science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they may be" (pp . 13-15).
This last tradition corroborates the one given from the "Records of the Secret Doctrine." The war mentioned between the yellow and the black men, relates to a struggle between the "sons of God" and the "sons of giants," or the inhabitants and magicians of Atlantis.
The final conclusion of the author, who personally visited all the islands of Polynesia, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows:
"As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer.
"The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands, Viti, Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna, Ouvea, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou, the Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues.
"All navigators agree in saying that the extreme and the central groups could never have communicated in view of their actual geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a pirogue . . . without a compass, and travel months without provisions.
"On the other hand, the aborigines of the Sandwich Islands, of Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa, Tahiti, etc., had never known each other, had never heard of each other, before the arrival of the Europeans. And yet each of these people maintained that their island had at one time formed part of an
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immense stretch of land which extended towards the West on the side of Asia. And all, brought together, were found to speak the same language, to have the same usages, the same customs, the same religious belief. And all to the question, 'Where is the cradle of your race?' for sole response, extended their hand toward the setting sun" (Ibid., p. 308).
Geographically, this description clashes slightly with the facts in the Secret Records; but it shows the existence of such traditions, and this is all one cares for. For, as there is no smoke without fire, so a
The Secret Doctrine by H P Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Sons of God
tradition must be based on some approximate truth.
In its proper place we will show modern Science fully corroborating the above and the traditions of the Secret Doctrine with regard to the two lost continents. The Easter Island relics are, for instance, the most astounding and eloquent memorials of the primeval giants. They are as grand as they are mysterious; and one has but to examine the heads of the colossal statues, that have remained unbroken on that island, to recognise in them at a glance the features of the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race giants. They seem of one cast though different in features -- that of a distinctly sensual type, such as the Atlanteans (the Daityas and "Atalantians") are represented to have in the esoteric Hindu books. Compare these with the faces of some other colossal statues in Central Asia -- those near Bamian for instance -- the portrait-statues, tradition tells us, of Buddhas belonging to previous Manvantaras ; of those Buddhas and heroes who are mentioned in the Buddhist and Hindu works, as men of fabulous size,* the good and holy brothers of their wicked co-uterine brothers generally, as Ravana, the giant King of Lanka was the brother of Kumbhakarna; all descendants of the gods through the Rishis, and thus, like "Titan and his enormous brood," all "heaven's first born." These "Buddhas," though often spoilt by the symbolical representation of the great pendent ears, show a suggestive difference, perceived at a glance, between the expression of their faces and that of the Easter Isle statues. They may be of one race -- but the former are "Sons of Gods"; the latter the brood of mighty sorcerers. All these are re-incarnations, however, and apart from unavoidable exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are historical characters.** When did they live? How long ago lived the
* An approach to the statues at Bamian -- also a Buddha 200 feet high -- is found near a Jain settlement in Southern India, and appears to be the only one that remains at present.
** Even Wilson admits that Rama and Ravana were personages founded on historical facts: --"The traditions of Southern India uniformly ascribing its civilization and the settlement of civilized Hindus (the Fifth Race) to the conquest of Lanka by Rama" ( Vishnu Purana, iii., p. 318) -- the victory of the "Sons of God" over the Atlantean sorcerers, says the true tradition.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 225 COCK AND BULL HYPOTHESES.
two races, the Third and Fourth, and how long after did the various tribes of the Fifth begin their strife, the wars between Good and Evil? We are assured by the Orientalists that chronology is both hopelessly mixed and absurdly exaggerated in the Puranas and other Hindu Scriptures. We feel quite prepared to agree with the accusation. Yet, if Aryan writers did allow their chronological pendulum to swing too far one way occasionally, beyond the legitimate limit of fact; nevertheless, when the distance of that deviation is compared with the distance of the Orientalists' deviation in the opposite direction, moderation will be found on the Brahminical side. It is the Pundit who will in the long run be found more truthful and nearer to fact than the Sanskritist. Surely, it is not because the curtailing of the latter -- even when proven to have been resorted to in order to fit a personal hobby -- is regarded by Western public opinion as "a cautious acceptance of facts," whereas the Pundit is brutally treated
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in print as a liar, that everyone has to see this in the same light. An impartial observer may judge it otherwise. He may either proclaim both unscrupulous historians, or justify both, each on his respective ground, and say: Hindu Aryans wrote for their Initiates, who read truth between the lines, not for the masses. If they did mix up events and confuse Ages intentionally, it was not in view of deceiving any one, but to preserve their knowledge from the prying eye of the foreigner. Otherwise, to him who can count the generations from the Manus, and the series of incarnations specified in the cases of some heroes,* the meaning and chronological order are very clear in the Puranas. As for the Western Orientalist, he must be excused, on account of his undeniable ignorance of the methods used by archaic Esotericism.
But such existing prejudices will have to give way and disappear very soon before the light of new discoveries. Already Dr. Weber's and Mr. Max Muller's favourite theories -- namely, that writing was not known in India, even in the days of Panini (!); that the Hindus had all their arts and sciences -- even to the Zodiac and their architecture (Ferguson) -- from the Macedonian Greeks; these and other such cock-and-bull hypotheses, are threatened with ruin. It is the ghost of old Chaldea that comes to the rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert
* Thus we are shown one hero, to give an instance, first born as the "unrighteous but valiant monarch" (Purusha) of the Daityas, Hiranyakasipu, slain by the Avatar Nara-Sinha (Man-lion). Then he was born as Ravana, the giant king of Lanka, and killed by Rama; after which he is reborn as Sisupala, the son of Rajarishi (King Rishi) Damaghosha, when he is again killed by Krishna, the last incarnation of Vishnu. This parallel evolution of Vishnu (spirit) with a Daitya, as men, may seem meaningless, yet it gives us the key not only to the respective dates of Rama and Krishna but even to a certain psychological mystery.
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lecture (1887) Professor Sayce of Oxford, speaking of newly-discovered Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, referred at length to Ea, the God of Wisdom, now identified with the Oannes, of Berosus, the half-man, half-fish, who taught the Babylonians culture and the art of writing. This Oannes, to whom, thanks only to the Biblical Deluge, an antiquity of hardly 1,500 B.C. had been hitherto allowed, is now spoken of in these terms: --
"His city was Eridu, which stood 6,000 years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf. The name means 'the good city,' a particularly holy spot, since it was the centre from which the earliest Chaldean civilization made its way to the north. As the culture-god was represented as coming from the sea, it was possible that the culture of which Eridu was the seat was of foreign importation. We now know that there was intercourse at a very early period between Chaldea and the Sinaitic peninsula, as well as with India. The statues discovered by the French at Tel-loh (dating from at latest B.C. 4,000) were made of the extremely hard stone known as diorite, and the inscriptions on them stated the diorite to have been brought from Mazan -- i.e., the Sinaitic peninsula, which was
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then ruled by the Pharaohs. The statues are known to resemble in general style the diorite statue, Kephren, the builder of the second Pyramid, while, according to Mr. Petrie, the unit of measurement marked on the plan of the city, which one of the Tel-loh figures holds on his lap, is the same as that employed by the Pyramid builders. Teak wood has been found at Mugheir, or Ur of the Chaldees, although that wood is an Indian special product; add to this that an ancient Babylonian list of clothing mentions sindhu, or 'muslins,' explained as 'vegetable cloth.' "
Muslin, best known now as Dacca muslin, known in Chaldea as Hindu (Sindhu), and teak wood used 4,000 years B.C.; and yet the Hindus, to whom Chaldea owes its civilization (as well proven by Colonel vans Kennedy), were ignorant of the art of writing before the Greeks taught them their alphabet -- if we have to believe Orientalists!
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 227 THE MOON-COLOURED RACE.
STANZA X.
THE HISTORY OF THE FOURTH RACE.
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§§ (38) The Birth of the Fourth, Atlantean Race. (39) The sub-races of the Fourth Humanity begin to divide and interblend; they form the first mixed races of various colours. (40) The superiority of the Atlantean over other races. (41) They fall into sin and beget children and monsters. (42) The first germs of Anthropomorphism and sexual religion. They lose their "third Eye."
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38. THUS TWO BY TWO, ON THE SEVEN ZONES, THE THIRD (Race) GAVE BIRTH TO THE FOURTH (Race men). THE GODS BECAME NO-GODS (Sura became a-Sura) (a).
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39. THE FIRST (Race) ON EVERY ZONE WAS MOON-COLOURED (yellow-white ); THE SECOND, YELLOW, LIKE GOLD; THE THIRD, RED; THE FOURTH, BROWN, WHICH BECAME BLACK WITH SIN.* THE FIRST SEVEN (human) SHOOTS WERE ALL OF ONE COMPLEXION IN THE BEGINNING. THE NEXT (seven, the sub-races) BEGAN MIXING THEIR COLOURS (b).
(a) To understand this verse 38, it must be read together with the three verses of Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical than physical nature. It is only after the so-called FALL, that the races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. And, in order that he may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall, so mystic and transcendental is it in its real significance, the student must be told at once the details which preceded
* Strictly speaking, it is only from the time of the Atlantean, brown and yellow giant Races, that one ought to speak of MAN, since it was the Fourth race only which was the first completely human species, however much larger in size than we are now. In "Man" (by two chelas), all that is said of the Atlanteans is quite correct. It is chiefly that race which became "black with sin" that brought the divine names of the Asuras, the Rakshasas and the Daityas into disrepute, and passed them on to posterity as
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the names of fiends. For, as said, the Suras (gods) or Devas having incarnated in the wise men of Atlantis, the names of Asuras and Rakshasas were given to the Atlanteans; which names, owing to their incessant conflicts with the last remnants of the Third Race and the "Sons of Will and Yoga," have led to the later allegories about them in the Puranas. "Asura was the generic appellation of all the Atlanteans who were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Aryans (gods)." ("Man," p. 97.)
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this event; of which event modern theology has formed a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs are made to turn.
The archaic commentaries explain, as the reader must remember, that, of the Host of Dhyanis, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless monads -- that some "obeyed" (the law of evolution) immediately when the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent Divine purity, created by Kriyasakti the semi-Divine man, who became the seed on earth for future adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom (unfettered as it then was by the bonds of matter), said: -- "We can choose . . . we have wisdom" (See verse 24), and incarnated far later -- these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies (physiologically) inferior to their astral models, because their chhayas had belonged to progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven classes. As to those "Sons of Wisdom" who had "deferred" their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, they produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for aeons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination. (See verses 32, 36.)
This was the "Fall of the angels," because of their rebellion against Karmic Law. The "fall of man" was no fall, for he was irresponsible. But "Creation" having been invented on the dualistic system as the "prerogative of God alone," the legitimate attribute patented by theology in the name of an infinite deity of their own making, this power had to be regarded as "Satanic," and as an usurpation of divine rights. Thus, the foregoing, in the light of such narrow views, must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, "created in the image of God," a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-
letter dogma. "Your doctrine," the Occultists were already told, "makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first." "Why did you make of your god a devil -
- both, moreover, created in your own image?" is our reply. The esoteric interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches -- more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.
The old doctrine about the true meaning of the "Fallen Angels," in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabala,
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and explains the Bible. It is found pre-eminent in Genesis when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In Genesis (vi.) the "Sons of God" -- B'ne Aleim -- become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the "Fall of Angels."* But what is, in reality, the "Book of Enoch" itself, from which the author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel have so profusely quoted? (e.g., verse 8, in chapter 10, about all who have come before Jesus, being "thieves and robbers.") Simply a Book of Initiation, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain archaic mysteries performed in the inner temples. The author of the "Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches" very justly suggests that the so-called "Visions" of Enoch relate to his (Enoch's) experience at initiation, and what he learned in the mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted
* In general, the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the "fallen" angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd. About a dozen could be cited, of the most various character as to details, and all from the pen of educated lay authors, "University graduates" of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author of "Earth's Earliest Ages," J. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Metaphysicians, Agnostics, Mystics, poets, and every contemporary author on oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the "Prince of the Air," and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in this wise: --
"Satan is the 'Anointed Cherub' of old. . . . God created Satan, the fairest and wisest of all his creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the Air. . . . He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis. . . . and of an altogether different and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, His vast empire is our earth, if not the whole solar system. . . . Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition." Then we are informed that "Satan was from the moment of his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty" (! !): that he "awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of those whom God had appointed . . . ." Then the Devil "passes from the royalty to his priestly dignity " (! ! !) "Satan was also a priest of the Most High," etc., etc. And now -- "Antichrist will be Satan incarnate" (pp. 56-59). The Pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already appeared -- they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the "Perfect Way," of "Isis Unveiled," of the "Mystery of the Ages," and even of the "Light of Asia"! ! The author notes the "avowed origin" (of Theosophy) from the "descending angels," from the "Nephilim," or the angels of the VIth ch. of Genesis, and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as the present Secret Doctrine endeavours to show -- unless he refuses to belong to the present humanity.
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to Christianity (!!); furthermore, he believes that this book was written "at the beginning of the Christian era, when . . . the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency"! This is hardly possible, since Jude quotes in his epistle from the "Book of Enoch" (verse 14); and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the Book of Enoch from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it "could not have been the production of a writer who lived after . . . or was even coeval with" the writers of the New Testament: unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, was also a production of the already established Church -- which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the "fallen Angels" of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself.
In Indian exotericism, these angels (Asuras) are also denounced as "the enemies of the gods;" those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the latter. In Christian theology they are broadly referred to as the "Fallen Spirits," the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends about them, gathered from Pagan sources. The coluber tortuosus "the tortuous snake," a qualification said to have originated with the Jews, had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it: -- among others, a purely astronomical meaning.
The "Serpent" fallen from on high, "deorsum fluens," was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead, [[tou thanatus arche]] to that day, when Jesus saw it "falling like lightning from heaven" (Luke x. 17, 18), the Roman Catholic interpretation of cadebat ut fulgur to the contrary, notwithstanding; and it means indeed that even "the devils are subject" to the Logos -- who is WISDOM, but who, as the opponent of ignorance, is Satan or Lucifer at the same time. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and quickening the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of MAHAT, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life, humanity -- if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state --was of course doomed to -- moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the LOGOS, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or logos, may be said to have saved those who believed in the secret teachings from "eternal death," to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This in the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also because the logos is Christos, that principle of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego -- the Higher-Self -- being formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi (the sixth) and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the
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fifth principle.* "The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and Conscious, Self-Active Wisdom on Earth," we are taught. It is the Marriage of "Heavenly man" with the "Virgin of the World" --Nature, as described in Pymander ; the result of which is their progeny -- immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John's Revelation the marriage of the lamb with his bride. (xix. 7.) That "wife" is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her linen may be fine and white outwardly (like the "whitened sepulchre"), but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not "the righteousness of Saints" (v. 8. ibid), but rather the
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blood of the Saints she has "slain upon the earth" (chap. xviii. 24.) Thus the remark made by the great Initiate (in Luke x. 18) -- one that referred allegorically to the ray of Enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to that old wisdom-religion then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adeptt** -- was distorted out of recognition (as was his own personality), and made to fit in with one of the most cruel as the most pernicious of all theological dogmas. ( Vide at the end of Stanza XI. "SATANIC MYTHS.")
But if Western theology alone holds the patent for, and copyright of SATAN -- in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction -- other nationalities
* It is not correct to refer to Christ -- as some theosophists do -- as the sixth principle in man -- Buddhi. The latter per se is a passive and latent principle, the spiritual vehicle of Atman, inseparable from the manifested Universal Soul. It is only in union and in conjunction with Self-consciousness that Buddhi becomes the Higher Self and the divine, discriminating Soul. Christos is the seventh principle, if anything.
** To make it plainer, any one who reads that passage in Luke, will see that the remark follows the report of the seventy, who rejoice that "even the devils (the spirit of controversy and reasoning, or the opposing power, since Satan means simply "adversary" or opponent) are subject unto us through thy name." (Luke x. 17.) Now, "thy name" means the name of Christos, or Logos, or the spirit of true divine wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of intellectual or mere materialistic reasoning -- the HIGHER SELF in short. And when Jesus remarks to this that he has "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven," it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers, notifying them that he already knew it, and a reference to the incarnation of the divine ray (the gods or angels) which falls into generation. For not all men, by any means, benefit by that incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and dead during the whole life. Truly "No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son" as added by Jesus then and there (Ibid v. 22) -- the Church "of Christ" less than any one else. The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the term "Father and the Son," and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Earth. For the teachings of Christ were occult teachings, which could only be explained at the initiation. They were never intended for the masses, for Jesus forbade the twelve to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans (Matt . x. 8), and repeated to his disciples that the "mysteries of Heaven" were for them alone, not for the multitudes (Mark iv. 11).
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and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of this tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. For they have both disfigured and hinted at the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories touching the subject. Nor have the
semi-esoteric dogmas of Puranic Hinduism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen gods. The Puranas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parasara ( Vishnu Purana), to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras,
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Kumaras and Munis, having to be born in every age, to re-incarnate in every Manvantara. This (esoterically) is equivalent to saying that the FLAMES born of the Universal Mind (Mahat), owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and an impulse of Evolutionary Law, had, as in Pymander -- without any gradual transition -- landed on this Earth, having broken through the seven Circles of fire, or the seven intermediate Worlds, in short.
There is an eternal cyclic law of re-births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric dawn by those who had enjoyed their rest from re-incarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable AEons -- by the highest and the earliest Nirvanees. It was the turn of those "Gods" to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.* The Gods who had fallen into generation, whose mission it was to complete divine man, are found represented later on as Demons, evil Spirits, and fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one Eternal law. But no conception of such creatures as the devils and Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahomedan religions was ever intended under those thousand and one Aryan allegories.** (See "The Fallen Angels" and "The Mystic Dragons" in Part II.)
* So, for instance, in the Puranas, "Pulastya," a Prajapati, or son of Brahma -- the progenitor of the Rakshasas, and the grandfather of Ravana, the Great King of Lanka (see Ramayana) -- had, in a former birth, a son named Dattoli, "who is now known as the sage Agastya" -- says Vishnu Purana. This name of Dattoli alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings. He is called respectively, Dattoi, Dattali, Dattotti, Dattotri, Dattobhri, Dambhobhi and Dambholi -- which seven variants have each a secret sense, and refer in the esoteric comments to various ethnological classifications, and also to physiological and anthropological mysteries of the primitive races. For, surely, the Rakshasas are not demons, but simply the primitive and ferocious giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the globe as the Fifth Race is now. Vasishta is a warrant to this, if his words addressed to Parasara, who attempted a bit of JADOO (sorcery), which he calls "sacrifice," for the destruction of the Rakshasas, mean anything. For he says, "Let no more of these unoffending 'Spirits Darkness' be destroyed." (see for details Adiparvan, s. 176, Mahabharata; also the Linga Purana "Purvardha, " s. 64.)
** We have a passage from a Master's letter which has a direct bearing upon these [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 233 HOLY SATAN.
The true esoteric view about "Satan," the opinion held on this subject by the whole philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an appendix, entitled "The Secret of Satan," to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford's "Perfect Way." No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length: --
"1. And on the seventh day (seventh creation of the Hindus),* there went forth from the presence of God a mighty Angel, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost
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sphere.**
2. "Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation."***
4. "Among the Gods is none like unto him, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:"
5. "Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,**** the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumph of Time."
For, as is said in Hermes, "Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King; he standeth in Solomon's porch; he holdeth the key of the Sanctuary, that no man enter therein, save the Anointed having the arcanum of Hermes" (v. 20 and 21).
These suggestive and majestic verses had reference with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity to the creative and generative light of the Logos (Horus, Brahma, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., as primeval manifestations of the ever-unmanifested Principle, e.g., Ain-Soph, Parabrahm, or Zeruana Akerne-- Boundless Time -- Kala), but the
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] incarnating angels. Says the letter: "Now there are, and there must be, failures in the ethereal races of the many classes of Dhyan-Chohans, or Devas (progressed entities of a previous planetary period), as well as among men. But still, as the failures are too far progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyan-Chohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower Kingdoms, this then happens. Where a new solar system has to be evolved these Dhyan-Chohans are borne in by influx 'ahead' of the Elementals (Entities . . . to be developed into humanity at a future time) and remain as a latent or inactive spiritual force, in the aura of a nascent world . . . until the stage of human evolution is reached. . . . Then they become an active force and commingle with the Elementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity." That is to say, to develop in, and endow man with his Self-conscious mind, or Manas.
* When the earth with its planetary chain and man were to appear.
** Our earth and the physical plane of consciousness.
*** When the pure, celestial Being (Dhyan Chohan) and the great Pitris of various classes were commissioned -- the one to evolve their images (Chhaya), and make of them physical man, the others to inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence and the comprehension of the Mysteries of Creation.
**** The "dynasties of the kings" who all regard themselves as the "anointed," reigning "by the Grace of God," whereas in truth, they reign by the grace of matter, the great Illusion, the Deceiver.
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meaning is now degraded in the Kabala. The "Anointed," who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes (Buddha, Wisdom), and who alone is entrusted with the key to the "Sanctuary," the Womb of nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos, has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the "God of generation" on the lunar mountain (Sinai, the mountain of the moon, "Sin"). The "Sanctuary" has become the "Holy of Holies," and the arcanum has been anthropomorphised and phallicised and dragged down into matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the "Dragon of Wisdom," the Serpent of Genesis: of the conscious god who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the "innumerable incarnations of Spirit," and "the ceaseless pulse and current of desire" refer, the first one, to our doctrine of Karmic and cyclic rebirths, the second -- to EROS, not the later god of material, physiological love, but to the divine desire in the gods, as well as in all nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one "dark," because invisible and incomprehensible, FLAME could achieve only by themselves descending into matter. Therefore, as continued in the APPENDIX:
12. "Many names hath God given him (Satan), names of mystery, secret and terrible."
13. "The Adversary, because matter opposeth Spirit. Time accuseth even the Saints of the Lord."
28, 29, 31. "Stand in awe of him, and sin not; speak his name with trembling . . . . For Satan is the magistrate of the justice of God (Karma); he beareth the balance and the sword . . . . For to him are committed Weight and Measure and Number."
Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabala to Prince Al-Chazari in the Book of that name, says; and it will be found that the Weight and Measure and Number are, in Sepher Jezirah, the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim, or figures, ciphers) covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the "Heavenly Man" or the Logos. Thus Satan and the anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore,
33. "Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades" . . . .
The seven or Saptaloka of the Earth with the Hindus; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of which theology makes a region bordering on Hell, is simply our globe, the Earth, and thus Satan is called --
33 ". . . . the angel of the manifest Worlds."
It is "Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god," and this without any allusive metaphor to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos, "the first son, eldest of the gods," in the order
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of microcosmic (divine) evolution; Saturn (Satan), astronomically, "is the seventh and last in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the kingdom of which Phoebus (the light of wisdom, also the Sun) is the centre." The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish god "an angel of matter," or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and he whose planet was Saturn.
34. "And God hath put a girdle about his loins (the rings of Saturn), and the name of the girdle is Death."
In anthropogony this "girdle" is the human body with its two lower principles, which three die, while the innermost man is immortal. And now we approach the "Secret of Satan."
37, 38, 39. " . . . Upon Satan only is the shame of generation. He hath lost his virginal estate (so hath the Kumara by incarnating): uncovering heavenly secrets, he hath entered into bondage. . . . He compasseth with bonds and limits all things. . . ."
42, 43, 44. "Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss (the manifested world) the legions of Satan. These are the unmanifest and the manifest; the free and the bound (in matter): the virginal and the fallen. And both are the Ministers of the Father, fulfilling the word Divine. . . ." Therefore --
55. "Holy is the Sabbath of god: blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of Havas" -- SATAN.
For, "The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord": God in the manifested world; "the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai" -- that footstool being the whole Kosmos. ( Vide Part II., "Is Pleroma Satan's Lair?")
When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the cosmic reflection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in matter or in the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever-incomprehensible WISDOM, revealing itself as Light and Shadow, good and evil in nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited intellect of MAN.
This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the adversary in the Kabala; the same tenets and spirit being found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with it. We say "historical," because allegory and a mythical ornamentation around the kernel of tradition, in no wise prevent that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the Kabala, repeating the time-honoured revelations of the once universal history of our globe and the evolution of its races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which have formed the Bible. Its historical foundation is now offered, in however imperfect a form, on these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus
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the allegorical and symbolical meaning of the Serpent of Genesis is found explained by the "Sons of Wisdom" (or angels from higher spheres, though all and each pertain to the kingdom of Satan, or Matter) revealing to men the mysteries of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so-called myths of the Hindu, Grecian, Chaldean, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The giants of Genesis are the historical Atlanteans of Lanka, and the Greek Titans.
Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer a non-existing personage, while the existence of such cities as Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends? Yet Schliemann proved that Troy had really existed, and the two cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the earth. How many more cities and localities called "fabulous" are on the list of future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical* will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees of Fate in the astral light.
As the tenets of the Eastern doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for one thing, read carefully the opening pages of the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus; and then he will see our doctrines corroborated in it, however veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the Universe, of our Earth (called "Nature" in Pymander) as of everything else, from the "Moyst Principle" -- or the great Deep, FATHER-MOTHER -- the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos. First the "Universal Mind," which the hand of the Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father: then the "Heavenly Man,"** which is the great Total of that Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior worlds or of the men of our globe, but which fell nevertheless into matter by virtue of that same evolution, as the second logos of the "Father."***
** The "Heavenly Man" -- please mark again the word -- is "the LOGOS" or the "Son" esoterically. Therefore, once that the title was applied to Christ (declared God and the very God himself) Christian theology had no choice. In order to support its dogma of the personal Trinity it had to proclaim, as it does, that the Christian Logos is the only true one, and that all the Logoi of other religions were false, and only the masquerading Evil Principles, SATAN. Now see where this led Western theology to.
*** "For the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Life and Life, brought forth by its Word another Mind or Workman; which, being God of the Fire and the Spirit, fashioned and formed seven other Governors, which in their circles contain the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 237 MAHASURA AND SATAN.
Synthetically every Creative Logos, or "the Son who is one with the Father," is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian theology makes of the seven "Angels of the Presence" the
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Virtues, or the personified attributes of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahma, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic theodice itself recognising, in its creative Verbum Princeps, the head of those angels -- caput angelorum -- and the magni consilii Angelus (the Angel of the great Counsel), thus recognizes the identity of Christ and those Angels.
"The Gods became no-Gods, the Sura -- A-sura," says the text; i.e., gods became fiends -- SATAN, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, allegorized as Good, and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names.
The Kabala teaches that Pride and Presumption -- the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism -- are the causes that emptied heaven of one third of its divine denizens -- mystically, and of one third of the stars -- astronomically; in other words, the two statements are -- the first an allegory, and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, as shown, is intimately connected with humanity.
In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of creation was due to, and the result of, that legendary "War in Heaven" brought on by the rebellion of the angels* against creative law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty by appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy -- is to say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient to
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Phenomenal World, and whose disposition is called Fate or Destiny." (Section 9, ch. I, ed. of 1579).
Here it is evident that "Mind" (the primeval universal Divine Thought) is neither the Unknown unmanifested One, since it abounds in both sexes (is male and female), nor yet the Christian Father, as the latter is a male and not an androgyne. The fact is that the Father, Son, and Man are hopelessly mixed up in the translations of Pymander.
* The allegory of the fire of Prometheus is another version of the rebellion of the proud Lucifer, who was hurled down to the bottomless pit, or simply unto our Earth, to live as man. The Hindu Lucifer, the Mahasura, is also said to have become envious of the Creator's resplendent light, and, at the head of inferior Asuras (not gods, but spirits), to have rebelled against Brahma; for which Siva hurled him down to Patala. But, as philosophy goes hand in hand with allegorical fiction in Hindu myths, the devil is made to repent, and is afforded the opportunity to progress: he is a sinful man esoterically, and can by yoga devotion, and adeptship, reach his status of one with the deity, once more. Hercules, the Sun-
god, descends to Hades (the cave of Initiation) to deliver the victims from their tortures, etc., etc. The Christian Church alone creates eternal torment for the devil and the damned, that she has invented.
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believers in the Pope's infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth,
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although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and symbologists, showed an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither alchemist nor philosopher could, during the Mediaeval Ages, utter that* which in the sight of orthodox theology was a terrible blasphemy, for it would have led them directly through the "Holy" office of the Inquisition, to stake and rack. But for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected and as ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manichaeism, invented the devil, and by placing
* Why should, for instance, Eliphas Levi, the very fearless and outspoken Kabalist, have hesitated to divulge the mystery of the Fallen Angels so-called? That he knew the fact and real meaning of the allegory -- both in its religious and mystical, as well as in its physiological sense -- is proved by his voluminous writings and frequent allusions and hints. Yet Eliphas, after having alluded to it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his latest "Histoire de la Magie, " p. 220 . . . "We protest with all our might against the sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We pretend neither to deny nor affirm here the tradition on the Fall of the Angels . . . but if so, then the prince of the Angelic Rebels can be at best the last and the most powerless among the condemned -- now that he is separated from deity -- which is the principle of every power. . . ." This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave Jennings writes in his weird, staccato-like style: --
"Both Saint Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted personages, or dignified heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are each represented with their appropriate faculties and attributes. These are reproduced and stand multiplied -- distinguished by different names in all the mythologies . . . (including the Christian). . . .
The idea regarding each is a general one. This idea and representative notion is that of the all-powerful champion -- child-like in his 'Virgin innocence' -- so powerful that this god-filled innocence (the Seraphim 'Know most,' the Cherubim 'love most') can shatter the world (articulated, so to use the word -- in the magic of Lucifer, but condemned) in opposition to the artful constructions (this 'side-life') of the magnificent apostate, the mighty rebel, but yet at the same time the 'Light-bringer,' the Lucifer, the 'Morning Star,' the 'Son of the morning' -- the very highest title 'out of heaven, 'for in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an apparently incredible side of his character -- qualities are of no sex -- this archangel, St. Michael, is the invincible, sexless, celestial 'Energy' -- to dignify him by his grand characteristics -- the invisible 'Virgin Combatant,' clothed . . . and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the Gnostic 'refusal to create.' This is another . . . 'myth within myths' . . . a stupendous 'mystery of mysteries,' because it is so impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as the Apocalypse. Unrevealable as the 'Revelation' "(p . 213).
Nevertheless, this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. But as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of "Phallicism" gives it, of course, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand the real drift of his remarks.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 239 THEOLOGICAL SNUFFERS.
a theological extinguisher on the radiant star-god, Lucifer, the "Son of the Morning," thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes -- a black and tenebrous light -- the myth has struck its roots too deep in the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas and laugh at her horned and cloven-footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi-exoterically, the "First-born" of the Almighty -- Fiat Lux, -- or the angels of primordial light, were commanded to create; one third of them rebelled and refused; while those who "obeyed as Fetahil did -- failed" most signally.
To realise the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and understand Eastern philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedantins, with regard to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the infinite and absolute deity. Esoteric philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyas, the "Central Sun" emits creative light -- passively so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of creating, or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent beings -- who became collectively a Being or creative God -- differentiated already from the one absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned creation.*
Now the Vatican MSS. of the Kabala -- a single copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain -- contains the most complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians** and other Gnostics; and in that parchment the Seven Suns of Life are given in the order they are found in the Saptasurya. Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions of the Kabala which are procurable in the public libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyan-Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Aryans.
* "Creation" -- out of pre-existent eternal substance, or matter, of course, which substance, according to our teachings, is boundless, ever-existing space.
** The Luciferians -- the sect of the fourth century who are alleged to have taught that the Soul was a carnal body transmitted to the child by its father; -- and that other religious and still earlier sect of the second century A.D., the Lucianists, who taught all this, and further, that the animal Soul was not immortal, were philosophizing on the grounds of the real Kabalistic and Occult teachings.
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As is well known, the Kabala never originated with the Jews, who got their ideas from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians.
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Thus even the now exoteric Kabalistic teachings speak of a Central Sun, and of three secondary suns in each solar system -- our own included. As shown in that able though too materialistic work, "New Aspects of Life and Religion, " which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect deeply thought out and assimilated: --
"The Central Sun . . . was to them (as much as to the Aryans) the centre of Rest; the centre to which all motion was to be ultimately referred. Round this central sun . . . 'the first of three systemic suns . . . revolved on a polar plane . . . the second, on an equatorial plane' . . . and the third only was our visible sun. These four solar bodies were 'the organs on whose action what man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet, earth, depends.' The channels through which the influence of these bodies was conveyed to the earth they (the Kabalists) held to be electrical" (p . 287). . . . "The radiant energy flowing from the central sun* called the Earth into being as a watery globe," whose tendency, "as the nucleus of a planetary body, was to rush to the (central) Sun . . . . within the sphere of whose attraction it had been created," "but the radiant energy, similarly electrifying both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed motion towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the revolving planet (earth) thus sought to reach.
"In the organic cell the visible sun found its own proper matrix, and produced through this the animal (while maturing the vegetable) Kingdom, finally placing man at its head, in whom, through the animating action of that Kingdom, it originated the psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal kingdom, at the head of the creation, was the animal, the soul-less, the perishable man. . . . Hence man, although apparently its crown, would, by his advent have marked the close of creation; since creation, culminating in him, would at his death have entered on its decline" . . . (p . 289).
This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the seven Suns with the seven systems of planes of being, of which the "Suns" are the central bodies, and you have the seven angelic planes,
* This "central sun" of the Occultists, which even Science is obliged to accept astronomically, for it cannot deny the presence in Sidereal Space of a central body in the milky way, a point unseen and mysterious, the ever-hidden centre of attraction of our Sun and system -- this "Sun" is viewed differently by the Occultists of the East. While the Western and Jewish Kabalists (and even some pious modern astronomers) claim that in this sun the God-head is specially present -- referring to it the volitional acts of God -- the Eastern Initiates maintain that, as the supradivine Essence of the Unknown Absolute is equally in every domain and place, the "Central Sun" is simply the centre of Universal life-
Electricity; the reservoir within which that divine radiance, already differentiated at the beginning of every creation, is focussed. Though still in a laya, or neutral condition, it is, nevertheless, the one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, life Centre.
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whose "Host" are gods thereof, collectively. (See Comm. to Stanza VII Book I.) They are the Head-
group divided into four classes from the incorporeal down to the semi-corporeal, which classes are directly connected -- though in very different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions -- with our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth (the first and highest), which is called the "Central Sun" in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the Aryan Cosmogony; one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of nature; the other spiritualizes matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh principle reaches man through all the phases of being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes through (the Kabala teaches from ) the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the second (the polar Sun), which two radiate on man his Atma. Group Three (the equatorial Sun) cement the Buddhi to Atman and the higher attributes of Manas, while group Four (the spirit of our visible sun) endows him with his Manas and its vehicle -- the Kama rupa, or body of passions and desires, the two elements of Ahamkara which evolve individualized consciousness -- the personal ego. Finally, it is the spirit of the Earth in its triple unity that builds the physical body, attracting to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sarira.
Now, as everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything else, the order in which he is generated is described fully in the Eastern teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the Kabala. Says the Book of Dzyan with regard to primeval man when first projected by the "Boneless," the incorporeal Creator: "First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow-Son (the Body) were 'CREATED.' But where was the pivot (the middle principle, Manas)? Man is doomed. When alone, the indiscrete (undifferentiated Element) and the Vahan (Buddhi) -- the cause of the causeless -- break asunder from manifested life" -- "unless cemented and held together by the middle principle, the vehicle of the personal consciousness of JIVA"; explains the Commentary. In other words, the two higher principles can have no individuality on Earth, cannot be man, unless there is (a) the Mind, the Manas-Ego, to cognize itself, and (b) the terrestrial false personality, or the body of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round a pivot (which it is, truly), to the physical form of man. It is the Fifth and the Fourth principles* -- Manas and Kama rupa -- that contain the dual personality: the real immortal Ego (if it assimilates itself to the two higher) and the false and transitory personality, the mayavi or astral body, so-called, or the animal-human Soul -- the two hav-
* The Fourth, and the Fifth from below beginning by the physical body; the Third and the Fourth, if we reckon from Atma.
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ing to be closely blended for purposes of a full terrestrial existence. Incarnate the Spiritual Monad of a Newton grafted on that of the greatest saint on earth -- in a physical body the most perfect you can think of -- i.e., in a two or even a three-principled body composed of its Sthula Sarira, prana (life principle), and linga sarira -- and, if it lacks its middle and fifth principles, you will have created an idiot -- at best a beautiful, soul-less, empty and unconscious appearance. "Cogito -- ergo sum" -- can find no room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate.
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There are students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning underlying the allegory -- so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church -- of the Fallen Angels. "The Kingdom of Spirits and spiritual action which flows from and is the product of Spirit Volition, is outside and contrasted with and in contradiction to the Kingdom of (divine) Souls and divine action."* As said in the text: --
"Like produces like and no more at the genesis of being, and evolution with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self-Existentt are called CREATIONS, for they appear in the Spirit Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in its UNBORN Nature, which is beyond time and (limited or conditioned) Space. Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and creatures: they are the development (evolution) of the discrete elements." (Com. xiv.) Again: --
"The Heavenly rupa (Dhyan Chohan) creates (man) in his own form; it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal (manifested) Substance; that form is the ideal shadow of Itself: and this is THE MAN OF THE FIRST RACE."
To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this earth only, it was the duty of the first "differentiated Egos" -- the Church calls them Archangels -- to imbue primordial matter with the evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition --"the Angels were commanded to create." After the Earth had been made ready by the lower and more material powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be "fruitful and multiply," the higher powers, the Archangels or Dhyanis, were compelled by the evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution -- MAN. Thus the "Self-created"
** Angelic, Spiritual Essences, immortal in their being because unconditioned in Eternity; periodical and conditioned in their Manvantaric manifestations.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 243 MAN, THE PALE SHADOW OF GOD.
and the "Self-existent" projected their pale shadows; but group the Third, the Fire-Angels, rebelled and refused to join their Fellow Devas.
Hindu exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them to refuse creating, as they desired to remain eternally Kumaras, "Virgin Youths," in order to, if possible, anticipate their fellows in progress towards Nirvana -- the final liberation. But, agreeably to esoteric interpretation, it was a self-sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The "Rebels" would not create will-less irresponsible men, as the "obedient" angels did; nor could they endow human beings with only the temporary reflections of
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their own attributes; for even the latter, belonging to another and a so-much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of a higher progress. No spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on earth -- the lowest and most material plane -- for one who on that plane, at all events, is inherently perfect and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Man remaining the pale shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless perfection, the one negative and passive attribute of the real I am that I am, would have been doomed to pass through life on earth as in a heavy dreamless sleep; hence a failure on this plane. The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first (if ever) pronounced the cruel words, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live for ever . . . " must have been indeed the Ilda-baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature, whose reflection created Ophiomorphos. In this case it is but natural -- even from the dead letter standpoint -- to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the "Harbinger of Light," bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah, as alleged; and he who was the first to whisper: "in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil" -- can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An "adversary" to Jehovah the "personating spirit," he still remains in esoteric truth the ever-loving "Messenger" (the angel), the Seraphim and Cherubim who both knew well, and loved still more, and who conferred on us spiritual, instead of physical immortality -- the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying "Wandering Jew."
As narrated in King's "Gnostics," "Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit, he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man,
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but this one proved a failure. It was a monster, soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda-Baoth was forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his own creature. Following the impulse of the divine light, man soared higher and higher in his aspirations; very soon he began presenting not the image of his creator Ilda-Baoth but rather that of the Supreme Being, the 'primitive man,' Ennoia. Then the Demiurgos was filled with rage and envy; and fixing his jealous eye on the abyss of matter, his looks envenomed with passion were suddenly reflected as in a mirror; the reflection became animate, and there arose out of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos -- 'the embodiment of envy and cunning. He is the union of all that is most base in matter, with the hate, envy, and craft of a spiritual intelligence.' " This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead letter text of chapter iii. of Genesis.
Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of animals on earth into a
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potential god, and making him free to "take the kingdom of heaven by violence." Hence also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Il-da-Baoth against his "rebellious son," Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never-dying, singeing fire and flames of an extinguishable hell. Two poles, yet the same idea; the dual aspect of a refined torture: a fire producer -- the personified emblem of [[Phosphoros]] of the astral fire and light in the anima mundi -- (that element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: "ohne phosphor kein gedanke," i.e., without phosphorus no thought), burning in the fierce flames of his terrestrial passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart -- a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious, hence a responsible entity.* The curse of life is great, yet how few are those men, outside some Hindu and Sufi mystics, who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) incorporeal being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahma during his "night's" rest. For, to quote from an able article by one**
* The history of Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is found further on.
** By an Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a Protestant clergyman, he became a Mahomedan, then a rabid atheist, and after meeting with a [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 245 SATAN, A CENTRIPETAL FORCE.
who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim to it: --
"Satan, or Lucifer, represents the active, or, as M. Jules Baissac calls it, the 'Centrifugal Energy of the Universe' in a cosmic sense. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is pain, which is the Re-action of the pleasure of action, and death -- which is the revolution of life -- Satan, burning in his own hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum -- the expansive disintegration of the nebulae which is to concentrate into new worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the eternal Inertia of the passive energy of the Kosmos -- the inexorable 'I AM' -- the flint from which the sparks are beaten out. Fitly is he . . . and his adherents . . . consigned to the 'sea of fire,' because it is the Sun (in one sense only in the Cosmic allegory), the fount of life in our system, where they are purified (disintegrated) and churned up to re-arrange them for another life (the resurrection); that Sun which, as the origin of the active principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan. . . ." To demonstrate furthermore the accuracy of Baissac's general theory (in Le Diable et Satan) cold is known to have a 'Centripetal' effect. "Under the influence of cold everything contracts. . . . Under it life hybernates, or dies out, thought congeals, and fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-
Sea -- it is only in the 'Nifl-heim' (the cold Hell of the Scandinavian Eddas) of the 'I AM' that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of Immortal Existence in the Nifl-heim, and that existence must be painless and peaceful, because it is Unconscious and Inactive. In the Kingdom of Jehovah (if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him) there is no Misery, no War, no marrying and
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giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness. * All is absorbed in the spirit of the most Powerful. It is emphatically a kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission as that of the 'Arch-Rebel ' is one of War and Revolution. . . . . It (the
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] master, a Guru, he became a mystic; then a theosophist who doubted, despaired; threw up white for black magic, went insane and joined the Roman Church. Then again turning round, anathematized her, re-became an atheist, and died cursing humanity, knowledge, and God, in whom he had ceased to believe. Furnished with all the esoteric data to write his "War in Heaven," he made a semi-political article out of it, mixing Malthus with Satan, and Darwin with the astral light. Peace be to his -- Shell. He is a warning to the chelas who fail. His forgotten tomb may now be seen in the Mussulman burial ground of the Joonagad, Kathiawar, in India.
* The author talks of the active, fighting, damning Jehovah as though he were a synonym of Parabrahm! We have quoted from this article to show where it dissents from theosophic teachings; otherwise it would be quoted some day against us, as everything published in the Theosophist generally is.
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former) is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvana. But then Theosophy teaches that separation from the Primal Source having once occurred, Re-union can only be achieved by Will -- Effort -- which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay."
It is "Satanic" from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil -- to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyans-Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal god -- that men can reach Nirvana and the haven of heavenly divine Peace.
To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumaras, the "Virgin-Angels," (to whom Michael and Gabriel, the Archangels, both belong), the divine "Rebels" -- called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or "Deprived" -- preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery (even if unconscious) of the beings (evolved as shadows out of their Brethren) through the semi-
passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If "man's uses of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,"* before he can do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogis offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity -- created god-like and perfect at first -- and to endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status and, descending on our globe, take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahayuga, thus exchanging their impersonal individualities for individual personalities -- the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love, was construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows "the rebel angels hurled down from
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heaven into the darkness of Hell" -- our Earth. Hindu philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras hurled down by Siva, are only in an intermediate state in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their
* Explaining the Kabala, Dr. H. Pratt says, "Spirit was to man (to the Jewish Rabbin, rather?) a bodiless, disembodied, or deprived, and degraded being, and hence was termed by the ideograph Nahash 'Deprived;' represented as appearing to and seducing the human race -- men through the Woman. . . . In the picture from this Nahash, this spirit was represented by a serpent, because from its destitution of bodily members, the Serpent was looked upon as a deprived and depraved and degraded creature" ("New Aspects, " p. 235). Symbol for symbol there are those who would prefer that of the
serpent -- the symbol of wisdom and eternity, deprived of limbs as it is -- to the Jod ( ) -- the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in the Kabala -- the god of the male symbol of generation.
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wretched condition; but Christian theology, claiming to be based on the rock of divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour -- has invented, to enforce that claim paradoxically, the dreary dogma of hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.
As to Rabbinical Wisdom -- than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries -- it calls these Beings, the "Evil One;" and the Kabalists -- Nahash, "Deprived," as just said, and the Souls, that have thrown themselves, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One, into an abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on earth. (Zohar iii., 61, C.)
And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar and the Kabala in their right interpretation -- for the latter is ours -- but only with the gross, pseudo -esoteric explanations of the later, and especially those of the Christian Kabalists.
"Our earth and man," says the Commentary, "being the products of the three Fires" -- whose three names answer, in Sanskrit, to "the electric fire, the Solar fire, and the fire produced by friction," -- these three fires, explained on the Cosmic and human planes, are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and become -- according to their applications -- the upadhis and the vehicles, or the noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the "three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour" of Agni Abhimanin, the eldest son of Brahma, the Cosmic LOGOS, by Swaha, one of Daksha's* daughters. In the metaphysical sense the "Fire of friction" means the Union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth, principles, which thus are united or cemented together; the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the monad; in the physical, it relates to the creative spark, or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, it is said (whose names are Pavaka, Pavamana and Suchi) were condemned by a curse of Vasishta, the great sage, "to be born over and over again." (Bhagavata-Purana iv. 24, 4.) This is clear enough.
* Daksha, the "intelligent, the competent." "This name generally carries with it the idea of creative power. " He is a son of Brahma, and of Aditi, and agreeably to other versions, a self-born power, which, like Minerva, sprang from his father's body. He is the chief of the Prajapati -- the Lords or Creators of Being. In Vishnu Purana, Parasara says of him, "in every Kalpa (or manvantara) Daksha and the rest are born and are again destroyed." And the Rig-Veda says that "Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha," a reference to the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine Essence.
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Rishis, Kumaras,* etc. etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves "reborn over and over again." In the Esoteric doctrine they are generally named the Asuras, or the Asu-ra Devata or Pitar-devata (gods) for, as said, they were first Gods -- and the highest -- before they became "no-gods," and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of the Earth** -- exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma.
No Theologian, any more than an Orientalist, can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajapati, the Manus, and the Rishis, nor the direct connection of these -- or their correlation rather -- with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all the Nations originally had in common. All these gods and demi-gods are found reborn on earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause.
Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as seen, absolutely necessary to show that the sons of "Dark Wisdom," though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the "Fallen," are as divine and as pure and more so than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the churches. The "old Book" goes into various details of Astral life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It may, therefore, be left for later explanations, and the First and Second Races can now only receive bare notice. Not so for the Third Race -- the Root-Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason. Men evolving pari passu with the globe, and the latter having "incrustated" more than a hundred million of years before -- the first human sub-race had already begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it: "the inner man (the conscious Entity) was not." This "Conscious Entity" Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is, the very entire essence and esse of the high Intelligences condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this manvantara.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 10
call our fathers Vasus; our paternal grandfathers, Rudras; our paternal great grandfathers, Adityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas," or "this is an everlasting Vedic text" in another translation.
** As now discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder literature, it was the same in Chaldean theogony. Ishtar, "eldest of Heaven and of Earth." Below him the Igaga or Angels of Heaven, and the Anunnaki, or angels of Earth. Below these again various classes of Spirits and "Genii" called Sadu, Vadukku, Ekimu, Gallu -- of which some were good, some evil. (See "Babylonian Mythology. ")
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(b) This verse (thirty-ninth) relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, esoteric philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its forefathers or "Creators" were all divine beings -- though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their hierarchy -- men were nevertheless born on seven different centres of the continent of that period. Though all of one common origin, yet for reasons given their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.* As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purana. The Kumdra -- the Rudra gods, so called (see further ), are described as incarnations of Siva, the destroyer (of outward forms), named also Vamadeva. The latter, as a Kumara, the "Eternal Celibate," the chaste Virgin youth, springs from Brahma in each great Manvantara, and "again becomes four"; a reference to the four great divisions of the human races, as regards complexion and type -- and three chief variations of these. Thus in the 29th Kalpa -- in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form which Siva ever destroys and remodels periodically, down to the manvantaric great turning point about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race -- in the 29th Kalpa, Siva, as Swetalohita, the root Kumara, becomes, from moon-coloured, white; in his next transformation -- he is red (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric teaching); in the third -- yellow; in the fourth -- black.
Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval races -- as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and hardly an objective, though colossal form. The evolution of these races, their formation and development, went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of those zones. It names three great divisions, namely, the RED-
YELLOW, the BLACK, and the BROWN-WHITE.** The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring
* Some superior, others inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reincarnating Monads which could not be all of the same degree of purity in their last births in other worlds. This accounts for the difference of races, the inferiority of the savage, and other human varieties.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 10
** "There are," says Topinard (English edition of "Anthropology," with preface by Professor Broca), "THREE fundamental elements of colour in the human organism -- namely, the red, the yellow, and the black, which, mixed in variable quantities with the white of the tissues, give rise to those numerous shades seen in the human family." Here is science unintentionally supporting Occultism again.
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from one single progenitor, called in Hindu exotericism by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu: the latter, remember, being that generic personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis* (See the Root and Seed Manus further on), and who is said to live even now in his mankind. ( Vide at the end of this Stanza, "THE PRIMEVAL MANUS OF HUMANITY.") The light yellow is the colour of the first SOLID human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root Race (after its fall into generation -- as just explained), bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; "Siva" gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became "black with sin" into red-yellow (the red Indians and the Mongolians being the descendants of these) and finally into Brown-white races -- which now, together with the yellow Races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purana is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.
When reading of "the last transformation," let the reader consider at this juncture, if that took place 18,000,000 years ago, how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage? And if man, in his gradual consolidation, developed pari passu with the earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race? For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state; the archaic teachings, moreover, telling us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of man, the Earth, man, and everything on the Globe was of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our dematerialization, as the spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then -- aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15, or 20,000,000 years ago, does not square with Geology, which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated,
* It must be remembered that the "last remnants" here spoken of, refer to those portions of the "great continent" which still remained, and not to any of the numerous islands which existed contemporaneously with the continent. Plato's "island" was, for instance, one of such remnants; the others having sunk at various periods previously. An occult "tradition" teaches that such submersions occur whenever there is an eclipse of the "spiritual sun."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 10
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 251 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS.
etc., etc., that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, "in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palaeozoic rocks." To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by geology to those "oldest palaezoic rocks"? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves (of carbonic acid apparently, as science seems to imply) break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral, i.e., viscid? The word "astral" does not necessarily mean as thin as smoke, in occult phraseology, but rather "starry," shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: How could an astral Earth have affected the other planets in this system? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one planet was suddenly removed? The objection is evidently invalid, since our system is composed of older and younger planets, some dead (like the moon), others in process of formation, for all astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our system have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis-
Himalayan secret teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindu Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is eighteen million and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as physical, or approximately physical, man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root-
Race. Beyond that period MAN, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300 million years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in "Esoteric Buddhism." Moreover, whereas the Hindu Puranas speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one. ( Vide supra).
We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man.
The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and Anthropogony as described actually existed, that its records are preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of ancient Scriptures.
The Puranas on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, read esoterically and expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes is, that
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the Puranas, giving as much, and perhaps more attention to the causes than to the effects, allude to the pre-Cosmic and pre-Genetic periods rather than to those of so-called Creation, whereas the Bible, saying only a few words of the former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while nearly skipping the pre-Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race.
Now, whatever the onslaught made on the Order of creation in Genesis, and its dead letter account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism,* he who reads the Hindu Puranas -- its allegorical exaggerations notwithstanding -- will find them quite in accordance with physical Science.
Even what appears to be the, on the face of it, perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahma assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds in the Secret Commentaries a perfectly scientific explanation, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, and the constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our globe; for Science teaches us now that nine-tenths of the stratified formations of the earth's crust have been gradually constructed beneath water, at the bottom of the seas. The ancient Aryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of natural history, geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand, proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the Bible, (See "Modern Science and Modern Thought," p. 337), to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism "earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the less philosophical and more immoral religions (! !) of the ancient world." Only, while we find in Biblical esotericism physiological sexual mysteries symbolised, and
* Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate attempt to reconcile the Genetic account with science (see Nineteenth Century, "Dawn of Creation" and the "Proem to Genesis," 1886) has brought upon him the Jovian thunderbolt hurled by Mr. Huxley. The dead-letter account warranted no such attempt; and his fourfold order, or division of animated creation, has turned into the stone which, instead of killing the fly on the sleeping friend's brow, killed the man instead. Mr. Gladstone killed Genesis for ever. But this does not prove that there is no esotericism in the latter. The fact that the Jews and all the Christians, the modern as well as the early sects, have accepted the narrative literally for two thousand years, shows only their ignorance; and shows the great ingenuity and constructive ability of the initiated Rabbis, who have built the two accounts -- the Elohistic and the Jehovistic -- esoterically, and have purposely confused the meaning by the vowelless glyphs or word-signs in the original text. The six days -- yom -- of creation do mean six periods of evolution, and the seventh that of culmination of perfection (not of rest), and refer to the seven Rounds and the seven Races with a distinct "creation" in each; though the use of the words boker, dawn or morning, and crib, evening twilight -- which have esoterically the same meaning as sandhya, twilight, in Sanskrit -- have led to a charge of the most crass ignorance of the order of evolution.
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more (something for which very little real philosophy is requisite), in the Puranas one may find the most scientific and philosophical "dawn of creation," which, if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy tale-like allegories, would show that modern zoology, geology, astronomy, and nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in the ancient Science, and were known to the philosophers in their general features, if not in such detail as at present!
Puranic astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, was shown even by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindu astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation of nebulae, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms -- far more correct than Europeans have even now -- for chronological and other purposes, were known in India to perfection.
If we turn to geology and zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajapati, and their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Aryans -- the authors of the most perfect philosophical systems of transcendental psychology, of Codes of Ethics, and such a grammar as Panini's, of the Sankhya and Vedanta systems, and a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Muller the most perfect on earth -- such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing fairy-
tales; such tales as the Puranas now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the remotest idea of
their secret meaning? What is the fable, the genealogy and origin of Kasyapa, with his twelve wives, by whom he had a numerous and diversified progeny of nagas (serpents), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of living things, and who was thus the father of all kinds of animals, but a veiled record of the order of evolution in this round? So far, we do not see that any Orientalist ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. "The Satapatha Brahmana," says one, "gives a not very intelligible account of Kasyapa's origin. . . . He was the son of Marichi, the Son of Brahma, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind. . . . Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajapati created offspring. That which he created he made akarot, hence the word kurma (tortoise). Kasyapa means tortoise; hence men say: 'All creatures are descendants of Kasyapa,' etc., etc. (Hindu Class. Dict.)
He was all this; he was also the father of Garuda, the bird, the "King
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of the feathered tribe," who descends from, and is of one stock with the reptiles, the nagas; and who becomes their mortal enemy subsequently as he is also a cycle, a period of time, when in the course of evolution the birds which developed from reptiles in their "struggle for life," -- "survival of the fittest," etc., etc., turned in preference on those they issued from, to devour them, -- perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room for other and more perfect species. ( Vide Part II., "Symbolism.")
In that admirable epitome of "Modern Science and Modern Thought," a lesson in natural history is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance with it of the Bible. The author remarks that Geology, commencing with --
" . . . the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of the Laurentian, continued in a chain, every link of which is firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life and first indication of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians (or frog family); the Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land animals began to appear; and finally, the Tertiary, in which mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type and species to species, are gradually differentiated and specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, until we arrive at the Glacial and Pre-historic periods, and at positive proof of the existence of man."
The same order, plus the description of animals unknown to modern science, is found in the commentaries on the Puranas in general, and in the Book of Dzyan -- especially. The only difference, a grave one, no doubt, -- as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the false personality and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox psychology -- is as follows. Having been in all the so-called "Seven creations," allegorizing the seven evolutionary changes, or the sub-races, we may call them, of the First Root-race of Mankind -
- MAN was on earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three Rounds,* his physical frame -- one adapted to the thermal conditions of
* "Follow the law of analogy" -- the Masters teach. Atma-Buddhi is dual and Manas is triple; inasmuch as the former has two aspects, and the latter three, i.e., as a principle per se, which gravitates, in its higher aspect, to Atma-Buddhi, and follows, in its lower nature, Kama, the seat of terrestrial and animal desires and passions. Now compare the evolution of the Races, the First and the Second of which are of the nature of Atma-Buddhi, their passive Spiritual progeny, and the Third Root-Race shows three distinct divisions or aspects physiologically and psychically; the earliest, sinless; the middle portions awakening to intelligence; and the third and last decidedly animal: i.e., Manas succumbs to the temptations of Kama.
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mid-point of the 3rd Root Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the two and then the three made one; for though the lower animals, from the amoeba to man, received their monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, all have to remain dormant till each reaches its human form, before which stage manas (mind) has no development in them.* In the animals every principle is paralysed, and in a foetus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third (the astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama, which is desire, instinct) whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy-tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it.
Now the writer is certain to meet what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization -- that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature, "from the primitive speck of protoplasm and the nucleated cell in which all life originates," and "is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and last of all, of the human type." (Laing, 335.)
This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against that; for all this relates to the shell of man -- his body, which in its growth is subject, of course, like every other (once called) morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization -- which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic (so-called) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man -- it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in nature, ever-present and as ever invisible, and unknowable, and of intra-Cosmic gods, who all were men.**
* "Men are made complete only during their third, toward the fourth cycle (race). They are made 'gods' for good and evil, and responsible only when the two arcs meet (after 31/2 rounds towards the fifth Race). They are made so by the Nirmanakaya (spiritual or astral remains) of the Rudra-Kumaras, 'cursed to be reborn on earth again; meaning -- doomed in their natural turn to reincarnation in the higher ascending arc of the terrestrial cycle.' (Commentary IX.)
** The whole trouble is this: neither physiologists nor pathologists will recognize that the cell-
germinating substance (the cytoblastema) and the mother-lye from which crystals originate, are one and the same essence, save in differentiation for purposes.
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But we would ask, what does science and its exact and now axiomatic discoveries prove against our Occult theory? Those who believe in the law of Evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell (which from a vital has become a morphological cell, until it awoke as protoplasm pure and simple) -- these can surely never limit their belief to one line of evolution. The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age -- we mean "primordial" matter of science -- is the same in every essential particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial living matter of to-day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if the now orthodox theory of Evolution were quite correct, namely, a constant, ever-flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of that, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal being all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms, assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity in the description of paleontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely -- MAN and the lower genera of being!
"Certain well-marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, but persisting comparatively unaltered, while other forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed 'persistent types' of life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds" (Huxley, "Proceed. of Roy. Inst.," vol. iii., p. 151).
Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., etc., as off-shoots of a moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the amphibian, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms -- which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to man, on every planet, in the Three preceding Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be the arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question: -- "What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination of pre-mammalian organic species?" -- is easily answered. One is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary,
hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects, which are destined to receive the final and vivid
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form under the brush of the painter. The fish evolved into an amphibian -- a frog -- in the shadows of ponds, and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the formation of the types in this one. On strict analogy, the cycle of Seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through every kingdom of Nature, are repeated on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think over and work out this analogy. As the seven months' old unborn baby, though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of mother-Nature before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyani, still more perfect than he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built chain of worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the astral merges into physical evolution. Of this Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey, it says. But now see the contradiction.
Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club mosses, some of them generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the carboniferous epoch, for: -- "The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species. . . . . Subkingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus . . . the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas. . . . The arachnida, the highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus differing only from its living congeners only in . . . the eyes," etc., etc.; all of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter's authoritative statement about the Foraminifera. "There is no evidence," he says, "of any fundamental modification or advance in the Foraminiferous type from the palaeozoic period to the present time. . . . The Forminiferous Fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous period; but there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type." ("Introduction to the study of the Forminifera," p. xi.)
Now, if there is no indication of change in the Forminifera, a protozoon of the lowest type of life, mouthless and eyeless, except its greater variety now than before, man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his Palaeolithic ancestor being even found
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superior in some respects to his present frame. Where is, then, the claimed uniformity of law, the absolute rule for one species shading off into another, and, by insensible gradations, into higher types?
We see Sir William Thomson admitting as much as 400,000,000 of years in the earth's history, since the surface of the globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living things;" and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so-called "age of reptiles," we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching its highest developments. We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period "we find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from previously existing forms . . . . Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains; and subsequently," are notified of -- "the gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval man himself may claim to have been evolved." ("The Beginnings of Life.")
He may; but no one, except materialists, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are "the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another." Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the Quadrumanous order, than that primeval man, who has remained stationary in his human specialization ever since his fossil is found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type -- has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape.
That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops "through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and at last the human type," is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: "A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God," holds good throughout the ages. Haeckel, in his Shopfungsgeschichte, shows a double drawing representing two embryos -- that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, except the slight difference in the head, larger and wider about the brain in the man, are
* "Trans. of Geolog. Soc. of Glasgow," vol. iii. Very strangely, however, he has just changed his opinion. The sun, he says, is only 15,000,000 old.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 259 IDENTITY OF HUMAN AND ANIMAL EMBRYOS.
undistinguishable. "In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal and finally of man. If we take him up at the more advanced stage where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form . . . for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks' growth between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy" ("Modern Science," etc., p. 171).
Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile -- a Naga, instead of coupling man with the quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the other, and more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to AEsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it since prehistoric times, it is no new discovery. In "Isis," Vol. I., 389, it is noticed and half explained.
As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in itself the totality of the kingdoms of nature, and since it seems to be "a persistent type" of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern philosophies believe in evolution, which Manu and Kapila* give with far more clearness than any scientist does at present. No need to repeat that which was fully debated in Isis Unveiled, as the reader may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rested, in our earlier books.** But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, "from the structureless Amoeba to man," are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre-Silurian epochs, in the sea or land-
* Hence the philosophy in the allegory of the 7, 10, and finally 21 Prajapati, Rishis, Munis, etc., who all are made the fathers of various things and beings. The order of the seven classes or orders of plants, animals, and even inanimate things, given at random in the Puranas, is found in several commentaries in the correct rotation. Thus, Prithu is the father of the Earth. He milks her, and makes her bear every kind of grain and vegetable, all enumerated and specified. Kasyapa is the father of all the reptiles, snakes, demons, etc., etc.
** See Vol. I. 152, et seq., about the tree of evolution -- The "Mundane Tree."
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mud. The Occultists believe in an inherent law of progressive development.* Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself.
On page 145 of the "Origin of Species" we find him stating that, since there can be no advantage "to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm . . . to become highly organized," therefore, "natural selection," not including necessarily progressive development -- leaves the animalcule and the worm (the "persistent types") quiet.
There does not appear much uniform law in such behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some Super-Natural selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern Occultists would call the "Law of Retardation," may have something to do with it.
But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance to his law -- as is given to it now by his atheistic followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive: (1) On account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; (2) on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and (3) because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to us -- nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth's surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says himself: --
"For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines."
It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride or unreasonable belief in man's representing even here on earth -- (in our period, perhaps) -- the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own, for it is not so. But simply because the "missing link," such as to prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by palaeontologists. Believing as we do that man has evolved from, and passed through, (during the preceding Rounds) the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the orangoutang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it
* Checked and modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which imposes a restriction on the advance of all species when a Higher Type makes its appearance.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 261 NATURE IS UNIFORM.
would forward the Occult doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man, most irresistibly. One may even enquire how it is that biologists and anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape -- how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory, unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a non-precedent in nature, quite a special and unique case. And that is what all this leads physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Haeckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance, not man. The pithecoid is an accidental creation, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.
The occult doctrine, is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying law in nature, the latter having no personal, "special design," but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole manvantaric period and deals with the land worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the
other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same evolutionary law, and both have to progress according to Karmic law. Both have started from the same neutral centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of the cycle.
It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike creature; and when we say "man" we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only -- the middle, or the transition point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man what he is now during the first two and a half Root-races. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the secondary period, as we claim.
Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult teaching, "a god on earth who had fallen into matter," or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma; and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the actual man and his inner nature, the Fall mentioned above having left no original sin on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with.
Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc -- which is centrifugal for spirit and centripetal for matter -- and those he prepares to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces -- viz., matter will become centrifugal and spirit centripetal -- that all such transformations are next in store for the anthropoid ape also, all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this
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Round -- and these will all be men in the Fifth Round, as present men inhabited ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round.
Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples -- "blurred copies," as Mr. Huxley has it -- of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-race during the period of what is called the "Fall into generation." The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume (anthropogenesis), it is the speechless animal that first started sexual connection, having been the first to separate into males and females. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow the bestial example -- as shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by the animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in the woman. The Ape is, indeed, as remarked in Isis Unveiled (Vol. II 278) "a transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family -- a hybrid branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter" -- or man. The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the Egos of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the "human stage" before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The
animal "Eves" were their foremothers, and the human "Adams" their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam's first wife, whom the Talmud describes as a charming woman, with long wavy hair, i.e.-- a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael-Lilith, or man-
animal united, a being called Hayo Bischat, the Beast or Evil Beast (Zohar). It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly "speechless men," and will become speaking animals (or men of a lower order) in the Fifth Round, while the adepts of a certain school hope that some of the Egos of the apes of a higher intelligence will reappear at the close of the Sixth Root-race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Species and genera of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown -- man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root-Race likewise, as well as after every geological
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 263 MILLIONS OF YEARS HENCE.
cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in the latter. In the Sixth Root-Race the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms -- though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches -- will develop from the "cast off" types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were none before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the monads of the unprogressed men of our race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated baboon. (But see Part III., Addenda .)
This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no "special creation" or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant ex nihilo.
This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 263 MILLIONS OF YEARS HENCE.
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A PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE EARLY RACES.
There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first "mindless" race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later "Lemurians"; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.
As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are "productions of blind natural forces," we are assured by some; "quite modern" we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by sceptic and materialist, and made subservient to the Bible in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian "deluge theory," it is declared by the Christian clergy "the insanely delirious voice of old superstition." Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of modern science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato's Atlantis is regarded by most of the scientists as a dream.
Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. Only Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the
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Puranas, nor anywhere else. But with simply one of the esoteric keys in hand it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless "lands of the gods," Devas and Munis described in the Puranas, in their Varshas, Dwipas, and zones. Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-
sunk.
It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three races -- except so far as to give a
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Early Races
general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the first had no history of its own. Of race the second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention only to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans before the history of our own race (the Fifth) can be attempted.
What is known of other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic science is daubed with the contemptuous term "Superstition." The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato's "winged" and hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the gods, are quietly brought back by Haeckel to their new place in nature: our divine races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of sea slime.
Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber, "the fictions of ancient poetry . . . . will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth." However one-sided the efforts of the learned author of the "Mysteries of the Kabiri," -- efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old paganism, "to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture," -- time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that "truth" by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of archaic paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri -- the most mysterious gods of antiquity -- was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, of these scholars had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter. "We have no reason to think," he writes, "that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 265 BAILLY AND FABER.
the first (the fourth in esoteric teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge. " (Chap. I. p. 9). To this, Faber adds: --
"I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegian isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly, indeed, in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of Scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlanteans were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians." ( "A Dissertation on the Kabiri," p. 284.)
In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept Biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the giants. (See "Lettres sur l'Atlantide. ") Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French confrere, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah -- that he "formerly inhabited the island Atlantis" (ibid). This island, whether it
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Early Races
was the "Poseidonis" mentioned in "Esoteric Buddhism," or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.
No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows; and if a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis?*
Bailly's mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and post diluvian nation, which, however, as he says, certainly "flourished before the foundation of the Hindu, the Egyptian, and the Phoenician empires." In this, had
* This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that "the Noetic family also . . . bore the appellations of Atlanteans and Titans, and the great patriarch himself was called by way of eminence Atlas and Titan." ( Vol. II. p. 285). And if so, then, according to the Bible, Noah must have been the progeny of the Sons of God, the fallen angels, agreeably to the same authority, and of the "daughters of men who were fair," (See Genesis, chap. vi.) And why not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his sons and daughters (who perished in the Deluge), as bad as the rest of mankind?
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he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was sunk under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of science, who will accept neither the tradition that several continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric cycle -- it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindus, Egyptians, and Phoenicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses (as every Initiate would) the two continents, and assigns to the small island which sunk last all the events pertaining to the two enormous continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the first couple, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In saying so, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to "Earth," he means "matter," as the Atlanteans were really the first purely human and terrestrial race -- those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.
Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated adept, about the history of the Third Race after its "Fall," though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Early Races
many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations -- all of which was based upon, and followed the early Aryan calculations -- to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.* One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.
* In that wonderful volume of Donnelly's "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World," the author, speaking of the Aryan colonies from Atlantis, and of the arts and sciences the legacy of our Fourth Race -- bravely announces that "the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene age." This is an enormous allowance for a modern scholar to make; but civilization dates still further back than the Miocene Atlanteans. "Secondary-period" man will be discovered, and with him his long forgotten civilization.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 267 THE NATURAL "FALL."
The THIRD RACE FELL -- and created no longer: it begot its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the "lords the gods" of the Bible ' the "Sons of Wisdom," the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature: but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness -- we must not say sin -- of what they had done, only when too late: after the angelic monads from higher spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various "fires" are latent, and in others they are active. The vital fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher principles awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus non-existing. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in matter. But as said in PYMANDER: --
"This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature* being mingled with Man** brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the essence of the Seven (Pitris, governors) and her own; the Fire and the Spirit and Nature (the noumenon of matter); which (commingling) forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes (negative and positive) according to the essences of the seven governors." (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect. 16.)
Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,*** "the Power of the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Early Races
* Nature is the natural body, the shadow of the Progenitors; and --
** MAN is the "Heavenly man," as already stated.
*** The "Pymander" of our museums and libraries is an abridgement of one of the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phoenician MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the "Genesis of Enoch." But even its disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators and seven primitive men. As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their master's names. This custom passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes (of whom Egyptologists count five) Enoch, etc., they are all inventors of letters; none of them dies but still lives, and they are the first Initiators into, and Founders of the Mysteries. The Genesis of Enoch disappeared only very lately among the Kabalists. Guillaume [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Thought Divine." St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world "the enigmatical mirror of pure truth," and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that "things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see." It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The "Fall of the Angels," and the "War in Heaven" are repeated on every plane, the lower "mirror" disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir: --
"All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches ME, who am the light of lights."
In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow -- Dyooknah -- of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven; which became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the war between spirit and matter. This war will last till the inner and divine man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of the former will be at eternal feud with his master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the "Fall," when even mortal man was created by the Elements and was not born.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Early Races
The above is made clear in all the great theogonies, principally in the Grecian (see Hesiod and Theogony). The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal* (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Eliphas Levi tells his readers.
* Uranos is a modified Varuna, "the Universal encompasser," the all-embracer, and one of the oldest of the Vedic deities -- SPACE, the maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the Leviathan -- Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the signs of the Zodiac. Varuna, "without whom no creature can even wink," was degraded like Uranos, and, like him, he fell into generation, his functions, "the grandest cosmical functions," as Muir calls them, having been lowered down from heaven to earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed "a new period, a second phase in the development of creation," as justly remarked by Decharme (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves -- as, later on, these men evolve their progeny -- without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos,* time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism -- matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial -- terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution.
This allegory is the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea -- by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. -- X., et seq., and also Berosus' account of primeval creation.) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus -- Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.** Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,*** and varies from Zeus, the Great
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[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Orientalist says, "The attributes ascribed to Varuna (in the Vedas) impart to his character a moral elevation and sanctity far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity." But to understand correctly the reason of his fall, like that of Uranos, one has to see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and sinful work of man's fancy, and also to study the mysteries which Varuna is said to have imparted to Vasishta. Only . . . "his secrets and those of Mitra are not to be revealed to the foolish."
* Kronos is not only [[Chronos]], time, but also, as Breal showed in his Hercule et Cacus (p. 57), comes from the root Kar, "to make, to create." Whether Breal and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in saying that in the Vedas Kronan is a creative god, we have our doubts. Breal probably meant Karma, or rather Visva-Karma, the creative god, the "Omnificent" and the "great Architect of the world."
** The Titanic struggle, in theogony at least, is the fight for supremacy between the children of Uranos and Gaia (or Heaven and Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans, against the children of Kronos, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting struggle going on to this day between the spiritual inner man and the man of flesh, in one sense.
*** Just as the "Lord God," or Jehovah, is Cain esoterically, and the "tempting serpent" as well, the male portion of the androgynous Eve, before her "Fall;" the female portion of Adam Kadmon; the left side or Binah of the right side Chochmah in the first Sephirothal Triad.
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"Father of the Gods." He is the "disrespectful son" in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the "Heavenly man" (Pymander); and even in the Bible he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on -- by transmutation -- under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the "sons of Wisdom." The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely human Atlantean cycle -- if Uranus and Kronos who precede him are found insufficient -- may be found in Hesiod, who tells us that the Immortals have made men and created the Golden and the Silver age (First and Second Races); while Jupiter created the generations of Bronze (an admixture of two elements), of Heroes, and the men of the age of Iron. After this he sends his fatal present, by Pandora, to Epimetheus,* which present Hesiod calls "a fatal gift," or the first woman. It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man "for the theft of divine creative fire." Her apparition on earth is the signal of every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering -- as the same races are made to live under Yima's rule, in the Mazdean Vendidad.
Two deluges may also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the theogonies save the Bible.** Everywhere the man of our race appears after a cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.*** "Gods and mortals have one common origin" says Hesiod (ibid. v. 108); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like
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Noah's (see Apollod., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam. I, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology (Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth. 1, 545), all men were drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the "master of all") advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la Grece Antique -- the four ages
* In the Egyptian legend, translated by M. Maspero (the ex-director of the Bulaq Museum), called the "two Brothers," the original of Pandora is given. Noum, the famous heavenly artist, creates a marvellous beauty, a girl which he sends to Batoo, after which the happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is man, and the girl Eve, of course. (See Maspero's Egyptian Legends, and also Decharme's "Mythologie de la Grece Antique. ")
** Yima is not the "first man" in the Vendidad, but only in the theories of the Orientalists. -- See further on.
*** Boeotia, then ancient Athens, and Eleusis were submerged.
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signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the races. "The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others," he says, "without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever-decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of purity . . . . qualifies the first race. . . . . The men of the second race, those of the age of Silver, are already inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy. . . . They disappear. . . . The men of the age of Bronze are robust and violent (the third race); their strength is extreme. They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown" (Op. at D., 143-155). The fourth generation (race) is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes (see "The Seven Against Thebes," by AEschylus), or under the walls of Troy.
Thus, the four races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the classics. But this is all "Mythology" and poetry. What can modern science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of the domain of that same science, that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even if that speck be not a figment of our opponents' imagination.
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STANZA X. -- (Continued.)
40. THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH (races) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. WE ARE THE KINGS, WE ARE THE GODS (a).
41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK AT. WIVES FROM THE "MINDLESS," THE NARROW-HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE. ALSO KHADO (Dakini) WITH LITTLE MINDS (b).
42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR HUMAN BODY. MALE AND FEMALE THEY WORSHIPPED (c). THEN THE THIRD EYE ACTED NO LONGER (d).
(a) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was -- pride! It is the Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, the
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memory of whom lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and which found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid and at the same time distorted legends. One who has read and studied the Commentaries on the archaic doctrine, will easily recognise in some Atlanteans, the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all these tutti quanti of "accursed memory," as theological literature expresses it: of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this leads us naturally to inquire into the religious ethics of these early races, mythical as these may be.
What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any, as they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe on faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible ALL, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical Self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower principles by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the "Sons of Light." Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From "Sons of Light and Wisdom" they ended by becoming the "Sons of Darkness." They had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.*
At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root Race had thus no beliefs that could be called religion. That is to say, he was equally as ignorant of "gay religions, full of pomp and gold" as of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety -- as a feeling
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expressed by a child toward a loved parent -- then even the earliest Lemurians had a religion -- and a most beautiful one -- from the very beginning of their intellectual life. Had they not their bright gods of the elements around
* The name is used here in the sense of, and as a synonym of "sorcerers." The Atlantean races were many, and lasted in their evolution for millions of years: all were not bad. They became so toward their end, as we (the fifth) are fast becoming now.
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them, and even within themselves?* Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by those who had given them life and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into matter could never have been achieved; nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super-
ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner principles with a portion, or rather, a reflection of that essence. The Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the NOUMENOI of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of nature - the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in what Science is pleased to call the "modes of motion" -- the imponderable forces and what not -- are the still higher noumenoi of still higher Hierarchies.
It was the "Golden Age" in those days of old, the age when the "gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals." Since then, the gods departed (i.e., became invisible), and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms -- the Elements.
It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into sexes -- hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals -- who became the first "Sacrificers" to the god of matter. They stand in the far-away dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,** as the first anthropomorphists who worshipped form and matter. That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship, thence led to phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve became matter, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel -- the latter the life-bearing soil, the former "the tiller of that ground or field."
Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the ray of which man feels within himself -- or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark Cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, "the mighty men of renown in those
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* The "Gods of the Elements" are by no means the Elementals. The latter are at best used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves. . . . .
** Cain was the sacrificer, as shown at first in chap. iv. of Genesis, of "the fruit of the ground," of which he was first tiller , while Abel "brought of the firstlings of his flock" to the Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first male, Abel of the first female humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the third race. (See "The Mystery of Cain and Abel. ") The "murdering" is blood-shedding, but not taking life.
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days" (Gen. vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Rakshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.
Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal god. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon and blended, so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean Continent); the Atlanteans, toward the Southern Pole, the pit, cosmically and terrestrially -- whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two poles were denominated, by the ancients, Dragons and Serpents -- hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the "Sons of God" (Sons of Spirit and Matter): the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of this dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the "Fallen Angels" in its esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man's self-consciousness; it is the angle-iron on which hinges his entire life-cycle; -- the history of his evolution and growth.
On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of esoteric anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the ONE into various contrasted aspects.
The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so considerable space is devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The "Fallen Angels," so-called, are Humanity itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, has never had any being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten, nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; he, again, who has contaminated the indwelling god in himself, by linking the pure spirit with the impure demon of matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, "Demon est Deus inversus " finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested nature, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.
Thus it has now become self-evident that postulating as we do (a) the appearance of man before that of other mammalia, and even before the ages of the huge reptiles; (b) periodical deluges and glacial
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periods owing to the karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man
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from a Superior Being, or what materialism would call a supernatural Being, though it is only super-
human -- it is evident that our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of the Mankind in the Third Race -- all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara -- owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings hypostasizing into their fifth principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that those angels are identical with their "Fallen" Spirits, than the esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.* The divine man dwelt in the animal, and, therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution -- when also "all the animal creation was untied," and males were attracted to females -- that race fell: not because they had eaten of the fruit of Knowledge and knew good from evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyan-Chohans had incarnated.** "When we have ascertained the extent of the Universe and learnt to know all that there is in it, we will multiply our race," answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated ascetics will "multiply," i.e., once more produce Mind-born immaculate Sons -- in the Seventh Root-Race.
It is so stated in the Puranas; in Adi Parvan (p. 115) and Brahma Purana, etc. In one portion of the Pushkara Mahatmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will-born progeny (the "Sons of passive Yoga"), will not create men, "converts half himself into a female by whom he begets daughters," the future females of the Third Race which begat the giants of Atlantis,
* It is, perhaps, with an eye to this degradation of the highest and purest Spirits, who broke through the intermediate planes of lower consciousness (the "Seven circles of fire" of Pymander), that St. James is made to say that "this Wisdom (psuche in the original) descended not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish"; and Psuche is Manas, the "human soul," the Spiritual Wisdom or Soul being Buddhi. Yet Buddhi per se, being so near the Absolute, is only latent consciousness.
** This is the "undying race" as it is called in Esotericism, and exoterically the fruitless generation of the first progeny of Daksha, who curses Narada, the divine Rishi, alleged to have dissuaded the Haryaswas and the Sabalaswas, the sons of Daksha, from procreating their species, by saying "Be born in the womb; there shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions"; after this Narada, the representative of that race of fruitless ascetics, is said, as soon as he dies in one body, to be reborn in another.
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the Fourth Race, so called. In the Vishnu Purana it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.
Happily for the human race the "Elect Race" had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races -- save some lowest -- of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, "the seeds of the Trinity of Wisdom" had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same great personality to step ad libitum from one worn-out body into another.
(b) The first war that earth knew, the first human gore shed, was the result of man's eyes and senses being opened; which made him see that the daughters of his Brethren were fairer than his own, and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race was born. Titans or giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race -- that of the giants.
For "there were giants" in the days of old, indeed* and the evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same in the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the carboniferous period.
Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works -- in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity -- contain references to giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Rakshasas of Lanka -- the opponents conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments of attention.
* The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva Espana of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, by saying as follows: "In the beginning, before the light of the Sun had been created, this land (Cholula) was in obscurity and darkness . . . . but immediately after the light of the Sun arose in the East, there appeared gigantic men . . . . who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered after that to all parts of the Earth."
"A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of giants called Quinanes," says the author of "Atlantis" (p. 204.)
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 277 THE GIANTS.
ARE GIANTS A FICTION?
Here, again, we come into collision with Science. The latter denies, so far, that man has ever been much larger than the average of the tall and powerful men one meets with occasionally now. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces such traditions as resting upon ill-digested facts. Instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward. Thus, in 1613, in a locality called from time immemorial the "Field of Giants" in the Lower Dauphine (France, four miles from St. Romans) enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobochus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium giganteum of the family of tapirs, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than they are now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us was the Roman Emperor Maximus, we are told, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day we see every year men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 1/2 feet tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. And as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding "always betray a tendency to revert to the original type," they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a rule in ancient days, there would be none now.
All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far (which is positively denied) to prove undeniably in the opinion of science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last racial cycle. The Giants of old are all buried under the Oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a brazen, far more a human skeleton. But whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, almost nothing was known of fossil man, for archaeology complacently ignored his existence. Of Giants who were "in the earth in those days" of old, the Bible alone had spoken to the wise men of the West, the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Atlas or Orion, whose mighty shoulders are said to support the world.
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Nevertheless, even the "Giants" have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well
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examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences -- Geological, Sidereal and Scriptural (the latter in its Universal character) -- may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with geology; it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. "All those bones" writes Frederic de Rougemont -- who, though believing too piously in Noah's ark and the Bible, is none the less a Scientific witness -- "all those skeletons found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liege, etc., etc. . . those skulls which remind all of the negro type. . . and which by reason of that type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men of very high stature" . . . ("Histoire de la Terre, " p. 154) The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a tall stature to those who were submerged in the deluge (not necessarily "Noah's") and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.
As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not stop at that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage -- for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity* and actual existence would have to be proven. But we may turn to the scientific journals of 1858, which spoke of a sarcophagus of giants found that year on the site of that same city. As to the ancient pagan writers -- we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself at Sigeus. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilaus, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as well as that other one discovered by Messecrates of Stire, at Lemnos -- "horrible to behold," according to Philostratus (Heroica, p. 35). Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class all these men as either fools or liars?
Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognised Orion, the son of Ephialtes (Nat. Hist., vol. VII, ch. xvi.). Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antaeus, the giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or Hillus, son of Hercules -- all giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbe Pegues (cited in de Mirville's Pneumatologie) affirms in his curious work on "The Volcanoes of Greece" that "in the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which must have necessi-
* There are critics who, finding no evidence about the existence of Tertullian save in the writings of Eusebius "the veracious," are inclined to doubt it.
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tated everywhere the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic." (Page 48.)
In the same work above cited of the Abbe Pegues, the author wonders why in Bible and tradition the Gibborim, (Giants, the mighty ones) the Rephaim, or the spectres (Phantoms), the Nephilim, or the fallen ones -- (irruentes) -- are shown "as if identical, though they are all men, since the Bible calls
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them the primitive and the mighty ones" -- e.g., Nimrod. The "Doctrine" explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two Phantom (astral) races; to the fallen one -- the Third; and to the race of the Atlantean Giants -- the Fourth, after which "men began to decrease in stature."
Bossuet (Elevations p. 56) sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the "original sin." "Ye shall be as gods," says the serpent of Genesis to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of false divinities. Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of images, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is the latter that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches, the Greek and the Latin especially, are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.* It is only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly gods, as pure and as divine as their progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical serpent does not, as sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, refer at all to the physiological fall of men, but to their acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, which knowledge comes to them prior to their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that "Adam knew Eve his wife" (Genesis iv.). It is not, however, by the dead-letter of the Hebrew Bible that we shall check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine; but point out, rather, the great similarities between the two in their esoteric meaning.
It is only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement
* And that, notwithstanding the formal prohibition at the great Church Council of Elyrus in A.D. 303, when it was declared that "the form of God, which is immaterial and invisible, shall not be limited by figure or shape." In 692, the council of Constantinople had similarly prohibited "to paint or represent Jesus as a lamb," as also "to bow the knee in praying, as it is the act of idolatry." But the council of Nicaea (787) brought this idolatry back, while that of Rome (883) excommunicated John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, for his showing himself a declared enemy of image worship.
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of Alexandria began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that "Serpents and Giants signify Demons. " (Genesis, chapter v.) *
We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the Bible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in Genesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate they belong to a more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In Shoo-King (4th part, chap. XXVII, p. 291), anyone can read in the French translation, "When the Mao-tse" ("that antediluvian and perverted race," explains the Annotator, "which had retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton"),**
* Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Ch. Gould writes in his "Mythical Monsters " on p. 212: -- "Its mythologies, histories, religions, popular stories and proverbs, all teem with references to a mysterious being who has a physical nature and spiritual attributes. Gifted with an accepted form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for the assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather, producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising tempests and allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the scattered legends which everywhere abound relating to this subject. . . . "
This "mysterious being" is the mythical Dragon, i.e., the symbol of the historical, actual Adept, the master and professor of occult sciences of old. It is stated already elsewhere, that the great "magicians" of the Fourth and Fifth Races were generally called the "Serpents" and the "Dragons" after their progenitors. All these belonged to the hierarchy of the so-called "Fiery Dragons of Wisdom," the Dhyan Chohans, answering to the Agnishwatta Pitris, the Maruts and Rudras generally, as the issue of Rudra their father, identified with the god of fire. More is said in the text. Now Clement, an initiated Neo-Platonist, knew, of course, the origin of the word "Dragon," and why the initiated Adepts were so-called, as he knew the secret of Agathodaemon, the Christ, the seven-
vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new faith required the transformation of all the rivals of Jehovah, the angels supposed to have rebelled against that Elohim as the Titan-Prometheus rebelled against Zeus, the usurper of his father's kingdom; and that "Dragon" was the mystic appellation of the "Sons of Wisdom"; from this knowledge came his definition, as cruel as it was arbitrary, "Serpents and Giants signify Demons, " i.e., not "Spirits," but Devils, in Church parlance.
** "What would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese -- I speak of the inland, the true Chinaman, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now occupying the throne, the aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race -- reached their highest civilization when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia" (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 67). And this handful of the inland Chinese are all of a very high stature. Could the most ancient MSS. in the Lolo language (that of the aborigines of China) be got at and translated correctly, many a priceless piece of evidence would be found. But they are as rare as their language is unintelligible. So far, one or two European archaeologists only have been able to procure such priceless works.
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"according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands. . . . ." The Lord Chang-ty (a king of the divine dynasty) saw that his people had lost the last vestiges of virtue. Then he commanded Tehong and Lhy (two lower Dhyan Chohans) to cut away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there was no more going up and down!"**
"Going up and down" means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two
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worlds. Not being in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together; especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the "coats of skin" of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between physical and ethereal divine man was stopped. The veil of matter between the two planes became too dense for even the inner man to penetrate. The mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their celestial teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men -- in whom the spark of divine Wisdom burnt bright, and only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to bad purposes -- remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kumaric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the secret teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which never died since that period: --
"The inner man of the first * * * only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvana, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind. . . . . ." "Out of the seven virgin-men (Kumara**) four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of
* Remember the same statement in the Book of Enoch, as also the ladder seen by Jacob in his dream. The "two worlds" mean of course the "two planes of Consciousness and Being." A seer can commune with beings of a higher plane than the earth, without quitting his arm-chair.
** Vide supra the Commentary on the Four Races -- and on the "Sons of Will and Yoga," the immaculate progeny of the Androgynous Third Race.
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the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, "He is dead"; behold, he is alive and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying knowledge (Gnyana). Thou shalt never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones (Maha . . .) before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand." . . . * (Catechism of the inner Schools.)
It is these sacred "Four" who have been allegorized and symbolized in the "Linga Purana, " which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as Kumara is reborn in each Kalpa (Race in this instance), as four youths -- four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Siva is pre-
eminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogis and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste asceticism itself which incarnates
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in these Elect. It is only after getting married and being dragged by the gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Siva, a god, and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type, in the Hindu Pantheon. Higher than the "Four" is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens -- that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Book I.
We have now to examine the nature of the "Sons of the Flame" and of "Dark Wisdom," as well as the pros and cons of the Satanic assumption.
Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments on the tile, which George Smith calls "the Curse after the Fall" (see p. 81 of his "Chaldean Account of Genesis"), are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the fall of the angels in our Books. Thus, it is said in line 12 that the "Lord of the earth his name called out, the father Elu" (Elohim), and pronounced his curse, which "The God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because his man (Angelic man) had corrupted his purity (14 and 15)," for which Hea expresses the desire that " 'Wisdom and knowledge' hostilely may they injure him (man)."
The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldean with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn (thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)), the Elohim do the same in the third chapter of Genesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.
But this was of no avail. For the spirit of divine Wisdom being
* In the Kabala the pronunciation of the four-lettered ineffable name is "a most secret arcanum" --- "a secret of secrets."
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upon and in man -- verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Manasic spirit, which made him learn the secret of creation on the Kriyasaktic, and of procreation on the earthly planes -- led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.
The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured legend. Primarily, the angelic Fall, which has transformed the "first-born" of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman and Typhon of the "pagans" (i.e., if the accounts given in the Book of Enoch,* and in Hermes, in Puranas and Bible are taken literally), when read esoterically means simply this: --
Sentences such as: "In his (Satan's) ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of
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Heaven" etc., ought to read: "Prompted by the law of eternal evolution and Karma, the angel incarnated on earth in man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the mysteries of Heaven." He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth, "man will beget, not create."** But as, by so doing, he has to use
* Returning once more to the most important subject in the archaic Cosmogony, it may be said that even in the Norse legends, in the Sacred Scrolls of the goddess Saga, we find Loki, the brother by blood of Odin (as Typhon, Ahriman, and others are brothers of Osiris and Ormazd), becoming evil only later, when he has mixed too long with humanity. Like all other fire or light gods -- fire burning and destroying as well as warming and giving life -- he ended by being accepted in the destructive sense of "fire." The name Loki, we learn ("Asgard and the Gods, " p. 250), has been derived from the old word "liechan," to enlighten. It has, therefore, the same origin as the Latin "lux, light." Hence Loki is identical with Lucifer (light-bringer). This title, given to the Prince of Darkness, is very suggestive and is a vindication in itself against theological slander. But Loki is still more closely related to Prometheus, as he is shown chained to a sharp rock, while Lucifer, identified with Satan, was chained down in hell; a circumstance, however, which prevented neither of them from acting in all freedom on Earth, if we accept the theological paradox in its fulness. Loki is a beneficent, generous and powerful god in the beginning of times, and the principle of good, not of evil, in early Scandinavian theogony.
** The Greek mythos just alluded to a few pages back, namely the mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos in the Greek theogony, is an allusion to this theft by the Son of the Earth and Heavens of the divine creative fire. If Uranos, the personification of the celestial Powers, has to stop creating (he is made impotent by Kronos, the god in time) so, in the Egyptian Cosmogony it is Thot, the god of Wisdom, who regulates this fight between Horus and Set, the latter being served by the former as Uranos is by Kronos (see "Book of the Dead " ch. XVII. V. 26). In the Babylonian account it is the god Zu, who strips "the father of the gods" of umsimi -- the ideal creative organ not the crown (!) as G. Smith thought (see pp. 115 and 116 Chaldean Account). For, in the fragment K. 3454 (British Museum) it is said very clearly, that Zu having stripped the "venerable [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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his weak body as the means of procreation, that body will pay the penalty for this wisdom, carried from heaven down to the earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.
The mediaeval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write: "The Kabala was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the FALL the Angels most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity" (Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the Kabala). This shows how the event -- of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the divine Secrets of Heaven to the daughters of men -- allegorically told
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by Enoch and in the sixth chapter of Genesis was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the pre-human period, that of divine man, or as plastic Protestant theology now has it -- the pre -adamite period. But even Genesis begins its real history (chap. vi.) by the giants of "those days" and the "Sons of god" marrying and teaching their wives -- the daughters of man.
This period is the one described in the Puranas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole personnel of the Brahmanas and Puranas -- the Rishis, Prajapatis, Manus, their wives and progeny -- belong to that pre-human period. All these are the Seed of Humanity, so to speak. It is around these "Sons of God," the "Mind born" astral children of Brahma, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Puranic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other spheres, events perceived by the "Siva eye" of the ancient Seers, (the "third eye" of our Stanzas) and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for Sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.
But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of Heaven" of his desire, he carried away the umsimi of the gods, and burnt thereby the teroti (the power) of all the other gods, thus "governing the seed of all the angels" (15). As the umsimi was on the seat of Bel, it could hardly be the "crown." A fourth version is in the Bible. Ham is the Chaldean Zu, and both are cursed for the same allegorically described crime.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 285 THE TIBETAN LILITH.
at, but in whom lower, more material, though sidereal, beings had incarnated. These beings in female forms (Lilith is the prototype of these in the Jewish traditions) are called in the esoteric accounts "Khado" (Dakini, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the chief of these Liliths, Sangye Khado, (Buddha Dakini, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of "walking in the air," and the greatest kindness to mortals; but no mind -- only animal instinct.*
(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body -- that "miracle of miracles," as an English author calls it -- and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their Science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing PRINCIPLE knew at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the matter in which the Principles had
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clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred "monsters" -- i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.
Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer describes them well in saying that:--
"Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by the Sovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. They commanded the Elements, knew the secrets of heaven and the earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity in the stars. . . . It seems, indeed, as though one has to deal, when reading of them, not with men as we are but with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her. . . . All these beings are marked with a character of MAGIC and SORCERY. . . . "
And so they were, those (now) legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still, once really existing races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dullness and superstition, an endless series of recognized philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they saw their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old -- no fewer and as great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus yielded to the evidence of facts and showed the discriminative capacity of really
* These are the beings whose legendary existence has served as a ground-work upon which to build the rabbinical Lilith, and what the believers in the Bible would term the antediluvian women, and the Kabalists the pre-Adamite races. They are no fiction -- this is certain, however fantastic the exuberance of later growth.
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great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than our modern wise men are; for, as well remarked by the author of some "Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought" (in Mind):--
"The common division of history into ancient and modern is . . . . misleading. The Greeks in the 4th century, B.C. were in many respects moderns especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to accept fables so easily . . . . ."
Yet the "Lemurians" and the Atlanteans, "those children of Heaven and Earth," were indeed marked with a character of SORCERY; for the Esoteric doctrine charges them precisely with that, which, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the Anthropoid Ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called "animals," and thus producing a truly pithecoid species,
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now extinct. Of course, as in the question of spontaneous generation -- in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches -- the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean giants, nor yet the "animals," were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject -- those of the physiologists included -- are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute denial a priori of such a fact.
A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being that the new "incarnate" bred with, was called an "animal," not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII. and what is said in its first verse (24th): -- that when the "Sons of Wisdom" came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a spark, while some of the shadows were left over from being filled and perfected, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which "remained destitute of knowledge," or those again which were left "mindless," remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve were supposed, with Cain and Abel, to be the only human family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Singhalese
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 287 THE RACES OF MEN NOT ALL HUMAN.
regard the Veddhas of their jungles as speaking animals and no more, some British people believe firmly, in their arrogance, that every other human family -- especially the dark Indians -- is an inferior race. Moreover there are naturalists who have sincerely considered the problem whether some savage tribes -- like the Bushmen for instance -- can be regarded as men at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals "fair to look at" as a biped: -- "Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair." Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.
If men existed two million years ago, they must have been -- just as the animals were -- quite different physically and anatomically from what they have become; and they were nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world breeds strictly inter se, i.e., in accordance with genus and species -- only since the appearance on this earth of the Atlantean race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, "Modern Science and Modern Thought," this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, "appears to be a prima facie deduction rather than an absolute law" even now. He shows that "different species, do, in fact, often breed together, as may be seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile. . . . but this rule is not universal, and recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile." The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as that of several other domestic animals (p. 101); "like foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rutimeyer as descended from
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three distinct species of fossil-oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos frontosus. " Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told, "numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series" -- the gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance (see Addenda).
Thus Mr. Darwin's remark -- or shall we say the remark of Linnaeus? -- natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would -- were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries -- reconcile in more than one way, if not entirely, the modern Evolution theory with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the "missing link" in our Fourth Round geological formations.
We will show elsewhere that, however unconsciously to itself, modern Science pleads our case upon its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be
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the descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-
found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe as he ever did that --
"Man was the first and highest (mammalian) animal that appeared in this (Fourth Round) creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours." For, "the Rakshasas (giant-demons) and Daityas (Titans) of the "White Dwipa" (continent) spoiled his (the dumb man's) Sires." (Commentary.)
Furthermore, as we see, there are anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of modern science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary Man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene Man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbe Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-
Age Man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brahminical exoteric books which approximate to the esoteric teaching.
(d) . . . . Then, "the third eye acted no longer," says the Stanza, because MAN had sunk too deep into the mire of matter.
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What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Verse 42, concerning the "third eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer"?
A few more occult teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the third Eye has to be first explained.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 289 THE "THIRD EYE."
THE RACES WITH THE "THIRD EYE."
The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's eye called esotericism on almost every inch of the occult grounds travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.*
It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, human side of the extinct races, in this history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. That, which finds its possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of modern science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate -- and therefore denies as facts in nature -- is withheld.
But even such statements as these -- e.g., that of all the mammalians, man was the earliest; that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the Ape; and that he was a kind of a Cyclops in days of old -- will all be contested, yet, scientists will never be able to prove -- except to their own satisfaction -- that it was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, and shape, even to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the store-house, so to speak, of all the seeds of life
* For suggestiveness, we would recommend a short article in the Theosophist of August, 1887, "Esoteric Studies." Its author expounds therein quite an occult theory, though to the world a new idea: "the progress of the Monad concurring with the retrogression of Form" (666), i.e., "with decrease of the vis formativa." He says, "Who knows what shape vehicled the Ego in remote rings (Rounds, or races?) . . . ? May not man's type have been that of the Simiadae in its variety? Might not the monkey-
kingdom of Ramayana fame rest on some far-off tradition relating to a period when that was the common lot, or rather aspect, of man?" . . . and winds up a very clever, though too short, exposition of his theory by saying that which every true occultist will endorse: "With physico-ethereal man there must be involution of sex. As physico-astral man depended on entities of the sub-human class (evolved from animal prototypes) for rebirth, so will physico-ethereal man find among the graceful, shapely orders issuing from the air-plane, one or more which will be developed for his successive embodiments when procreated forms are given -- a process which will include all mankind only very gradually. The (pre ?) Adamic and post-Adamic races were giants; their ethereal counterparts may
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possibly be liliputians -- beauteous, luminous, diaphanous -- but will assuredly be giants in mind" (p. 671, art. by Visconde de Figaniere, F.T.S.).
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for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.* As En-Soph is "One, notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him " (Zohar," i. 2la), so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm. "As soon as man appeared, everything was complete. . . . for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms (Ibid., iii. 48a)." "The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man" (ii. 76a). The human form -- so called, because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the divine man -- is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of "Esoteric Studies,"** the new type, at the beginning of every Round, "as man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdom in esse." The author proceeds, "he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have been the new type of the cycle. The human shape, in one ring (?), as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below."
If the idea is what we understand it to mean -- for the "rings" spoken of throw some confusion upon it -- then it is the correct esoteric teaching. Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, man (the astral, or the "Soul," for the Zohar, repeating the archaic teaching, distinctly says that "the real man is the Soul, and his material frame no part of him") -- man became the living and animal UNIT, from which the "cast-off clothes" determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.***
Thus, he "created" for ages the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the Vendidad of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldean and the Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindu Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and his Ark with the Seven Rishis, as in that of the Rishis, each of whom is shown the father and
* It may be objected that this is a contradiction. That, as the first Root-Race appeared 300,000,000 years after the vegetation had evolved, the seed of vegetable life could not be in the First Race. We say it could; for up to man's appearance in this Round, the vegetation was of quite another kind than it is now, and quite ethereal, this for the simple reason that no grass or plants could have been physical, before there were animal or other organisms to breathe out the carbonic acid which vegetation has to imbibe for its development, its nutrition and growth. They are inter-dependent in their physical and achieved forms.
** "Visconde de Figaniere, F.T.S." (The Theosophist, Aug. 1887, page 676.)
*** It is stated in the Zohar that the "primordial worlds" (sparks) could not continue because man was
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not as yet. "The human form contains everything; and as it did not as yet exist, the worlds were destroyed."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 291 MAZDEAN SYMBOLISM.
progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters (See Vishnu and other Puranas). Open the Mazdean Vendidad, at Fargard ii., at verse 27 (73) and read the command of Ormazd to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three races, after telling him to build a vara ("an enclosure," an argua or vehicle) . . . .
"Thither (into the vara) thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle," etc., etc.; and v. 28 (74) . . . ."all those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the vara." Those "men" in the "Vara" are the "Progenitors," the heavenly men or Dhyani, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For "Vara," or the "Ark" (or again the Vehicle) simply means MAN.* Verse 30 says: . . . . "thou shalt seal up the vara (after filling it up with the seeds), and thou shalt make a door and a window self-shining within," which is the Soul. And when Yima inquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that vara, he is answered: "Crush the earth . . . and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay" (31).
The Egyptian ram-headed god makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so in Genesis do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.
When the "Maker of the material world" (Ahura Mazda) is asked, furthermore, what is to give light "to the Vara which Yima made," he is told that "There are uncreated lights and created lights" and that "there" (in Airyana Vaego, where Vara is built), "the stars, the moon, and the Sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set" and a year seems only as a day (and night) a clear reference to the "land of the Gods" or the (now) polar regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse: a distinct allusion to the "uncreated lights" which enlighten man within -- his principles. Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer ( V. 40), which is forthwith followed by Verse 41 saying that "Every fortieth year, to every couple (hermaphrodite) two are born, a male and female,"** the latter being a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says --
* This is the meaning when the allegory and symbol are opened and read by means of the human key, or the key to terrestrial anthroposophy. This interpretation of the "ark" symbolism does not in the least interfere with its astronomical, or even theogonic keys; nor with any of the other six meanings. Nor does it seem less scientific than the modern theories about the origin of man. As said, it has seven keys to it, like the rest.
** Vendidad Sadah, See also Bund. XV.; and J. Darmesteter's translation of the Vendidad. "Sacred Books of the East."
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"At the expiration of every forty (annual) Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third . . . . . ."
Which is clear, since "every sun" meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one day then, as in the arctic circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar day lasted during the whole period of the earth's revolution about the sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to astronomy as now taught and understood: but who can say that changes in the motion of the earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?
Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the MAN of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the moon, and even Noah's ark, if one will so have it -- this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathustra. Thus when the latter asks --
V. 42. "O Maker of the Material World, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?"
"Ahura Mazda answered: 'It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathustra.' . . . ."
"The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth he would be king of birds. He brought into the var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds." (Bund. xix and xxiv.)
This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird "an incarnation of lightning," and say its song was "often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation," and what not. Karshipta is the human mind-soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the "Book of Concealed Mystery" it is said of the tree, which is the tree of knowledge of good and evil: "In its branches (of the tree) the birds lodge and build their nests," or the Souls and the Angels have their place!.* Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. "Bird" was a Chaldean, and has become a Hebrew synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the "Bird's Nest" was with both Heaven, and is God's bosom in the Zohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden "into that place which is called the Bird's Nest" (Zohar, ii., 8b).
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 293 ANGELS CALLED BIRDS.
"Like a bird that is flying from its nest, and that is the Soul from which the Shekeenah (divine wisdom or grace) does not move away" (Zohar, iii., 278a; Myer's Qabbalah, 217). "The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, is boundless space," says the Commentary, meaning Hansa, the bird of Wisdom.
It is Adam Kadmon who is the (Sephirothal) tree, and it is he who becomes the "Tree of knowledge of good and evil" esoterically. And that "tree hath around it seven columns (seven pillars) of the world, or Rectores "; the same "Progenitors " or "Sephiroth" again "operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets," etc., one of which orders begets giants (Nephilim) on Earth.
It was the belief of entire antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already yielded in isolated cases groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.* These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindu Puranas and the Greek Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans -- men of a superhuman tremendous physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times -- and of actual Cyclopes -- three-eyed mortals.
It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the "origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature."
In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated ex nihilo so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.**
* Darwinian Evolutionists who are so wont to refer to the evidence of reversion to type -- the full meaning of which, in the case of human monsters, is embraced in the esoteric solution of the embryological problem -- as proof of their arguments, would do well to inquire into those instances of modern giants who are often 8, 9, and even 11 feet high. Such reversions are imperfect, yet undeniable reproductions of the original towering man of primeval times.
** See "Mythical Monsters, " by Ch. Gould, from whose interesting and scientific volume a few passages are quoted further on. See in Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World," the description of a cavern in the Himalayas filled with relics of human and animal giant bones.
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The evidence for the Cyclopes -- a race of giants -- will be pointed out in forthcoming Sections, in the Cyclopean remnants, so called to this day. An indication that, during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism -- which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race -- the early Fourth Race may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.
To the Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic involution proceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution; that the inner senses -- innate in the first human races -- atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses; to the student of Esoteric symbology, finally, this statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply a phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of this passage in the Commentaries which says: --
"There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females (hermaphrodites); with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.* A KALPA later (after the separation of the sexes) men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coordinately the third eye commenced to lose its power. . . . When the Fourth (Race) arrived at its middle age, the inner vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old sages.** . . . The third eye, likewise, getting gradually PETRIFIED,*** soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the inner man (during trances and spiritual visions) the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
* Viz., the third eye was at the back of the head. The statement that the latest hermaphrodite humanity was "four-armed," unriddles probably the mystery of all the representations and idols of the exoteric gods of India. On the Acropolis of Argos, there was a [[Zoanon]], a rudely carved wooden statue (attributed to Daedalus), representing a three-eyed colossus, which was consecrated to Zeus Triopas (three-eyed). The head of the "god" has two eyes in its face and one above on the top of the forehead. It is considered the most archaic of all the ancient statues (Schol. Vatic. ad Eurip. Troad. 14).
** The Inner sight could henceforth be acquired only through training and initiation, save in the cases of "natural and born magicians," sensitives and mediums, as they are called now.
*** This expression "petrified" instead of "ossified" is curious. The "back eye," which is of course the pineal gland, now so-called, the small pea-like mass of grey nervous matter attached to the back of the third ventricle of the brain, is said to almost invariably contain mineral concretions and sand, and "nothing more." (Vide Infra.)
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The undefiled Lanoo (disciple, chela) need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity (who is not chaste) will receive no help from the 'deva eye.' "
Unfortunately not. The "deva-eye" exists no more for the majority of mankind. The third eye is dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the PINEAL GLAND. As for the "four-armed" men, it is they who become the prototypes of the four-armed Hindu gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.
Such is the mystery of the human eye that, in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action, some scientists have been forced to resort to occult explanations. The development of the Human eye gives more support to the occult anthropology than to that of the materialistic physiologists. "The eyes in the human embryo grow from within without " out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester, thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines, suggests the curious view that "our" earliest vertebrate ancestor was a transparent creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man "a transparent creature" once upon a time, we are taught, hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Haeckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes in the epidermis? If it started inside, the theory goes into the waste-basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion -- or shall we say admission? -- is rendered perhaps necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses "FROM WITHIN WITHOUT," from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory: The third eye retreated inwards when its course was run -- another point in favour of Occultism.
The allegorical expression of the Hindu mystics when speaking of the "eye of Siva," the Tri-bochana ("three-eyed"), thus receives its justification and raison d'etre -- the transference of the pineal gland (once that "third eye") to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery -- incomprehensible to some -- of the connection between abnormal, or Spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked, "Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine qua non rule and condition of regular chelaship, or the development of psychic and occult powers" The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the "third eye" was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual
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disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality (Spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical), it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by physiologists as the spleen is -- when we learn this, the connection will become clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the medulla oblongata, reacts powerfully on the pineal gland, for, owing to the number of "centres" in that region, which controls by far the
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greater majority of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, there must be exerted a very powerful "inductive" action by the medulla on the pineal gland.
All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all; then it may rest on the assumptions of materialistic science itself.
It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation this time, that many of the animals -- especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata -- have a third eye, now atrophied, but necessarily active in its origin.* The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand (a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well), presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria punctata, but the chameleon, certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that it was no more than the prolongation of the brain ending with a small protuberance, called epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. It offered -- as its development and anatomical structure showed -- such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it any-
* "Deeply placed within the head, covered by thick skin and muscles, true eyes that cannot see are found in certain animals," also, says Haeckel: "Vertebrate . . . blind moles and field mice, blind snakes and lizards. . . . They shun daylight . . . dwelling under the ground. They were not originally blind but have evolved from ancestors that lived in the light and had well-developed eyes. The atrophied eye beneath the opaque skin may be found in these blind beings in every stage of reversion." ("Sense Organs," Haeckel.) And if two eyes could become so atrophied in lower animals, why not one eye -- the pineal gland -- in man, who is but a higher animal in his physical aspect?
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thing else. There were and are paleontologists who feel convinced to this day that this "third eye" has functioned in its origin, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the pineal gland in Quain's Anatomy ( Vol. II. ninth edit., pp. 830-851. "Thalamencephalon" Interbrain): --
"It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity. . . . . The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process, to
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be noticed later, into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.
"The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.
"The two optic thalami formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior, behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the third ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by the posterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by the peduncles of the pineal gland. . . . .
"At an early period the optic tracts may be recognised as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.
"The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the Thalamencephalon."
The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres backwards, the pineal gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection to be traced between the (originally) hollow optic tracts and the eyes anteriorly, the pineal gland and its peduncles behind, and all
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of these with the optic thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria punctata have a very important bearing on the developmental history of the human senses, and on the occult assertions in the text.
It is well known, (and also regarded as a fiction now, by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man,) that Descartes saw in the pineal gland the Seat of the Soul.
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Although it is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of it in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that "special" locality, he concluded that it was that little gland tied to the brain, yet having an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion "by the animal Spirits* which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense."
Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the occult truth than is any Haeckel. For the pineal gland, as shown, is far more connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of the real processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding cyclic course of this great law, they would know instead of conjecturing; and feel as certain of the future physical transformations of the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then, would they see the fallacy and all the absurdity of their modern "blind-force" and mechanical processes of nature; realizing, in consequence of such knowledge, that the said pineal gland, for instance, could not but be disabled for physical use at this stage of our cycle. If the odd "eye" in man is now atrophied, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant form without some definite purpose and use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the cycle ran down toward that point when the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of the physical man, the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development, that median "eye" ended by atrophying along with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the soul, says popular wisdom,** and Vox populi Vox Dei.
* The "Nervous Ether" of Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S. -- the nerve-aura of occultism. The "animal spirits" (?) are equivalent to the currents of nerve-auric compound circulation.
** Let us remember that the First Race is shown in Occult sciences as spiritual within [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 299 THE EVOLUTION OF THE EYE.
In the beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal, whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their coats of skin, viz., to evolve from within without the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism -- the third eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes developed* later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrata, in our day, i.e., beneath an opaque skin.** Only the stages of the odd, or primeval eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the "Cyclopean" eye was, and still is, in man the organ of spiritual sight, in the
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animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by nature for further use in AEons to come.
This explains why the pineal gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is the vertebrata in which it is the most prominent and objective, and in man it is
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] and ethereal without; the second, psycho-spiritual mentally, and ethero-physical bodily; the third, still bereft of intellect in its beginning, is astro-physical in its body, and lives an inner life, in which the psycho-spiritual element is in no way interfered with as yet by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its two front eyes look before them without seeing either past or future. But the "third eye" "embraces ETERNITY."
* But in a very different manner to that pictured by Haeckel as an "evolution by natural selection in the struggle for existence" ("Pedigree of Man. " "Sense Organs," p. 335). The mere "thermal sensibility of the skin," to hypothetical light-waves, is absurdly incompetent to account for the beautiful combination of adaptations present in the eye. It has, moreover, been previously shown that "natural Selection" is a pure myth when credited with the origination of variations (vide infra, Part III., on Darwinian mechanical causation); as the "survival of the fittest" can only take place after useful variations have sprung up, together with improved organisms. Whence came the "useful variations," which developed the eye? Only from "blind forces . . . without aim, without design?" The argument is puerile. The true solution of the mystery is to be found in the impersonal Divine Wisdom, in its IDEATION -- reflected through matter.
** Palaeontology has ascertained that in the animals of the Cenozoic age -- the Saurians especially, such as the antediluvian Labyrinthodon, whose fossil skull exhibits a perforation otherwise inexplicable -- the third, or odd eye must have been much developed. Several naturalists, among others E. Korscheldt, feel convinced that whereas, notwithstanding the opaque skin covering it, such an eye in the reptiles of the present period can only distinguish light from darkness (as the human eyes do when bound with a handkerchief, or even tightly closed), in the now extinct animals that eye functioned and was a real organ of vision.
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most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the anatomist. No less light is thrown thereby on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali yuga -- the black age which began nearly 5,000 years ago -- it was said (paraphrased into comprehensible sentences):
"We (the Fifth Root-Race) in our first half (of duration) onward (on the now ASCENDING arc of the
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cycle) are on the mid point of (or between) the First and the Second Races -- falling downward (i.e., the races were then on the descending arc of the cycle). . . . . Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see." (Commentary xx.).
Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period -- namely, in the second half of the First Spiritual ethero-astral race -- nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element. As it was on its descending line, and as we are parallel to it, on the ascending, we are,
EVOLUTION OF ROOT RACES IN THE FOURTH ROUND
therefore devoid of the Spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the manasa period of our cycle of races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter -- or that equilibrium between brain intellect and Spiritual perception. One important point has, however, to be borne in mind.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 301 THE ODD EYE IS NOW A GLAND.
We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal MAHAT -- a ray unimpeded by matter -- will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of developmental evolution repeated on a smaller scale, it must be the more so in the case of a Root-Race. Our race then has, as a Root-race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the Spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again -- the oldest -- having crossed their crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.
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It becomes comprehensible now why the "odd eye" has been gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the "Lemurians."
It is a curious fact that it is especially in human beings that the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been developed, and that the optic thalami, corpora quadrigemina, and corpora striata are the principal parts which are developed in the mammalian brain. Moreover it is asserted that the intellect of any man may to some extent be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary that if the development and increased size of the pineal gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the pineal gland at the expense of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres. It is a curious speculation which would receive a confirmation in this case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of a human being, and which is allowed by science to be the great centre for all the physiologically co-
ordinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc., etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain -
- the cerebral hemispheres -- the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed pineal gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.
It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.
This is, then, the organ which gave rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of man with one head but two faces. These may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the
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Chaldean fragments. Apart from the work already cited -- the Shan Hai King, compiled by King Chia from engravings on nine urns made 2,255 B.C., by the Emperor Yu, they may be found in another work, called the "Bamboo Books," and in a third one, the "Rh Ya" -- "initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, B.C., 1,122": -- says Mr. Ch. Gould in his "Mythical Monsters. " The Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 at the opening of the grave of King Seang of Wai, who died B.C. 295. Both these works mention men with two faces on one head -- one in front and one behind (p . 27).
Now that which the students of Occultism ought to know is that THE "THIRD EYE" IS INDISSOLUBLY CONNECTED WITH KARMA. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.
The "eye of Siva" did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Third Eye
of the reverse, the eye lost its powers. But such was the law of Evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no FALL. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a god, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say "sin" it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning; as the term Karma* would be the right one to use in this case; while the reader who would feel perplexed at the use of the term "spiritual" instead of "physical" iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the psychic, if not of the "Spiritual man." While in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual being which sinned, the Spirit element being still the "Master" principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.
As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of the theosophical teachings.
Questions with regard to Karma and re-births are constantly offered, and a great confusion seems to exist upon this subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea
* Karma is a word of many meanings, and has a special term for almost every one of its aspects. It means, as a synonym of sin, the performance of some action for the attainment of an object of worldly, hence selfish, desire, which cannot fail to be hurtful to somebody else. Karman is action, the Cause; and Karma again is "the law of ethical causation"; the effect of an act produced egotistically, when the great law of harmony depends on altruism.
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that a new soul is created by God for every newly-born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether in such case the number of incarnating Monads on earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conceptions, the number of the incarnating monads -- even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the aeons already passed -- still, there must be a limit. It was stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, had ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.
Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of KARMA is inextricably interwoven with that of Re-
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Third Eye
incarnation.
It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same individuality throughout the life-
cycle; the assurance that the same MONADS -- among whom are many Dhyan-Chohans, or the "Gods" themselves -- have to pass through the "Circle of Necessity," rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless shells, or astral figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us -- nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terrible and apparent injustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues ---far more deserving in every way --perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of
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pain around him -- that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.*
Of all the terrible blasphemies and accusations virtually thrown on their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably "pious" Christian assert, in connection with every evil and undeserved blow, that "such is the will of God."
Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees, who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and creator for helpless man, and of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words: --
"But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?" Logic and simple common sense, we answer: if we are made to believe in the "original Sin," in one life, on this Earth only, for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire (and this whether they are good or bad, says the Predestinarian),** why should not every man endowed with reasoning powers condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as --
"Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast involved The pride of human wisdom, to confound The daring scrutiny and prove the faith
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Third Eye
Of thy presuming creatures! . . . ."
Truly a robust "faith" is required to believe that it is "presumption" to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to "perplex" him, and to test a "faith" with which that "Power," moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.
Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and life-
experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law -- whether Conscious or Uncon-
* Objectors to the doctrine of Karma should recall the fact that it is absolutely out of the question to attempt a reply to the Pessimists on other data. A firm grasp of the principles of Karmic Law knocks away the whole basis of the imposing fabric reared by the disciples of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.
** The doctrine and theology of Calvinists. "The purpose of God from eternity respecting all events" (which becomes fatalism and kills free will, or any attempt of exerting it for good). . . . ." It is the pre-
assignment or allotment of men to everlasting happiness or misery" (Catechism). A noble and encouraging Doctrine this!
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scious -- predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is ETERNITY itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is ACTION itself. It is not the Wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the Ocean's motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinise its mysteries. On the contrary, he who unveils through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is working for the good of his fellow-men. KARMA is an Absolute and Eternal law in the World of manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists -- still less as fatalists:"
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Third Eye
better acquainted with the Greek than with Aryan philosophy, have made an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had the latter been known to the profane in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term would be unobjectionable. As it is, it has been too much anthropomorphised by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, "from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a moral feeling rather," says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the gods, and is pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that "feeling" was deified, and its personification became an ever-
fatal and punishing goddess. Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, it has to be done in the triple character of the latter, viz., as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the latter is the goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty, Adrasteia -- "the inevitable" -- represents Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dike, is the equitable goddess reserving her wrath for those alone who are maddened with pride, egoism, and impiety. (See Mesomed. Hymn. Nemes., V. 2. Brunck, Analecta II. p . 292; Mythol. de la Grece Antique, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphised in its various aspects, Karma is a highly philosophical truth, a most divine noble expression of the primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil, and [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect in its effects in the phenomenal world.
Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of re-birth, or of the re-
incarnation of the same spiritual individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. The latter are like the various costumes and characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. The inner, or real man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet for the brief space of a few acts, which represent, however, on the plane of human illusion the whole life of Hamlet. And he knows that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night; but the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact. In actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real. Nevertheless, the permanent individuality is fully aware of the fact, though, through the atrophy of the "spiritual" eye in the physical body, that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false personality.
The possession of a physical third eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of Third SUB-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame made it disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perceptions lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether before the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many "Noahs."
The student has to bear in mind that there were many such deluges as that mentioned in Genesis, and
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, Third Eye
three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section devoted to the subject of pre-historic continents. To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the esoteric doctrine has much in it of the legends contained in the Hindu Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former -- only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that "Vaivasvata Manu" -- a generic name indeed! -- was the Noah of the Aryans and his prototype, all this, which is also the belief of the Occultists, necessitates at this juncture a new explanation. ( Vide Part III. "Submerged Continents.")
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] ennobles our conceptions of what divine immutable justice ought to be, instead of degrading the unknown and unknowable Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel tyrant, which we call Providence.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 307 THE SEVEN AND FOURTEEN MANUS.
THE PRIMEVAL MANUS OF HUMANITY.
Those who are aware that the "great Flood," which was connected with the sinking of an entire continent -- save what became a few islands -- could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago; and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya (or the fish) Avatar of Vishnu -- may feel perplexed at this discrepancy between facts stated and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to turn to the Theosophist of July, 1883, and after studying the article therein, "The Septenary Principle in Esotericism," the whole question can be explained to him. It is in this explanation, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brahmins.
For the benefit of those, however, who may not have "The Theosophist" of that month and year to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:
"Who was Manu, the son of Swayambhuva? The secret doctrine tells us that this Manu was no man, but the representation of the first human races evolved with the help of the Dhyan-Chohans (Devas) at the beginning of the first round. But we are told in his Laws (Book I. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa -- or interval from creation to creation (read interval from one minor 'Pralaya' to another*) -- and that in the present divine age, there have been as yet seven Manus. Those who know that there are seven rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now in the fourth; and who are
* Pralaya -- a word already explained -- is not a term that applies only to every "Night of Brahma," or the world's dissolution following every Manvantara, equal to 71 Maha-yugas. It applies also to each "obscuration" as well, and even to every Cataclysm that puts an end, by Fire or by Water in turn, to each Root-Race. Pralaya is a term like that of "Manu" -- the generic name for the Sishtas, who, under the appellation of "King," are shown in the Puranas as preserved "with the seed of all things in an ark from the waters of that flood" (or the fires of a general volcanic conflagration, the commencement of which we already see for our Fifth-Race in the terrible earthquakes and eruptions of these late years, and especially in the present one) . . . . which in the season of a pralaya overspreads the world" (the Earth). (See Preface, p. lxxxi. , to Wilson's "Vishnu Purana.") Time is only a form of "Vishnu" -- truly, as Parasara says in that Purana. In the Hindu Yuga Kalpa, we have the regular descending series 4, 3, 2, with ciphers multiplied as occasion requires for esoteric purposes, but not, as Wilson and other Orientalists thought, for "sectarian embellishments." A Kalpa may be an age, a "Day" of Brahma, or a sidereal Kalpa, astronomical and earthly. Those calculations are found in all the Puranas, but some differ -- as for instance, "the year of the seven Rishis, 3,030 mortal years, and the year of Dhruva, 9,090 in the Linga Purana," which are again esoteric, and which do represent actual (secret) chronology. As said in the Brahma Vaivarta: "Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the life of Brahma. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous." "Minor Kalpas" denote here every period of destruction, as was well understood by Wilson himself, who explains the latter as "those in which the Samvarta wind or other destructive agents operate" (Vishnu Purana, p. 54, vol. I.).
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taught that there are seven dawns and seven twilights or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on, and between the planets there is an awakening to illusive life, and an awakening to real life; and that, moreover, there are root-Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as the seed-Manus -- the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (or the Sishtas -- the surviving fittest*; a mystery divulged only to those who have passed their third degree in initiation) -- those who have learned all that will be better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the Sacred Hindu scriptures that the first Manu produced six other Manus (seven primary Manus in all), and these produced in their turn each seven other Manus** (Bhrigu I, 61-63) -- the production of the latter standing in the occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu -- the last one, the progenitor of our Fourth Round Humanity -- must be the seventh, since we are on our fourth Round,*** and there is a root-Manu at globe A and a seed Manu at globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a 'Root Manu' (Dhyan Chohan) and closes with a 'Seed-Manu,' so a Root and a Seed Manu appear respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human period on any particular planet.**** It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement that a Manu-antaric period means, as the term implies, the time between the
* An intuition and a presentiment of the Sishtas may be found in Mr. Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism, "Fifth Edition. See in it Annotations -- the "Noah's Ark Theory" pp. 146, 147.
** The fact that Manu himself is made to declare that he was created by Viraj, and that he then produced the ten Prajapatis, who again produced seven Manus, who in their turn gave birth to seven other Manus (Manu, I, 33-36) relates to other still earlier mysteries, and is at the same time a blind with regard to the doctrine of the Septenary chain, and the simultaneous evolution of seven humanities, or MEN. However, the present work is written on the records of Cis-Himalayan Secret Teachings, and Brahmanical esoteric philosophy may now differ in form as the Kabala does. But they were identical in hoary antiquity.
*** There is another esoteric reason besides this one for it. A Vaivasvata is the seventh Manu, because this our Round, although the Fourth, is in the preseptenary Manvantara, and the Round itself is in its seventh stage of materiality or physicality. The close of its middle racial point occurred during the Fourth Root Race, when man and all nature reached their lowest state of gross matter. From that time, i.e., from the end of the three and a half races, humanity and nature entered on the ascending arc of their racial cycle.
**** The interval that precedes each Yuga is called a Sandhya, composed of as many hundreds of years as there are thousands in the yuga; and that which follows the latter is named Sandhyamsa, and is of similar duration, we are told in Vishnu Purana. "The interval between the Sandhya and the Sandhyamsa is the yuga denominated Krita, Treta, etc., etc. The (four) Krita, Treta, Dwapara, and Kali constitute a great age, or aggregate of four ages: a 1000 such aggregates are a Day of Brahma; and 14 Manus reign within that term." Now had we to accept this literally then there would be only one Manu for every 4,320,000,000 of years. As we are taught that it took 300,000,000 of years for the two lower kingdoms to evolve, and that our humanity is just 18 and some odd millions old -- where were the other Manus spoken of, unless the allegory means what the esoteric doctrine teaches us about the 14 being each multiplied by 49.
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appearance of two Manus or Dhyan Chohans; and hence a minor Manvantara is the duration of the作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:23
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, "Manus"
seven races on any particular planet, and a major manvantara is the period of one human round along the Planetary chain. Moreover, that, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 root-races on the seven planets during each Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called 'Vaivasvata' and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our Fifth race -- who saved it from the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) -- is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root, or primitive-Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root-Manu.
"For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their respective order and relation to each Round: --
"Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root-Manu of our fourth Human Wave (the reader must always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who are made to preside over the seven races of this our planet. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and ever-recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every Root-race. And it is this Vaivasvata -- the Hindu ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah and by other names -- who is the allegorical man who rescued our race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration."*
* The words "creation," "dissolution," etc., do not render correctly the right meaning of either Manvantara or Pralaya. The Vishnu Purana enumerates several: The dissolution of all things is of four kinds, Parasara is made to say: -- Naimittika (occasional), when Brahma slumbers (his night, when, "At the end of this day occurs a re-
coalescence of the Universe, called Brahma's contingent re-coalescence," because Brahma is this universe itself); "Prakritika (elemental), when the return of this universe to its original nature is partial and physical; Atyantika (absolute), identification of the embodied with the incorporeal Supreme spirit -- Mahatmic state, whether temporary or until the following Maha Kalpa: also absolute obscuration -- as of a whole [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu-antara, lit. "between two Manus") 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or sidereal Flood (a mystery), or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As the several (and quite different) events are purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Puranas in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader's mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The blinds which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.
As somebody -- Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake -- remarked, "the first principle in Hindu religious philosophy is Unity in diversity." If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, this is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same LOGOS, the celestial, as well as the terrestrial messengers and permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of activity; conscious during the period of Cosmic evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic rest, as the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which "sleepeth not," nor is it ever awake -- for it is SAT or Be-ness, not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great unseen Logos, who evolves all the other logoi, the primeval MANU who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the manifested Logos.* Hence we learn in the "Commentaries" that while no Dhyan Chohan, not even the highest, can realise completely "the condition of the preceding Cosmic evolution," "the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences of all the Cosmic evolutions throughout Eternity." This is very plain: the first Manu is called Swayambhuva,
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] planetary chain, etc.; and Nitya (perpetual) Mahapralaya for the Universe, death -- for man, nitya is the extinction of life, like the extinction of a lamp," also "in sleep at night." Nitya Sarga is "constant or perpetual creation," as Nitya pralaya is "constant or perpetual destruction of all that is born." "That which ensues after a minor dissolution is called ephemeral creation. . . . This is Samyama" (production, existence, and dissolution) ( Vishnu Purana, Book I., ch. vii.) The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our statements.
* But see the superb definitions of Parabrahmam and the Logos in Mr. Subba Row's Lectures on the Bhagavat Gita in the early numbers of the Theosophist of 1887, Feb., March, April, and May.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 311 THE FOUR EARLIER RACES.
"the Self-manifested," the Son of the unmanifested FATHER. The Manus are the creators of the creators of our First Race -- the Spirit of mankind -- which does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first "pre-
Adamic" men on Earth.
Manu declares himself created by Viraj,* or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity),** which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic activity: that Logos or UNIVERSAL MONAD (collective Elohim) that radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity -- progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated
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human monads of planetary chains as well as of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is "Swayambhuva," the SELF-BORN, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system), and whose radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhuva (a generic name, mysterious and meaning far more than appears), each of these becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity. (See "The Manus and the Manvantaras Explained by a Western Mystic and Mathematician.")
As to the question of the four distinct races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in it, except the ethereal bodies of the first races; and it is a matter of legendary, nevertheless, very correct history. That legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindus have, to this day.
Trying to account for the community of legends in the remote antiquity -- held by Chinese, Chaldean, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks -- and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of "Mythical Monsters, " remarks, that "we must not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture (as in China), the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay . . . and how much more . . . if . . . minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by
** See Manu I., 32, 33. Vaiswanara is, in another sense, the living magnetic fire that pervades the manifested solar system. It is the most objective (to us the reverse) and ever present aspect of the ONE LIFE, for it is the Vital Principle. (See Theosophist, July, 1883, p . 249). It is also a name of Agni.
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deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes." ("Mythical Monsters, " by Ch. Gould, p. 134.)
And how many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from this Stanza:
"During the first seven crores of the Kalpa (70,000,000 years) the Earth and its two Kingdoms (mineral and vegetable), one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi-
ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore* the mother (Earth) grows opaque, and in the FOURTEENTH** the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of nature (geological changes) last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals."
The last change took place nearly twelve crores of years ago (120,000,000). But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier. (Commentary, xxii.)
Thus, if we are to believe esoteric teaching, there have been no more universal geological disturbances and changes for the last 120 millions of years, and the Earth was, even before that time, ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about eighteen millions of years ago, after the first great failure of nature to create beings alone, without the help of the divine "Fashioners," had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three races (See above
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Stanzas III. et seq.). The actual duration of the first two and a-half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The History of the Races begins at the separation of the Sexes, when the preceding egg-bearing androgynous race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub-races of the
* This -- in the period of Secondary creation, so called. Of the Primary, when Earth is in possession of the three Elemental Kingdoms, we cannot speak for several reasons, one of which is, that, unless one is a great seer, or naturally intuitional, he will be unable to realise that which can never be expressed in any existing terms.
** Hippocrates said that number seven "By its occult virtues tended to the accomplishment of all things, to be the dispenser of life and fountain of all its changes." The life of man he divided into seven ages (Shakespeare), for "As the moon changes her phases every seven days, this number influences all sublunary beings," and even the Earth, as we know. With the child, it is the teeth that appear in the seventh month and he sheds them at seven years; at twice seven puberty begins, at three times seven all our mental and vital powers are developed, at four times seven he is in his full strength, at five times seven his passions are most developed, etc., etc. Thus for the Earth. It is now in its middle age, yet very little wiser for it. The Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered sacred name of the Deity, can be resolved on Earth only by becoming Septenary through the manifest triangle proceeding from the concealed Tetraktis. Therefore, the number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As written in the Kabala "The greater Holy Assembly" v. 1161: -- "For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh. For all things depend from the SEVENTH."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 313 THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF "FISH."
Third Root-Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this "destruction" which is called allegorically the great "Vaivasvata Manu Deluge," when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu (or "Humanity") remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis "with him." The allegory is very plain: --
In the Symbolism of every nation, the "Deluge" stands for Chaotic unsettled matter -- Chaos itself: and the Water for the feminine principle -- the "Great Deep." As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it -- "Arche (ark) answers to the Hebrew rasit, or Wisdom . . . . and (at the same time) to the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of nature (and of mankind) floats or broods on the great Abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane (or racial) cycle." Ark is also the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which broods over chaos. Now Vishnu is the divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of life -- the third person of the Trimurti (composed of Brahma, the Creator, Siva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver). Vishnu is shown in the allegory as guiding, under the form of a fish, the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu clean across the waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word fish. (See Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, etc.) Its theological meanings is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus is called the "Fish," and so were Vishnu and Bacchus: [[Ies]], the "Saviour" of mankind, being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called [[Ichthus]], the fish.* As to the Seven Rishis in the Ark, they symbolised the seven principles, which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and no longer a divine creature. (See for further details, "The Seventh Manu.")
Nor have we many details about the submersion of the continent inhabited by the Second Root Race. But the history of the Third, "Lemuria," is given, as is that of Atlantis, the others being only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary age (the Eocene),** and it is during this Deluge also -- an actual geological deluge this time -- that Vaivasvata Manu is again shown as saving mankind (allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is saved); so
* Says St. Augustin of Jesus, "For he is a fish that lives in the midst of waters." Christians called themselves little fishes -- pisciculi -- in their sacred mysteries. "So many fishes bred in the water, and saved by one great fish," says Tertullian of the Christians and Christ and the Church.
** "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 55.
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remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,* after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato's Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.
It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. It is of this cataclysm that the old records (See the "Book of Enoch ") say that "the ends of the Earth got loose;" and upon which the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deukalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect saved, have been built. Tradition, taking into no account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both indifferently "deluges." Yet there is a great difference. The cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor -- the fourth continent -- was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred records of the East.
Hence, Modern Science denies Atlantis and its existence. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth's axis, and would attribute the reason for the change of climates to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are other men of Science, such as Sir H. James (Athenaeum, Aug. 25, 1860), and Sir John Lubbock (ibid), who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced -- only to accept it later on whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact?
How far our figures agree, or rather disagree with modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Book, where the geology and anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the same in Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned in the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree
* This event, the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and the smaller one Daitya, which occurred 850,000 years ago in the later Pliocene times, must not be confounded with the submersion of the main continent of Atlantis during the Miocene period. Geologists cannot place the Miocene only so short a way back as 850,000 years; whatever they do, it is several million years ago that the main Atlantis perished.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 315 THE INNER MAN IN THE ZOHAR.
very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which calls Atlantis "Lemuria," however, whenever it accepts such a submerged continent. With regard to the pre-human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even up to the appearance of the "Mindless" First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. More may be said: that which Science -- recognizing only physical man -- has a right to regard as the prehuman period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean race, since it is only then that man became the "complete organic being he is now." And this would make Adamic man no older than a few million of years.*
The author of the Qabbalah remarks truly that "Man to-day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being-
hood of precedent human life," or lives, rather. "According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam (Rishoun), went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge-boor-ah, Qai-
yin and Ra'hmin Seth. These three were divided into 70 species, called: the principal roots of the human race." (p. 422.)
"Said Rabbi Jehudah: 'How many garments (of the incorporeal man) are these which are crowned' (from the day man was 'created')? Said R. El'eazar: 'The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua'h spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings . . . : and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world." (Zohar I., 119b. col. 475; Qabbalah, 412.)
This relates to the races (their "garments," or degree of materiality) and to the three principles of man in their three vehicles.
* Mr. Huxley divides those races into the quintuple group of Australioids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthochroics and Melanochroics -- all issuing from imaginary Anthropoids. And yet, while protesting against those who say "that the structural differences between man and apes are small and insignificant," and adding that "every bone of the gorilla bears a mark by which it can be distinguished from a corresponding human bone," and that "in the present state of creation, at least, no intermediary being fills the gap which separates the man from the troglodyte" -
- the great anatomist goes on speaking of the Simian characteristics in Man! (See de Quatrefages' "The Human Species," p. 113.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, stanza 11
The Secret Doctrine
by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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STANZA XI.
THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE
FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES.
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§§ (43) The Lemuro-Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization. The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. (44) Their statues, witnesses to the size of the Lemuro-
Atlanteans. (45) Lemuria destroyed by fire, Atlantis by water. The Flood. (46) The destruction of the fourth race and of the last antediluvian monster-animals.
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43. THEY (the Lemurians) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT OF THE FIRES (lava) VOMITED. OUT OF THE WHITE STONE OF THE MOUNTAINS (marble) AND THE BLACK STONE (of the subterranean fires) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM (a).
(a) As the History of the first two human races -- the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans -- proceeds, we have at this point to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively.
Here reference is also made to the divine Dynasties, such as were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their human kings; they are still believed in by the modern Hindus, and are enumerated in their sacred books. But of these we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern geologists are now being driven into admitting the evident existence of submerged continents. But to confess their presence is not to accept that there were men on them during the early geological periods;* --
* This is the reason why, perhaps, even Easter Island with its wondrous gigantic statues -- a speaking witness to a submerged continent with a civilized mankind on it -- is hardly mentioned anywhere in the modern Encyclopaedias. Its mention is carefully avoided except in some books of Travels; modem science has an undeniable predilection for forcing upon the cultured public hypotheses, built on personal hobbies, as well-established evidence, for offering it guesses instead of Knowledge, and
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, stanza 11
calling them "scientific conclusions." Its specialists will evolve a thousand and one contradictory speculations rather than confess an awkward self-evident fact -- pre-eminent among such specialists being Haeckel and his English admirers and co-thinkers. Yet "they are authorities" -- we are sternly reminded. What of that? The Pope of Rome is also an AUTHORITY and an infallible one -- for his followers; whereas the remarkable fallibility of Scientific speculations is being proven periodically with every change of the moon.
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ay, men and civilized nations, not Palaeolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences, and knew astronomy, architecture and mathematics to perfection. This primeval civilization did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Yet, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub-race building their first rock-cities out of stone and lava.* One of such great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow piece of sterile ground, and was entirely destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the Lemurians of the last sub-races; and an occultist shows, therefore, no wonder on learning that the stone relics found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are "very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru," ("The Countries of the World," by Robert Brown, Vol. 4, p. 43); and that they are in the CYCLOPEAN STYLE. The first large cities, however, appeared on that region of the continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in
* Our best modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams: witness Mr. Louis Stephenson and his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist, Mr. Rider Haggard, also had a prophetic or rather a retrospective clairvoyant dream before he wrote "SHE"? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead, whose surviving living men sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems to step out in its general outlines from the imperishable pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests "that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians"; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a MASTER quoted in "Esoteric Buddhism." For, she says, "Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This (the nation of Kor) is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in. . . . . Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. But the barbarians . . . came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones. . ." (pp. 180, 181.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, stanza 11
Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. The Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity as descendants of Homo primigenius, the ape-man, of which "NO FOSSIL REMAINS ARE AS YET KNOWN TO US," but (which) "were PROBABLY akin to the gorilla and orang of the present day" (Haeckel). In answer to whose "probably," occultists point to another and a greater probability -- the one given in our text. (See above.)
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those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection with the former, and Karma -- its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the spark dropped into them by the "Flames," extinguished it by long generations of bestiality.* The Aryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had personally incarnated.**
It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements, his brothers -- more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them -- built cities, and cultivated arts and sciences. Nevertheless, and civilization notwithstand-
* See Stanza II, ante. This would account for the great difference and variation between the intellectual capacities of races, nations, and individual men. While incarnating, and in other cases only informing the human vehicles evolved by the first brainless (manasless) race, the incarnating Powers and Principles had to make their choice between, and take into account, the past Karmas of the Monads, between which and their bodies they had to become the connecting link. Besides which, as correctly stated in "Esoteric Buddhism " (p. 30), "the fifth principle, or human (intellectual) soul, in the majority of mankind is not even yet fully developed."
** It is said by Krishna, the Logos incarnate, in the Bhagavat-gita, "The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang (emanated or was born) the human race and the world," (Chap. X. Verse 6.)
Here, by the seven great Rishis, the seven great rupa hierarchies or classes of Dhyan Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the Saptarshi (the seven Rishis) are the regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, therefore, of the same nature as the angels of the planets, or the seven great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn, all men on earth in various Kalpas and races. Moreover, "the four preceding Manus" are the four classes of the originally arupa gods -- the Kumaras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.: who are also said to have incarnated. They are not the Prajapatis, as the first are, but their informing principles -- some of which have incarnated in men, while others have made other men
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simply the vehicles of their reflections. As Krishna truly says --the same words being repeated later by another vehicle of the LOGOS -- "I am the same to all beings. . . . those who worship me (the 6th principle or the intellectual divine Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas) are in me, and I am in them." (Ibid, 29.) The Logos, being no personality but the universal principle, is represented by all the divine Powers born of its mind -- the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism, the "Intellectual Breaths" -- those angels who are said to have made themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and quiescent, into the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is recognised, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba Row's excellent lecture on the Bhagavatgita, ("Theosophist," April 1887, p . 444.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 319 DEGENERATION OF MANKIND.
ing, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, they, the builders, could now obtain theirs only gradually; even these being generally used for power over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command and the guidance over his own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking. "There is no such thing as magic" philosophises "SHE," the author forgetting that "magic" in her early day still meant the great SCIENCE of WIDOM, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought -- "though there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature." (p. 152). But they have become "Secrets" only in our race, and were public property with the Third.
Gradually, mankind went down in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save the hierarchy of the "Elect," the followers and disciples of the "Sons of Will and Yoga" -- called later the "Sons of the Fire Mist."
Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub-race. But, as said in the Commentary: --
The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island (the primitive Sveta-dwipa) had perished ages before. Their (Lemuria's) elect, had taken shelter on the sacred Island (now the "fabled" Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert), while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground ("cave-men"), when the golden yellow race (the Fourth) became in its turn "black with sin." From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Sveta-dwipa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya, east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted. . . . The demi-gods of the Third had made room for the semi-
demons of the Fourth Race. Sveta-dwipa, whose northern parts of the Toyambudhi the seven Kumaras (Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatana, Sanatkumara, Jata, Vodhu, and Panchasikha) had visited, agreeably with exoteric tradition (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana; Asiat. Researches also, Vol. XI., pp. 99, 100); the White Island had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dwipa (Pushkara) and Rakshasas from the seventh
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climate replaced the Saddhus and the ascetics of the Third age, who "had descended to them from other and higher regions." . . . .
It is evident that, taken in their dead letter, the Puranas read as an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. But if one reads chapters I., II. and III. from Book II. (Vol. II.) of Vishnu Purana and accepts verbatim its geography, geodesy, and ethnology, in the matter of Priyavrata's seven sons, among whom the father divides the seven Dwipas (Continental Islands); and then proceeds to study how the eldest son, the King of Jambu-dwipa, Agnidhra, apportioned Jambu-dwipa among his nine sons; and then how Nabhi his son, who had a hundred sons and apportioned all these in his turn -- then the reader is likely to throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the esoteric student will understand that, in the days when the Puranas were written, the true meaning was clear only to the Initiated Brahmins, who wrote those works allegorically and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will explain to the Orientalists who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, made and still are making such a mess of it, that the first three chapters (See Wilson's trans. of Vishnu Purana Book II et seq.) purposely confuse the following subjects and events: --
I. The series of Kalpas or Ages (also of Races) are never taken into account; e.g., events which have happened in one being allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying -- "Whenever any contradictions in different Puranas are observed, they are ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the like" ( Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas).
II. The several meanings of the words "Manvantara" and "Kalpa" or age, are withheld, and the general one only given.
III. In the genealogy and geography of the Kings and their Varshas (countries) and Dwipas, they are all allowed to be regarded as terrestrial regions.
Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is easy and permissible to show that: --
(a) The Seven Dwipas apportioned to Priyavrata's septenary progeny refer to several localities: first of all to our planetary chain. Jambu-dwipa alone representing our globe, the six others are the (to us) invisible companion globes of this earth. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu (dwipa) "is in the centre of all these (the so-called insular continents) and is surrounded" by a sea of salt water (lavana), whereas Plaksha, Salmalia,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 321 THE HINDU SYMBOLIZATION.
Kusa, Krauncha, Saka and Pushkara, are "surrounded severally -- by great seas of sugar-cane juice, of
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wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk," etc., etc., and such like metaphorical names. (Chap. II, Book II) This is shown furthermore by --
(b) Bhaskara Acharya, who uses expressions from the Secret Doctrine and its books, in his description of the sidereal position of all these dwipas: -- "the sea of milk and the sea of curds" etc., meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of nebulae; the more so, since he names "the country to the south of the equator Bhur-loka, that to the north Bhuva-loka, Swar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya lokas"; and says: "Those lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits," i.e., they are various paradises. (See Bibliotheca Indica. Trans. of the Goladhyaya of the Siddhanta-siromani III., 21-44).
(c) That this geographical division of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to our Round nor even to our races (the name of Bharata Varsha (India) notwithstanding), is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of Vishnu Purana. For he closes the first chapter by saying: "Bharata (the son of Nabhi, who gave his name to Bharata-Varsha or India) consigned the Kingdom to his son Sumati . . . . and abandoned his life at Salagrama. He was afterwards born again as a religious Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics . . . . under these princes (Bharata's descendants) Bharata Varsha was divided into nine portions, and their descendants held successively possession of the country for seventy-one periods of the aggregate of the four ages," or the reign of a Manu, representing a Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years.
But having said so much, Parasara suddenly explains that "this was the creation of Swayambhuva Manu, by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varaha," i.e., the boar incarnation, or Avatar. Now every Brahmin knows that it is only with Vaivasvata Manu that our Humanity began on this Earth (or Round). And if the Western reader turns to the sub-section on "The Primeval Manus of Humanity," he will see that Vaivasvata is the seventh of the fourteen Manus who preside over our planetary chain during its life cycle: i.e., that representing or standing in every Round for two Manus of the same name (a Root and a Seed Manu), he is the Root Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only "an incongruity" (see his Vishnu Purana, vol. II., p. 108, footnote), and speculates that "the patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas," and thus "have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods." It is nothing of the kind.
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But as Orientalists know nothing of the secret teaching, they will take everything literally, and then turn round and abuse the writers of that which they do not comprehend!
These genealogies embrace a period of three and a half Rounds; they speak of pre-human periods, and explain the descent into generation of every Manu -- the first manifested sparks of the ONE Unity -- and show, furthermore, each of these human sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first, the Pitars, the human ancestors, then by human Races. No being can become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human cycles. Therefore the Sloka says, "Happy are those who are born, even from the (latent) condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-varsha; as that is the way to . . . final liberation." In
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Jambu-dwipa, Bharata is considered the best of its divisions, because IT IS THE LAND OF WORKS. In it alone "it is that the succession of four Yugas (ages), the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and Kali take place"; when, therefore, Parasara, asked by Maitreya "to give him the descriptions of the Earth," returns again to the enumeration of the same Dwipas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Swayambhuva Manvantara -- it is simply a blind, yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub-divisions, islands, and continents, some of which were called by the names of celestial lokas, and by those of other globes. Hence the confusion.
All these are called by the Orientalists "mythical" and "fabulous" islands and lands.* Very true, some are not of this earth, but they still exist. The "White Island" and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since the latter was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the Fifth Race to the land of Sin -- Atlantis, in general, not to Plato's island alone; and since the former was (a) the Sveta-
dwipa of theogony, and (b) Saka-dwipa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions) in its beginnings. This was when it yet had its "seven holy rivers that washed away all sin," and its "seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue," as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas -- that caste which even the Brahmins acknowledged as not inferior to their own -- and which was
* In a lecture, Professor Pengelly, F.R.S., quoting Professor Oliver, makes him say "that the present Atlantic islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World," but himself adds that, at the same time, "at some period of the Tertiary epoch, N. E. Asia was united to N. W. America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends." Thus Occult Science alone can reconcile the contradictions and hesitations of modern Science. Moreover, surely the argument for the existence of Atlantis does not rest on Botany alone.
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the nursery of the first Zaratushta. The Brahmins are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on Narada's advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun in the temple built by Samba (the reputed) son of Krishna, who in reality had none. In this the Puranas are historical --allegory notwithstanding -- and Occultism is stating facts.
The whole story is told in Bhavishya Purana. It is stated that, having been cured by Surya (the Sun) of leprosy, Samba, having built a temple dedicated to the Sun, was looking for pious Brahmins to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God. But Narada (this virgin ascetic whom one finds in every age in the Puranas) advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brahmins to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Samba to Gauramukha (white face), the Purohita or family priest of Hgrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed Samba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Surya, to discharge the duty. Ignorant of the place they lived in, it is Surya, the Sun himself, who
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directs Samba to Sakadwipa beyond the salt water. Then Samba performs the journey, using Garuda (Vishnu's and Krishna's vehicle, the great Bird) who lands him among the Magas, etc.
Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Narada, who is found reborn in every cycle (or race), besides Garuda -- the symbol esoterically of the great cycle -- show the allegory; yet the Magas are the Magi of Chaldea, and their class and worship were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Saka-dwipa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Saka-dwipa are the forefathers of the fire-
worshipping Parsis. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing hundreds of thousands to a few centuries this time: they carry the event -- Narada and Samba notwithstanding -- to the days of the flight of the Parsis to Gujerat, which is simply absurd, as that was in the VIIIth cent. of our era. Though the Magas in the Bhavishya Purana are credited with still living in Saka-dwipa in the day of Krishna's Son, yet the last of it -- Plato's "Atlantis" -- had perished 6000 years before. They were Mag "late of" Saka-Dwipa, and lived in those days in Chaldea. This is an intentional confusion, again.
The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet the human Asuras and the Rakshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the future continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the Ocean floors. "Lemuria," as we have called the continent of the Third Race, was then a gigantic land.* It covered
* As shown in the Introduction, it stands to reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost continents, but have been adopted by us for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name given to those [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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the whole area of space from the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean, not only beyond Rapa-nui (Teapy, or Easter Island) which now lies in latitude 26 S., and longitude 110 W. (See Addenda to this Book II., Section, "Proofs of the Submerged Continents.") This statement seems corroborated by Science, -- even if only partially; as, when discussing continental trends, and showing the infra-Arctic masses trending generally with the Meridian, several ancient continents are generally mentioned, though inferentially. Among such the "Mascarene continent," which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, is spoken of, and the existence of another ancient continent running "from Spitzbergen to the Straits of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom," is taught.* The latter corroborates, then, the Occult teaching which shows the (now) polar regions as the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity, and as the tomb of the bulk of the mankind of that region during the Third Race, when the gigantic continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the
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Commentary, to a decrease of velocity in the earth's rotation: --
"When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities (the poles) agree with its middle circle (equator), when it runs slower and tilts in every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth. The waters flow toward
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] portions of the submerged Fourth-Race continent which were "beyond the pillars of Hercules," and which happened to keep above water after the general cataclysm. The last remnant of these -- Plato's Atlantis, or the "Poseidon" (another substitute or rather a translation of the real name) -- was the last of it some 11,000 years ago. Most of the correct names of the countries and islands of both continents are given in the Puranas; but to mention them specially, as found in other more ancient works, such as the Surya Siddhanta, would necessitate too lengthy explanations. If, in earlier writings, the two seem to have been too faintly disconnected, this must be due to careless reading and want of reflection. If ages hence, Europeans are referred to as Aryans, and a reader confuses them with the Hindus and the latter with the Fourth Race, as they live (some of them) in ancient Lanka -- the blame will not fall on the writer.
* See Professor Dana's article, "American Journal of Science, " III, v. 442-3; Prof. Winchell's "World Life "; and other geological works.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 325 ATLANTIS -- OCEAN FLOOR.
the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle belt (equatorial lands), while those at the ends are subject to pralayas by submersion . . . ."
And again: --
. . . "Thus the wheel (the Earth) is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon, for the breath of its waters (tides). Toward the close of the age (Kalpa) of a great (root) race, the regents of the moon (the Pitar fathers, or Pitris) begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the wheel about its belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the extremities (poles) new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in."
We have but to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very clearly. Scientists (modern Specialists) have ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planets, and the shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically.* Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward to the periods of the earth's first incrustation. (See "American Naturalist, " XVIII., 15 et seq.); therefore it seems easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statements. We propose to treat of this at greater length in the Addenda. ( Vide § § V. and VI.)
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It is asked by some Theosophists: "What will Atlantis be like when raised?" they understanding from a few words in "Esoteric Buddhism " that "old continents" that have been submerged will reappear. Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were the same identical lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would, indeed, be barren for ages. Because the Atlantic sea-bottom is covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming -- a new "cretaceous formation" of strata, in fact -- is no reason why, when the time for a new continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion and upraising of the sea bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the surface. The racial cataclysms are not a Noah's deluge of forty days -- a kind of Bombay monsoon.
* Speaking on periodical elevation and subsidence of the equatorial and polar regions, and ensuing changes of climate, Mr. Winchell (professor of Geology at Michigan) says -- "As the movements here contemplated are cyclical, the same conditions would recur again and again; and accordingly the same fauna might return again and again to the same region, with intervals of occupation by another fauna. Progressive sedimentation would preserve the records of such faunal alterations; and there would be presented the phenomena of 'colonies' 're-apparitions' and other faunal dislocations in the vertical and horizontal distributions of fossil remains. These phenomena are well known to the student of geology." ("Effects of Astronomical Changes .")
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That the periodical sinking and re-appearance of the mighty continents, now called Atlantis and Lemuria by the modern writers, is no fiction, will be demonstrated in the Section in which all the proofs of the same have been collated together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dwipas) are mentioned in the Surya Siddhanta, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out re-incarnated in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these "sacred islands" Atlantean -- as done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Swayambhuva Manu, to his seven sons -- was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose continent had been submerged in its turn. When originally mentioned by Parasara ( Vishnu Purana) the seven refer to an esoteric doctrine which is explained further on. Of all the seven islands, Jambu-dwipa is the only one that is terrestrial, for it is our globe. In the Puranas every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region; which, when the magnolia blossomed there where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a continent again. Science speaks of an ancient continent which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse-shoe-
like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi-circle. This continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of
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the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains re-appeared again on the face of the Oceans. Therefore, though it can be said without departing from truth that Atlantis is included in the Seven great insular continents, since the Fourth Race Atlanteans got some of the Lemurian relics, and, settling on the islands, included them among their lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on that remnant of Lemuria only to perish thereon, when destroyed in one day by its volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain geographers and geologists; to the Occul-
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tists it is history. What does Science know to the contrary? "Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India . . . . . Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, were connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre-historic ages . . . . was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the 'Brahmans of Upper India' stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached -- hardly wetting his feet -- the Alaskan peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America." (But see "Five years of Theosophy," art. "Leaflets from Esoteric History, " pp. 338 and 340.) This was written from the words of a MASTER -- a rather doubtful authority for the materialists and the sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather -- Ernest Haeckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost verbatim: . . . . "It would seem that the region on the earth's surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the CLOSELY RELATED CATARRHINE APES (! !) took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished -- H.P.B.] or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, which, lying to the South of the Asia of to-
day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa." (See supra and compare "The Pedigree of Man," p. 80-81.)
In the epoch we are treating of, the Continent of "Lemuria," had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. There was, nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe in those days, all these slumbering yet on the Ocean floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the cis-Himalayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond this stretched the "lotus leaves" of Sveta-dwipa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc., etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Isle, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilisation of the Third
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Race. Submerged with the rest, a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the Ocean floor, raised the small relic of the Archaic ages untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of northern polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race.
In this we are again corroborated to a degree by materialistic Science. Haeckel, when speaking of Blumenbach's brown or Malay race and the Australians and Papuans, remarks: -- "There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island-world, that seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent." ("Pedigree of Man, " p. 82. But see footnote supra and the Addenda. )
It certainly was, since it stretched, during the Third Race, east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie, and since the present Australia is but a portion of it, as are also a few surviving islands sown hither and thither on the face of the Pacific and a large bit of California, which belonged to it. Funnily enough, Haeckel, in his fantastic "Pedigree of Man," considers "the Australians of to-day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged (? !), of that second branch of the primitive human race. . . that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man's infancy, and seems to have been the parent of all the other straight-haired races of men. . . . The one, woolly-haired, migrated in part, westwards" . . . (i.e., to Africa and northwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no existence as yet) . . . "the other, straight-haired, was evolved farther to the north in Asia . . . . and peopled Australia . . . " (p. 81). "Behold," writes a MASTER, "the relics of that once great nation (Lemuria of the Third Race) in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia" ("Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 65). But they belong to the last remnants of the Seventh Sub-race of the Third. Prof. Haeckel must also have dreamt a dream and seen for once a true vision!
It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the Ancestors of those, who are termed by us the most ancient peoples of the world -- now called respectively the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phoenicians on the other. These were governed by the DIVINE DYNASTIES, i.e., kings and rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from spheres higher and more celestial than our own sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is useless of course to attempt to force their existence on sceptics. Their greatest pride consists in proving their patronymic denomination as catarrhinides; which fact they try to demonstrate on the alleged
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authority of the Coccyx appended to their os sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if they only had it long enough, they would wag in joy and for ever, in honour of its eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their ape-ancestors as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets right on this point theosophists and students of Occult Sciences.
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If we regard the Second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Haeckel's surmise that "the evolution of the primitive men took place . . . . in either Southern Asia or . . . . Lemuria" -- Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of question -- is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, in the same way that the evolution of the First Race (from the bodies of the pitars ) took place on seven distinctly separated regions of the (then) only Earth at the arctic pole -- so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur: it began in those northern regions, which have just been described a few pages back as including Behring's Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic regions and most adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when: --
"The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over the heads of that portion of the SWEAT BORN; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish REMAINED AS HALF-GROWN BABES* IN SIZE AND INTELLECT. This was the third pralaya of the races.**
Which means again, that our globe is subject to seven periodical entire changes which go pari passu with the races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial pralayas, three occasioned by the change in the inclination of the earth's axis. It is a law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic law. In Occultism this inexorable law is referred to as "the great ADJUSTER." Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and such changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes; nor does it seem so sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared rather to deny the axial phenomena altogether, than admit the intelligent Karmic hand and
* "Half-grown babes" in comparison with their giant Brethren on other zones. So would we now.
** Relates to Lemuria.
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law which alone could reasonably explain such sudden changes and their results. It has tried to account for them by various more or less fantastic speculations; one of which would be the sudden, and as imaginary, collision of our earth with a comet (De Boucheporn's hypothesis), as the cause of all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding to our esoteric explanation, since FOHAT is as good as any comet, having, in addition, universal intelligence to guide him.
Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu's Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four such axial disturbances; when the old continents -- save the first one -- were sucked in by the oceans, other
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lands appeared, and huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the survival of the fittest nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones -- the failures -- were disposed of by being swept off the earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.
The Sub-races are subject to the same cleansing process, as also the side-branchlets (the family-Races). Let one, well-acquainted with astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight and shadows of the Past. Let him observe, take notes of what he knows of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles -- especially with the Sidereal year, equal to 25,868 of our solar years.* If the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, then will he find how the weal and woe of nations is intimately connected with the beginning and close of this sidereal cycle. True, the non-occultist has the disadvantage that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing, through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he may find consolation in the knowledge or -- if he so prefers -- speculation on the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of -- about 16,000 years hence.
* There are other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles -- and this is just that which creates such a difficulty in the calculations of racial events. The circuit of the ecliptic is completed in 25,868 years. And, with regard to our Earth, it is calculated that the equinoctial point falls back fifty minutes ten seconds, annually. But there is another cycle within this one. It is said that "as the apsis goes forward to meet it at the rate of eleven minutes twenty-four seconds, annually," (see the article on Astronomy in Encyclopaedia Britannica), "this would complete a revolution in one hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and two years (115,302). The approximation of the equinox and the apsis is the sum of these motions, sixty-one minutes thirty-four seconds, and hence the equinox returns to the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years." We have mentioned this cycle in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 331 PRE-HISTORIC STATUES.
Our meaning is very clear. Every sidereal year the tropics recede from the pole four degrees in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator rounds through the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every astronomer knows, at present the tropic is only twenty-three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the equator. Hence it has still 2 1/2 degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal year; which gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years.*
After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) --
"Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and Pigmies (the dwarfed races of the Poles) . . . Many acquired DIVINE, more -- UNLAWFUL knowledge, and
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followed willingly the LEFT PATH." (Commentary xxxiii.)
Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods it took to accomplish this fourth destruction? Who can tell. . . . But we are told that --
-------
(44.) THEY (the Atlanteans) BUILT GREAT IMAGES, NINE YATIS HIGH (27 feet) -- THE SIZE OF THEIR BODIES (a). LUNAR FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS (the Lemurians). WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH (Race) (b).
(a) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged continent -- as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages -- are all between 20 and 30 feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all twenty-seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders. (See § "Stones, Witnesses to Giants," at the end of this Stanza.) The writer is well aware that the modern archaeologists have decided now that "these statues are not very old," as declared by one of the high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of those arbitrary decisions of modern science which does not carry much weight.
We are told that it is after the destruction of "Lemuria" by subterranean fires that men went on steadily decreasing in stature -- a process already commenced after their physical FALL -- and that finally, some millions of years after, they reached between six and seven feet, and are now dwindling down (as the older Asiatic races) to nearer five than
* See at the end of this Stanza "On the Duration of Ages and Cycles."
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six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub-race of the Fourth Root Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family (Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders) are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo-
Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub-races, the others to the very last and transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow.
(b) Now, how could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac is denied to the Hindus by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Aryan Hindus knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled-for slander was so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear evidence of facts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptians have on their Zodiacs (See Denon's "Voyage en
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Egypte " Vol. II.) irrefutable proofs of records having embraced more than three-and-a-half sidereal years -- or about 87,000 years -- the Hindu calculations cover nearly thirty-three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad, "These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the (last local) Flood (in Asia), or Age of Horror, " in the latitude of India. And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Aryan historical memory -- that which submerged the last portions of Atlantis, 850,000 years ago. The floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.
The sinking and transformation of Lemuria beginning nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), the Third Race ended its career in Lanka, or rather on that which became Lanka with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lanka, while the enormous island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic continent described a few pages back. As a MASTER says (See "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 65): -- "Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them . . . . there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis,
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been several times already submerged, and had the time to re-appear again and bear their new groups of mankind and civilisations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?"
Not the same identical continents, of course.
But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern "Lemuria." The prolongation of that great continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round "South Africa" (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden -- which every geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river -- is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary Age. The former reality of this river is a fact of science -- will its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, which their data demand? Professor Berthold Seeman not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent -- thus corroborating the whole "horse-shoe" doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the ELEVATED RIDGE in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes
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towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a SOUTH-EASTERLY line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d'Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-
shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean. (Cf. chart adapted from the "Challenger" and "Dolphin " soundings in Mr. Donnelly's, "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, " p. 47.)
The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis. The latter, indeed, must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria, than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race-evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth Race
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Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and became ultimately the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest "occult" authority, that "Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America." ("Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 58.)
The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded by it as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. Discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claims of the Asiatic philosophers, who maintain that Sciences -- Geology, Ethnology, and History included --were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived an untold number of ages ago. Future finds will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Aryans of India, Chaldeans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations during "myriads of centuries";* and the latter points to the fact that, "Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature."** To this Professor R. Owen adds that, "Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes"; and Winchell ("Pre-Adamites," p. 120), that "at the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books."
This is quite natural if we have to believe the statements of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii.), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, its tremendous antiquity,
secret annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the seven sciences; which sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the secret records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints --
1. The Realistic plane of thought;
2. The Idealistic;
3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.
The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely mythical element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For, it is either symbolical (archaic mode of thought), emblematical (a later though very ancient mode of thought), parabolical (allegory), hieroglyphical, or again logo-grammical -- the most difficult method of all, as every letter, as in the Chinese language, represents a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the Vedas, the "Book of the Dead," or the Bible (to a degree), is composed of such logograms. No one who is not initiated into the mystery of the occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say -- i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of Solar-myth and sexual-worship -- shall penetrate into the arcana. behind the veil. One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern mythologists.
Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah, etc., etc. -- all the head-figures of the world-deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological -- all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such deluges are based on events that took place in nature, and stand as historical records, therefore, whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical, of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we
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believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.
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To speak of a race nine yatis, or 27 feet high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than "Jack the Giant-Killer," is a somewhat unusual proceeding. "Where are your proofs?" the writer will be asked. In History and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Danavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim (Numbers xiii. 33). Moses speaks of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide (Deut. iii. 11), and Goliath was "six cubits and a span in height" (or 10 ft. 7 in.). The only difference found between the "revealed Scripture" and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., etc., is this: While the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that geology and archaeology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants have to be given up. (But see Part III., Addenda, the closing chapter.)
Of still standing witnesses to the submerged continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archaeology claims several such on this globe, though beyond wondering "what these may be" -- it never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Besides the Easter Island statues mentioned already, to what epoch do the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian, belong? Archaeology assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity (as usual), and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science. In "The Countries of the World," by Robert Brown, in Vol. IV., page 43, it is stated that --
"Teapi, Rapa-nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the South American coast. . . . In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four . . . and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their activity remains. . . .
" . . . But who made the great stone images (p. 44, etc.) which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? No one knows " -- says the reviewer. "It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants (a handful of Polynesian savages) arrived. . . . Their workmanship is
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of a high order . . . . and it is believed that the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America. . . Even at the date of Cook's visit, some of the statues, measuring 27 feet in height and eight across the shoulders were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen broad. . . . all built of hewn stone in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, or the ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru" (vol. iii., pp. 310, 311).
"THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT ANY OF THE STATUES HAVE BEEN BUILT UP, BIT BY BIT, BY SCAFFOLDING ERECTED AROUND THEM" -- adds the journal very suggestively -- without explaining how they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. One of the best of these colossal images is now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka -- the only ones now found erect -- are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like the head of a man asleep. Their types, though all are long-headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths and chins differ greatly in form, their head-dress, moreover -- a kind of flat cap with a back piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head --showing that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked -- "Who made them?" -- but it is not archaeology nor yet geology that is likely to answer, though the latter recognizes in the Island a portion of a submerged continent.
But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world, for Bartholdi's "Statue of Liberty" (now at New York) is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain "all honeycombed with gigantic cells," with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from Shoo-King) the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled the earth"; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. "Masses of enormous human bones" were found "in America, near Misorte," a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing
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spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters (See "De La Vega," Vol. ix., ch. ix.).*
Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal-warriors of Nadir-Shah? Bamian is a
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small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Kobhibaba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian (or Hindu-Kush) chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis-Khan in the XIIIth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their viharas. Such viharas are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock-cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. It is at the entrance of some of these that five enormous statues, of what is regarded as Buddha, have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, as the famous Chinese traveller, Hiouen-Thsang, speaks of, and saw them, when he visited Bamian in the VIIth century.
When it is maintained that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, the fact is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the "Statue of Liberty" now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 metres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is only 120 feet (15 feet taller than the said "Liberty").** The third statue is only 60 feet high -- the two others still smaller, the last one being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga; M. de Nadeylac thinks (See infra) that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, point out undeniably that Buddha was meant to be represented. But the above proves nothing. Notwithstanding the fact
* See also "Pneumatologie des Esprits " Vol. III., p. 55, de Mirville.
** The first and second have, in common with Bartholdi's Statue, an entrance at the foot, leading by a winding staircase cut in the rock up into the heads of the statues. The eminent French archeologist and anthropologist, the Marquis de Nadeylac, justly remarks in his work that there never was in ancient or in modern times a sculptured human figure more colossal than the first of the two.
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that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samadhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. "The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance": --says a Stanza. Gautama Buddha was an Aryan Hindu, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort them artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore Hiouen Thsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that
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"the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue" in his day "dazzled one's eyes," but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The very drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, cut out in the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. Whom does it represent in such case, it may be asked?
Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments -- which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting -- are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, like some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent, in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.
The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have
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survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second -- 120 feet high -- represents the sweat-born; and the third -- measuring 60 feet -- immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter. (See the following sub-section on "Cyclopean Ruins, and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.")
These are, then, the "Giants" of antiquity, the ante- and post-diluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as "grasshoppers" in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years.
In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear the wise words of Montaigne in his mind. Saith the great French philosopher: --
" . . . It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or truth: which is an ordinarie fault in those who
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persuade themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort.
" . . . But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage to have the bounds and limits of God's will, and the power of our common Mother Nature tied to his sleeve, and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie.
"If we term those things monsters or miracles to which our reason cannot attain, how many doe such daily present themselves unto our sight? Let us consider through what cloudes, and how blinde-folde we are led to the knowledge of most things that passe our hands; verily we shall finde it is rather custome than Science that receiveth, the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things, were they newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them as much or more unlikely and incredible than any other." (Essays, chap. xxvi.)
A fair-minded scholar should, before denying the possibility of our history and records, search modern History, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is found scattered about and buried even in the British Museum alone. The
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reader is asked to throw one more glance at the subject-matter treated of in the chapter which follows: -
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, Cyclopean
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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CYCLOPEAN RUINS AND COLOSSAL STONES AS WITNESSES TO GIANTS.
In his enormous works -- Memoires addressees a l'Academie des Sciences -- de Mirville, carrying out the task of proving the reality of the devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of "historical evidence" that in the days of miracle -- Pagan and Biblical -- the stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sung. That finally, "Christ-stone," or Christ-Rock, "the spiritual Rock" that followed "Israel" (I Corinth. x. 4) "became a Jupiter lapis, " swallowed by his father Saturn, "under the shape of a stone."* We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of Biblical metaphors, simply for the sake of proving the Satanism of idols, though a good deal might be said** on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence on hand, to show that (a) had there been no giants to move about such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany) and other such Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as MAGIC, there could never have been so many witnesses to oracular and speaking stones.
In the Achaica (p. 81) we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid "for worshipping stones." But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: "I have changed my way of thinking." Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same -- a crime Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans with, as they do likewise -- one may be allowed to believe in what so many great philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an "idiot" by modern Pausaniases.
The reader is referred to Volume VI. of the Academie des Inscriptions (Memoires, p. 518, et seq.) if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of Magic and psychic powers. In a poem on Stones attributed to Orpheus, those stones are divided into ophites and siderites, "serpent-stones" and "star-stones." "The 'Ophite'
* Pierres Animees et parlantes., p. 283. Theologie de la Pierre, 270.
** Saturn is Kronos -- "Time." His swallowing Jupiter lapis may turn out one day a prophecy. "Peter (Cephas, lapis), is the stone on which the Church of Rome is built" we are assured. But Kronos is as sure "to swallow it" one day, as he has swallowed Jupiter-lapis and still greater characters.
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is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has the gift of speech; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound similar to the cry of a child. It is by means of this stone that Helanos foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland . . " etc. (Falconnet.)
Sanchoniathon and Philo Byblius, in referring to these betyles, call them "Animated Stones." Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. The latter (Eusebius) never parted with his ophites, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from them, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling.* Arnobius (a holy man who, "from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church," Christians tell their readers) confesses he could never meet on his passage with one of such stones without putting it questions, "which is answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice." Where is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan ophites, we ask?
It is also known that the famous stone at Westminster was called liafail -- "the speaking stone," -- which raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry (Monuments Celtiques) says he saw it when it still bore the inscription: --**
Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heraclius, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which "ran away when a hand approached them." (See Dictionnaire des Religions par l'abbe Bertrand; art. on words Heraclius and Betyles.)
De Mirville -- who seeks to justify the Bible -- inquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior-gaur (from Cor, "dance," whence chorea, and gaur, a GIANT), or the dance of giants? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop of St. Gildas. But the authors of the Voyage dans le Comte
* The same, of course, as the "small voice" heard by Elijah after the earthquake at the mouth of the cave. (I Kings xix. 12.)
** The rocking, or Logan, stones bear various names. The Celts had their clacha-brath, the "Destiny or judgment-stone"; the divining-stone, or "stone of the ordeal" and the oracle stone; the moving or animated stone of the Phoenicians; the rumbling stone of the Irish. Brittany has its "pierres branlantes" at Huelgoat. They are found in the Old and the New Worlds: in the British Islands, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, etc., as in North America. (See Hodson's "Letters from North America, " Vol. II., p. 440.) Pliny speaks of several in Asia (Hist. Nat. Lib. I., c. 96), and Apollonius
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, Cyclopean
Rhodius expatiates on the rocking stones, and says that they are "stones placed on the apex of a tumulus, and so sensitive as to be movable by the mind" (Ackerman 's Arth. Index, p. 34), referring no doubt to the ancient priests who moved such stones by will-power and from a distance.
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de Cornouailles, sur les traces des giants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,* Carnac and West Hoadley, give far better and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions -- true forests of rocks -- immense monoliths are found, "some weighing over 500,000 kilograms" (Cambry). These "hinging stones" of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, nor giants. Who then, if not giants, could ever raise such masses (especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley), range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, are set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, and would yet resist the efforts of twenty men who should attempt to displace them.
We say, that most of these stones are the relics of the last Atlanteans. We shall be answered that all the geologists claim them to be of a natural origin. That, a rock when "weathering," i.e., losing flake after flake of its substance under influence of weather, assumes this form. That, the "tors" in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this cause. That, finally, as all scientists consider the "rocking stones to be of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in layers" -- our statement will be justly denied, especially as " we see this process of rock-modification in progress around us to-day." Let us examine the case.
But read what Geology has to say, and you will learn that often these gigantic masses do not even belong to the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those regions and to be found only far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke (French trans., Sepulture des Tartares. Arch. VII, p. 222), speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that there, where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have been brought over "from immense distances and with prodigious efforts." Charton ( Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes, Vol. I., p. 230) speaks of a specimen of such rock "from Ireland," which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin, "most probably African."
This is a strange coincidence, as Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular stones to a Sorcerer who brought them from Africa. De Mirville sees in that sorcerer "an accursed Hamite. " We see in him a
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dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands -- GIANTS in every and any case.*
"Men," says Cambry, naively, "have nothing to do with it . . . for never could human power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has accomplished it all (!!) and Science will demonstrate it some day" (!!) (p. 88). Nevertheless, it is a human, though gigantic power, which has accomplished it, and no more "nature" alone than god or devil.
"Science," having undertaken to demonstrate that even the mind and Spirit of man are simply the production of blind forces, is quite capable of accepting the task. It may come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that nature alone has marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds flying from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland!
It is true that Cambry recanted later on. "I had believed for a long time," he says, "that Nature alone could produce those wonders . . . . but I recant . . . . chance is unable to create such marvellous combinations . . . . and those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau. . . . ." Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author "Antiquites Celtiques ," p. 99, says, when speaking of the moving rocks, or Rocking-
Stones situated on the slope of Golcar (the "Enchanter"): "The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to gods." . . . .
In "Stonehenge" (Flinders Petrie) it is said that "Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or 'sarsen' stone, locally called 'grey wethers.' But some of the stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably the North of Ireland."
To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in 1850 in the Revue Archeologique (p. 473), are worthy of being quoted. Says the paper, concerning the rocking stones: --
"Every stone is a block whose weight would try the most powerful machines. There are, in a word, scattered throughout the globe, masses, before which the word materials seems to remain inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded, and that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the
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denominated by the Hellenes Giants. [Gk chars] "[Oi d'en Aiguptoi muthologousi kata ten Isidos helikian gegonenai tinas polusomatous]."
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things themselves. Besides which, these immense rocking stones, called sometimes routers -- placed upright on one of their sides as on a point, their equipoise being so perfect that the slightest touch is sufficient to set them in motion . . . betray a most positive knowledge of statics. Reciprocal counter-motion, surfaces, plane, convex and concave, in turn . . . all this allies them to Cyclopean monuments, of which it can be said with good reason, repeating after de La Vega that 'the demons seem to have worked on them more than men.' "*
For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, applied to masses weighing millions of pounds, can be the work of Palaeolithic savages, of cave-men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is no use for our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking-stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place, every effort made to keep it elsewhere notwithstanding. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far bigger one and had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. . . The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. . . And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytanea "whence it ran away several times, which forced them to lead it" (Nat. Hist., XXXVI., p. 592) . . . Here we have immense stones stated by all antiquity to be "living, moving, speaking and self-perambulating." They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they have been called routers ("to put to flight," to rout) and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones and
* "It is difficult," writes Creuzer, "not to suspect in the structures of Tiryns and Mycenae planetary forces supposed to be moved by celestial powers, analogous to the famous Dactyles." (Pelasges et Cyclopes). To this day Science is ignorant on the subject of the Cyclopes. They are supposed to have built all the so-called "Cyclopean" works whose erection necessitated several regiments of Giants, and -- they were only seventy-seven in all (about one hundred, Creuzer thinks). They are called "Builders," and Occultism calls them the INITIATORS, who, initiating some Pelasgians, thus laid the foundation stone of true MASONRY. Herodotus associates the Cyclops with Perseus "the son of an Assyrian demon" (I. VI. p. 54). Raoul Rochette found that Palaemonius, the Cyclops, to whom a sanctuary was raised, "was the Tyrian Hercules." Anyhow, he was the builder of the sacred columns of Gadir, covered with mysterious characters to which Apollonius of Tyana was the only one in his age to possess the key; and with figures which may still be found on the walls of Ellora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Viswakarma, "the builder and artificer of the Gods."
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called mad stones (see his, "Dieu et les Dieux, " p. 587). "The rocking-stone is accepted in Science. Why did it rock, why was it made to do so? One must be blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and that they were called for this very reason 'the stones of truth.' " (de Mirville, "Fetichisme ")*
This is history, the Past of prehistoric times, warranting the same in later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the moon and the serpent, were the more ancient "Rocks of Destiny" of older nations, whose motion, or rocking, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this ancient reading. Vormius and Olaius Magnus show that it was according to the orders of the oracle, "whose voice spoke through the immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of ancient giants," that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. "In India and Persia," says Pliny, "it is she (the Persian Oitzoe) whom the magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns" (Nat. Hist., lxxxvii., chap. LIV.); and he describes (in chap. XXXVIII., 1. ii.) a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that "a single finger
* Messrs. Richardson and Barth are said to have been amazed at finding in the Desert of Sahara the same trilithic and raised stones they had seen in Asia, Circassia, Etruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr. Rivett-Carnac, B.C.S., of Allahabad, the distinguished Archaeologist, shows the same amazement in finding the description given by Sir J. Simpson of the cuplike markings on stones and rocks in England, Scotland, and other Western countries -- "offering an extraordinary resemblance" to "the marks on the trap Boulders which encircle the Barrows near Nagpur" (the city of Snakes). The eminent scholar saw in this "another and very extraordinary addition to the mass of evidence. . . that a branch of the nomadic tribes, who swept at an early date over Europe, penetrated into India also." We say Lemuria, Atlantis and her giants, and the earliest races of the Fifth Root-Race had all a hand in these betyles, lithoi, and "magic" stones in general. The cup marks noticed by Sir J. Simpson, and the "holes scooped out on the face" of rocks and monuments found by Mr. Rivett-Carnac "of different sizes varying from six inches to an inch-and-a-half in diameter, and in depth from one to one-and-a-
half inch . . . . . . generally arranged in perpendicular lines presenting many permutations in the number and size and arrangement of the cups" -- are simply written RECORDS of the oldest races. Whosoever examines with attention the drawings made of such marks in the "Archaeological Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India, etc.," will find in it the most primitive style of marking or recording; something of the sort having been adopted by the American inventors of the Morse code of telegraphic writing, which reminds us of the Ahgam writing, a combination of long and short strokes, as Mr. Rivett-Carnac describes it "cut on sandstone." Sweden, Norway, and Scandinavia are full of such written records, the Runic characters having followed the cup-marks and long and short strokes. In "Johannes Magnus' Infolio" one sees the representation of the demi-god, the giant Starchaterus (Starkad, the pupil of Kroszharsgrani, the Magician) who holds under each arm a huge stone covered with Runic characters; and Starkad, according to Scandinavian legend, went to Ireland and performed marvellous deeds in the North and South, East and West. (See "Asgard and the Gods. ")
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can move it, while the weight of the whole body makes it resist." Why then should not the rocking stones of Ireland, or those of Brinham, in Yorkshire, have served for the same mode of divination or oracular communications? The hugest of them are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller ones, such as Brinham Rocks, with some revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more ancient lithoi. Had not the bishops of the middle ages destroyed all the plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know more of these.* As it is, we know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and MAGIC. E. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in his Antiquites de France, Vol. ix., an article showing the Chatam peramba (the Field of Death, or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical with the old tombs at Carnac -- "a prominence and a central tomb." . . . "Bones are found in them (the tombs)," he says, "and Mr. Hillwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives (of Malabar) calling the tombs the dwellings of Rakshasas (giants)." Several stone circles, "considered the work of the Panch Pandava (five Pandus), as all such monuments are in India, so numerous in that country," when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, "were found to contain human bones of a very large size." (T. A. Wise, in "History of Paganism in Caledonia, " p. 36).
Again, de Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to "great natural geological commotions" (Charlton), and "are the work of Nature" (Cambry) is now exploded, his remarks are very just. "Before the impossibility of such a theory is asserted, we advise Science to reflect . . . . and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends: for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking stones will oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to see clearer and realise once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity" ("Fetichisme, " p. 288).
It is just what we can never repeat too often, though the voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediaeval theology in its interpretations of the so-called Revelation. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape -- a transformation requiring millions of years -- and yet fears to make mankind older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of species,
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to bird and mammalian. Yet it refuses to man, who physiologically is only a higher mammal and animal, such transformation of his external form. But if the monstrous iguanodon of the Wealden may have been the ancestor of the diminutive iguana of to-day, why could not the monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man -- the link between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this "theory," than in that of refusing to man any spiritual immortal Ego, making of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, as a distinct genus in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific than the present exact Sciences, they are withal more logical and consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and natural affinities of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal; but it requires more than a mere interplay between certain material aggregates and their environment, to call to life a fully conscious man ; even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two "poor cousins" of the Quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Haeckel that (objective) life on our globe "is a logical postulate of Scientific natural history," but add that the rejection of a like Spiritual involution, from within without, of invisible subjective Spirit-life -- eternal and a Principle in Nature -- is more illogical, if possible, than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by blind forces inherent in matter, without any external help.
Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being in the following manner. First, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in Space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named organic PROTEIN. Then, under the influence of incident forces, those states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into and resulted in new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind-pipes and bellows. After which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart's Requiem. This was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad infinitum; its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. . . . . What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown.
Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of
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species, what he says in it applies to our doctrine. "Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations on a pre-existing kind of being." ("Essays on Physiology, " Subj. p. 144.) Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a modification on a pre-existent and pre-historical kind of man, even supposing for argument's sake that there is nothing within him to last longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is not so! For, when we are told that "organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call artificial evolution" (Appendix to "Principles of Biology, " p. 482), we answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great adepts have done as much, and, indeed, far more, before the chemists ever attempted to "build out of dissociated elements complex combinations." The Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in
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Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein will have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no chemist, or Alchemist either, will ever endow such a "Frankenstein's Monster" with more than animal instinct, unless indeed he does that which the "Progenitors" are credited with, namely, if he leaves his own physical body, and incarnates in the "empty form." But even this would be an artificial, not a natural man, for our "Progenitors" had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become gods before they became men.
The above digression, if one, is an attempt at justification before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this. But this accounts also for the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or theology; and why they prefer any such "psychic craze" to the dogmatic assertions of both, neither of the two having anything better to offer than blind faith in their respective infallibility. Universal tradition is indeed the far safer guide in life. And universal tradition shows primitive man living for ages together with his Creators and first instructors -- the Elohim -- in the World's "Garden of Eden," or "Delight." We shall treat of the Divine Instructors in Stanza XII.
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45. THE FIRST GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS (a).
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46. ALL HOLY SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE ANIMALS PRODUCED FROM THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (b).
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(a) As this subject -- the fourth great deluge on our globe in this Round -- is fully treated in the chapters that follow the last Stanza, to say anything more at present would be mere repetition. The seven great islands (Dwipas) belonged to the continent of Atlantis. The secret teachings show that the "Deluge" overtook the Fourth, giant Race, not on account of their depravity, or because they had become "black with sin," but simply because such is the fate of every continent, which -- like everything else under our Sun -- is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was when the Fifth Race was in its infancy.
(b) Thus the giants perished -- the magicians and the sorcerers, adds the fancy of popular tradition, but "all holy saved," and alone the "unholy were destroyed." This was due, however, as much to the prevision of the "holy" ones, who had not lost the use of their "third eye," as to Karma and natural law. Speaking of the subsequent race (our Fifth Humanity), the commentary says: --
"Alone the handful of those Elect, whose divine instructors had gone to inhabit that Sacred Island -- from whence the last Saviour will come' ' -- now kept mankind from becoming one-half the
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exterminator of the other [as mankind does now -- H.P.B.]. It (mankind) became divided. Two-thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one-third remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race -- the divine Incarnates. When the Poles moved (for the fourth time) this did not affect those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like the Lemurians -- alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and 'were seen no more . . . . ."
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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STANZA XII. THE FIFTH RACE AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
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§§ (47) The remnants of the first two races disappear for ever. Groups of the various Atlantean races saved from the Deluge along with the Forefathers of the Fifth. (48) The origins of our present Race, the Fifth. The first divine Dynasties. (49) The earliest glimmerings in History, now pinned to the allegorical chronology of the Bible, and "universal" History slavishly following it. -- The nature of the first instructors and civilizers of mankind.
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47. FEW (men) REMAINED. SOME YELLOW, SOME BROWN AND BLACK, AND SOME RED, REMAINED. THE MOON-COLOURED (of the primitive Divine Stock) WERE GONE FOR EVER (a) . . . .
48. THE FIFTH RACE PRODUCED FROM THE HOLY STOCK (remained). IT WAS RULED BY HER FIRST DIVINE KINGS.
49. THE "SERPENTS" WHO RE-DESCENDED; WHO MADE PEACE WITH THE FIFTH (Race), WHO TAUGHT AND INSTRUCTED IT (b) . . . .
(a) This verse (47) relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with it, but living and ever-
recurring tradition does. History -- or what is called history -- does not go further back than the fantastic origins of our fifth sub-race, a "few thousands" of years. It is the sub-divisions of this first sub-
race of the Fifth Root-Race which are referred to in the sentence, "Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red, remained." The "moon coloured" (i.e., the First and the Second Races) were gone for ever -- ay, without leaving any traces whatever; and that, so far back as the third "Deluge" of the Third Lemurian race, that "Great Dragon," whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this is the true meaning of the Verse in the COMMENTARY which says:
"The GREAT DRAGON has respect but for the 'SERPENTS' of WISDOM, the Serpents whose holes are now under the triangular stones," i.e., "the Pyramids, at the four corners of the world."
(b) This tells us clearly that which is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the Commentaries;
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namely, that the Adepts or "Wise" men of the three Races (the Third, Fourth and the Fifth) dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind of pyramidal structure, if not
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actually under a pyramid. For such "pyramids" existed in the four corners of the world and were never the monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though until found scattered all over the two Americas, under and over ground, beneath and amidst virgin forests, as in plain and vale, they were supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If the true geometrically correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular, pyramidal and conical menhirs in the Morbihan, and Brittany generally; many of the Danish tumuli and even of the "giant tombs" of Sardinia with their inseparable companions, the nuraghi, are so many more or less clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first settlers on the newly-born continent and isles of Europe, the -- "some yellow, some brown and black, and some red" -- races that remained after the submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands (850,000 years ago), with the exception of Plato's Atlantean island, and before the arrival of the great Aryan races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East. Those who can hardly accept the antiquity of the human race so far back as the 57,000 years assigned by Dr. Dowler to the skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi, will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken some day. It is the foolish self-glorification of the Arcadians who styled themselves [[proselenoi ]] -- older than the moon -- and of the people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the sun appeared in heaven, that we may disparage, not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the mammoth and mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the mammalians, man is the only one whom science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames, from the giant homo diluvii to the creature between 5 and 6 feet that he is now.
But the "Serpents of Wisdom" have preserved their records well, and the history of the human evolution is traced in heaven as it is traced on underground walls. Humanity and the stars are bound together indissolubly, because of the intelligences that rule the latter.
Modern symbologists may scoff at this and call it "fancy," but "it is unquestionable that the Deluge has (ever) been associated in the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the constellations," writes Mr. Staniland Wake ("The Great Pyramid "). The "Old Dragon" is identical with the "great Flood," says Mr. Proctor (in "Knowledge, " Vol. I., p. 243): "We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples . . . the Dragon would be the
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uppermost or ruling constellation . . . it is singular how closely the constellations . . . correspond in
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sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded respecting the (Biblical) Flood."
The reasons for this singularity have been made clear in this work. But it shows only that there were several Deluges mixed up in the memories and traditions of the sub-races of the Fifth Race. The first great "Flood" was astronomical and cosmical, while several others were terrestrial. Yet, this did not prevent our very learned friend Mr. Gerald Massey -- an Initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still only a Self-initiate -- from declaring and insisting that the Atlantean submersion and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people; and that Atlantis was no better than an astronomical allegory. Nevertheless, the great Zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and one can hardly interfere with the other; and it stands also to reason that every student of Occultism knows what that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of it. Its "twelve cantos" refer to the "annual course of the Sun through the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac"; the eleventh canto being "consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and of rain, and harmonizes with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac -- Aquarius, or the Waterman" (Nineteenth Century, 1882, p. 236). But even this is preceded in the old records by the pre- astronomical Cosmic FLOOD, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above Zodiacal or Noah's Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the Great Dragon (the constellation), the "Dragons of Wisdom," or the great Initiates of the Third and Fourth Races, and the Floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the Third Sub-race of the Fourth Root-race or the Atlanteans. When was it? Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of the Zodiacal calculations in Egypt, the poles have been thrice inverted.
We will presently return once more to this statement. Such symbols as are represented by the Signs of the Zodiac -- a fact which offers a handle to materialists upon which to hang their one-sided theories and opinions -- have too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too important to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to consider the meaning of that other statement which mentions (verse 48) the first divine Kings, who are said to have "redescended," guided and instructed our Fifth Race after the last deluge!
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We shall consider this last claim historically in the sections that follow, but must end with a few more details on the subject of "Serpents."
The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediaeval, and modern works that have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of the weird symbol -- so often referred to and suggestive of the "tempter of man" in the orthodox light of the church -- can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every available proof at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been
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invariably made out by our theologians and some pious symbologists as indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called devil, and every proof to the contrary has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored; therefore, the occultist must neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander. It is proposed to divide the subjects involved in these three last verses into several groups, and examine them in this final chapter as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine -- the bulk of which will be found in Part II. on Symbology.
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SERPENTS AND DRAGONS UNDER DIFFERENT SYMBOLISMS.
The name of the Dragon in Chaldea was not written phonetically, but was represented by two monograms, probably meaning, according to the Orientalists, "the scaly one." "This description," very pertinently remarks G. Smith, "of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a serpent, or a fish," and we may add: "It applies in one case to Makara, the tenth Zodiacal sign, meaning in Sanskrit a non-
descript amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, and really signifying something else. ( Vide Part II., "The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.") This, then, is a virtual admission that the Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of the "Dragon" in ancient Chaldea, whence the Hebrews got their symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians, who made of the "Scaly one" a living entity and a maleficent power.
A specimen of Dragons, "winged and scaled," may be seen in the British Museum. Representing the events of the Fall according to the same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a tree, and holding out their hands to the "apple," while at the back of the "Tree"
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is the Dragon-Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two "Chaldees" ready for initiation, the Serpent symbolising the "Initiator"; while the jealous gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane clergy. Not much of the literal "Biblical event" there, as any occultist can see.
"The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom," says the Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures and the "Serpent."
"The Serpents who redescended . . . . who taught and instructed" the Fifth Race. What sane man is capable of believing in our day that real serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess, now become almost an axiom with the men of science, that those who wrote in antiquity upon various sacred Dragons and Serpents either were superstitious and credulous people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the profane.
"Terrible are the gods when they manifest themselves" -- those gods whom men call Dragons. And
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AElianus, treating in his "De Natura Animalium " of these Ophidean symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he understood well the nature of this most ancient of symbols. Thus he most pertinently explains with regard to the above Homeric verse -- "For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of which it is better (for others?) to remain in ignorance" (Book xi., ch. 17).
This "Dragon" having a septenary meaning, the highest and the lowest may be given. The former is identical with the "Self-born," the Logos (the Hindu Aja). He was the second person of the Trinity, the SON, with the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent-Worshippers. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.* Its seven "stars" are the seven stars held in the hand of the "Alpha and Omega" in Revelation. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term "Dragon" was applied to the Wise men.
This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that it can hardly escape, all civilization notwithstanding, being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished Christian dogmas, the subject of which required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.
Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in
* As shown by H. Lizeray in the "Trinite Chretienne Devoilee" -- placed between the immutable Father (the Pole, a fixed Point) and mutable matter, the Dragon transmits to the latter the influences received by him from the Pole, whence his name -- the Verbum.
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Heaven originate with St. John, and in his Revelation? Emphatically we answer -- No. His "Dragon" is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean magic.
To demonstrate the negation the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects.
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THE SIDEREAL AND COSMIC GLYPHS.
Every astronomer -- besides Occultists and Astrologers -- knows that, figuratively, the astral light, the milky way, and also the path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the circles of the Sidereal or Tropical year, were always called "Serpents" in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the adepts.
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This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a "Dragon": "Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune" (Peratae Gnostics); the "Good and Perfect Serpent," the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.
But one ought to discriminate between the characters of this symbol. For instance: Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine; and when, as an example, we read in the Vendidad complaints uttered against the "Serpent," whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana-Vaego, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, at the same time as mental and psychic consumption, every occultist knows that the Serpent alluded to is the north pole, as also the pole of the heavens.* The latter produces the seasons according to the angle at which it penetrates the centre of the earth. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaego by the good river Daitya had disappeared, and "the Aryan Magi had to emigrate to Sagdiani" -- say the exoteric accounts. But the esoteric teaching states that the pole had passed through the equator, and that the "land of bliss" of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo-Aryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognise the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood, and conversed with the pure "Yazathas" (celestial Spirits of the Elements), whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein (Revue Archeologique, 8th year, 1885), "the Vendidad seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara-Korum chain."
* Symbolized by the Egyptians under the form of a Serpent with a hawk's head.
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The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who for once (and for a wonder) wrote the truth, symbolised Kosmos by a large fiery circle, representing a serpent with a hawk's head lying across its diameter. "Here we have the pole of the earth within the plane of the ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac in 25,000 (odd) years, must have reddened with the solar blaze, and each sign must have been vertical to the polar region." (See Mackey's "Sphinxiad.")
Meru -- the abode of the gods -- was placed, as before explained, in the North Pole, while Patala, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Patala have one significance and represent localities; while astronomically, they have another, and mean "the two poles," which meanings ended by their being often rendered in exoteric sectarianism -- the "Mountain" and the "Pit," or Heaven and Hell. If we hold at present only to the astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the ancients knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern astronomers; they had reasons, and good ones for naming one the "Mountain " and the other the "Pit. " As the author just quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same: "Heli-on is the Sun in the highest"
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(Helios, Heli-on, the "most high"); "and Acheron is 32 deg. above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded the southern pole, being therefore called the PIT, while observing, toward the Northern pole that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared above the horizon -- they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of the Gods, these were said to ascend and descend periodically; by which (astronomically) the Zodiacal gods were meant, the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the heaven." "In that age," adds the author of that curious work, the "Sphinxiad" and of "Urania's Key to the Revelations " -- "at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the North Pole to the north horizon; crossing the eight coils of the Serpent (eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years), which would seem like an imaginary ladder with eight staves reaching from the earth up to the pole, i.e., the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, i.e., the signs of the Zodiac, ascended and descended. (Jacob's ladder and the angels) . . . . It is more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder." . . . .
This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific
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and especially theological character. As just said, the Christian trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning, which made Rutilius say -- of those who euhemerized it -- "Judaea gens, radix stultorum. "
But the profane, and especially the Christian fanatics, ever in search of scientific corroboration for their dead-letter texts, will persist in seeing in the celestial pole the true Serpent of Genesis, Satan, the Enemy of mankind, instead of what it is -- a cosmic metaphor. When the gods are said to forsake the earth, it does not only mean the gods, protectors and instructors, but also the minor gods -- the regents of the Zodiacal signs. Yet, the former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as much as in the Hindu Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura-Mazda, the "Lord of Wisdom," is the synthesis of the Amshaspends (or Amesha-Spenta -- "Immortal Benefactors"),* the "Word," however, or the Logos and its six highest aspects in Mazdyanism. These "Immortal Benefactors" are described in Zamyad yasht as the "Amesha-Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great, helpful . . . . imperishable and pure which are all seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike . . . . which are the creators and destroyers of the creatures of Ahura-Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers . . . ."
These few lines alone indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspends, our Dhyan-
Chohans or the "Serpents of Wisdom." They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura-
Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians -- the Stary-azatas of the Zoroastrians -- or again the seven planets (including the sun) of every religion.** The epithet -- "the shining having efficacious eyes" -- proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the divine powers of Ahura-Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the "Builders," the "watchers," the Pitar (fathers), and the first Preceptors of mankind.
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When mortals shall have become sufficiently spiritualised, there will be no more need of forcing them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men will know then, that there never yet was a great World-reformer, whose name has passed into our generation, who (a) was not a direct emanation of the LOGOS (under whatever name known to us), i.e., an essential incarnation of one of "the seven," of the "divine Spirit who is sevenfold"; and (b) who had not appeared before, during the
* Also translated as "blissful Immortals" by Dr. W. Geiger; but the first is more correct.
** These "seven" became the eight, the Ogdoad, of the later materialized religions, the seventh, or the highest principle, being no longer the pervading Spirit, the Synthesis, but becoming an anthropomorphic number, or additional unit.
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past Cycles. They will recognise, then, the cause which produces in history and chronology certain riddles of the ages; the reason why, for instance, it is impossible for them to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the Dabistan ; why the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up in their numbers and individualities; why Krishna and Buddha speak of themselves as re-incarnations, i.e., Krishna is identified with the Rishi Narayana, and Gautama gives a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being "the very supreme Brahma," is yet called Amsamsavatara -- "a part of a part" only of the Supreme on Earth. Finally, why Osiris is a great God, and at the same time a "prince on Earth," who reappears in Thoth-Hermes, and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognised, cabalistically, in Joshua, the Son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The esoteric doctrine explains it by saying that each of these (as many others) had first appeared on earth as one of the seven powers of the LOGOS, individualized as a God or "Angel" (messenger); then, mixed with matter, they had re-appeared in turn as great sages and instructors who "taught the Fifth Race," after having instructed the two preceding races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of mankind, and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had become truly only "the parts of a part" on earth, though de facto the One Supreme in Nature.
This is the metaphysics of Theogony. And, as every "Power" among the SEVEN has (once individualized) in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules over it,* hence the many meanings in every symbol, which, unless interpreted according to the esoteric methods, generally lead to an inextricable confusion.
Does the Western Kabalist -- generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist -- require a proof? Let him open Eliphas Levi's Histoire de la Magic," p. 53, and carefully examine his "Grand Symbole Kabalistique " of the Zohar. He will find, on the engraving given, a white man standing erect and a black woman upside down, i.e., standing on her head, her legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and protruding behind his shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on each side.
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Eliphas Levi makes of it, God and Nature; or God, "light," mirrored inversely in "Nature and Matter," darkness. Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as emblematical cosmogony goes. Nor has he invented the symbol any more
* These elements are: -- The cosmic, the terrene, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, the aqueous, and finally the human -- in their physical, spiritual, and psychic aspects.
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than the Kabalists have: the two figures in white and black stone have existed in the temples of Egypt from time immemorial -- agreeably to tradition; and historically -- ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them. Therefore the symbol must have been in existence since nearly 2,500 years ago. This, at the very least, for that Persian sovereign, who was a son of Cyrus the Great, succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two Kabiri personifying the opposite poles. Herodotus (Thalia, No. 77) tells posterity that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he went into an inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought a man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate "the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the Heaven," as perceived by Mackey.* But they represented also the poles inverted, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, bringing each time as a result the displacement of the Oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and vice versa. These Kabirim were the "Deluge" gods.
This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same gods, and classes of gods. Faber showed already, at the beginning of this century, the identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes,** Titans, and Aletae with the KABIRI. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis and our Dhyan Chohans, who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri-Titans were seven great gods: cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected
* Who adds that the Egyptians had various ways of representing the angles of the Poles. Also in Perry's View of the Levant there is "a figure representing the South Pole of the Earth in the constellation of the Harp," in which the poles appear like two straight rods, surmounted with hawks' wings, but they were also often represented as serpents with heads of hawks, one at each end.
** Faber and Bishop Cumberland would make them all the later pagan personifications, as the former writer has it, of "the Noetic Ark, and no other than the Patriarch (Noah) and his family" (!) See his "Kabiri, " Vol. I., 136; because, we are told, "after the Deluge in commemoration of the event, the
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pious Noachidae had established a religious festival, which was, later on, corrupted by their impious descendants; demons or hero-gods; and at length unblushing obscenity usurped the name and garb of religion" ( Vol. I., p. 10.). Now this is indeed putting an extinguisher upon the human reasoning powers, not only of antiquity, but even of our present generations. Reverse the statement, and explain after the words "Noah and his family" that what is meant by that patriarch and family is simply the Jewish version of a Samothracian mystery, of Saturn, or Kronos-Sadic and his Sons, and then we may say Amen.
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(a) with At-al-as "the divine Sun," and (b) with tit "the deluge." But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe-inspiring great gods -- the Dioscuri,* the deities surrounded with the darkness of occult nature -- become the Idei (or Idaeic finger) with the adept-healer by metals. The true etymology of the name lares (now signifying "ghosts") must be sought in the Etruscan word "lars," "conductor," "leader." Sanchoniathon translates the word Aletae as fire worshippers, and Tabor believes it derived from Al-Orit, "the god of fire." Both are right, as in both cases it is a reference to the Sun (the highest God), toward whom the planetary gods "gravitate" (astronomically and allegorically) and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber's etymology, who says that "lar" is a contraction of "El-Ar, " the solar deity, is not very correct. They are the "lares," the conductors and leaders of men. As Aletae, they were the seven planets -- astronomically; and as Lares, the regents of the same, our protectors and rulers -- mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic worship, as also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, their attributes being recognised in these two capacities by the name of the temples to which they respectively belonged, and those of their priests. They all belonged, however, to the Septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyan Chohans. The Sabeans, who worshipped the "regents of the Seven planets" as the Hindus do their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes (Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the planetary gods. Seth and Enos were borrowed from the Sabeans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but the truth can still be traced about them even in Genesis.** Seth is the "progenitor" of those early men of the Third Race in whom the "Planetary" angels had incarnated -- a Dhyan Chohan himself, who belonged to the informing gods; and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch) or Hermes, was said to be his son -- because it was a generic name for all the early Seers ("Enoichion"). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabeanism; and therefore that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idris (Hermes or Enoch), (See Vyse, "Operations," Vol. II., p. 358); that thither Sabeans proceeded
* Who became later on, with the Greeks, limited only to Castor and Pollux. But in the days of Lemuria, the Dioscuri, the "Egg-born," were the Seven Dhyan Chohans (Agnishwatta-Kumara) who incarnated in the Seven Elect of the Third Race.
** Clement of Alexandria recognized the astronomical significance of chapter xxv. et seq. of Exodus.
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According to the Mosaic doctrine, he says that the seven planets help in the generation of terrestrial things. The two cherubs standing on the two sides of the sacred tetragrammaton represent the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
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on pilgrimage, and chanted prayers seven times a day, turning to the North (the Mount Meru, Kaph, Olympus, etc., etc.) (See Palgrave, Vol. II., p. 264). Abd Allatif says curious things about the Sabeans and their books. So does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote 200 years later. While the latter maintains "that each pyramid was consecrated to a star" (a star regent rather), Abd Allatif assures us "that he had read in Sabean books that one pyramid was the tomb of Agathodaemon and the other of Hermes" ( Vyse, Vol. II., p. 342). "Agathodaemon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes was his son," adds Mr. Staniland Wake in "The Great Pyramid," p. 57.
Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples they were the great Cosmic Gods (the seven and the forty-nine Sacred Fires), in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, therefore to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were 3 and 4, or 7 -- the male and female principles -- (the crux ansata); this division showing why some classical writers held that they were only three, while others named four. And these were -- the Kabiri -- Axieros (in his female aspect, Demeter); Axio-
Kersa (Persephone)*; Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kadmilos (Hermes -- not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus (II. 51) but "he of the sacred legend," explained only during the Samothracian mysteries). This identification, due, according to the Scholiast Apollon (Rh. I. 217), to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is none at all, as names alone do not reveal much. There were still others again who maintained, being as right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. The two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial, and the pole of the heavens -- astronomically, as also the physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus, the Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read esoterically to understand the allegory. The parts played in the event by the fire, water, earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how "the father of the gods"
* It is a curious idea -- yet one not very far from the truth, perhaps -- that speculation of Mackey, the self-made Adept of Norwich, found in his "Mythological Astronomy." He says that the Kabiri named Axieros and Axiokersa derived their names (a) from Kab or Cab, a measure, and from Urim, the heavens: the Kabirim being thus "a measure of the heavens"; and (b) that their distinctive names, implying the principle of generation, referred to the sexes. For, "the word sex was formerly understood by aix; which has now settled . . . . into sex." And he refers to "Encyclopaedia Londinus" at the word "aspiration." Now if we give the aspirated sound to Axieros, it would be Saxieros; and the other pole would be Saxiokersa. The two poles would thus become the generators of the other powers of nature -- they would be the parents: therefore the most powerful gods.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 363 THE POLES, THE "HEAVENLY MEASURE."
and the "merry God of the wine" were also made to personify the two terrestrial Poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In astronomy, the poles are indeed the "heavenly measure" (vide note supra); and so are the Kabiri Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri-
Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the invention of fire* and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias shows that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus. (I. ix. p. 751.)
But the fact that, astronomically, the Titans-Kabirim were also the generators and regulators of the seasons, and cosmically the great Volcanic Energies, the gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works, does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason. They are pre-eminently in every theogony -- especially in the Hindu -- the sacred divine fires, 3, 7, or 49, according as the allegory demands it. Their very names prove it, as they are the Agni-putra (Sons of the Fire) in India, and the genii of the fire under numerous names in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name Kabeiron meaning "the powerful through fire," from the Greek word [[kaio]] "to burn." The Semitic Kabirim, "the powerful, the mighty, and the great," answering to the Greek [[megaloi dunatoi]], are later epithets. They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phoenicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with fire; their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to Chthonian divinities. Therefore Christianity has made of them infernal gods.
They are truly "the great, beneficent and powerful Gods," as Cassius Hermone calls them (See Macrob. Sat. I., iii., c. 4, p . 376). At Thebes, Kore and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary (Pausan. IX. 22; 5), and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter their holy precincts (Herodotus I. ii., c. 37). But we must not lose sight, at the same time, of the fact that the title of Kabiri was a generic one; that the Kabiri (the mighty gods as well as mortals), were of both sexes, as also terrestrial, celestial and kosmic. That, while in their later capacity of the Rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon (as it is now
* The word "guebra" comes from Kabiri, gabiri, and means Persian ancient fire-worshippers, or Parsis. Kabiri became gabiri and then remained as an appellation of the Zoroastrians in Persia. (See Hyde's "De Religio Persarum, " cap. 29.)
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regarded) was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the rulers of mankind. When incarnated as Kings of the "divine Dynasties," they gave the first impulse to civilizations, and directed the mind with which they had endued men to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as
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such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To them -- the Kabiri or Titans -- is ascribed the invention of letters (the Devanagari, or the alphabet and language of the gods), of laws and legislature; of architecture, as of the various modes of magic, so-called; and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those demi-gods and heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers -- too zealous for plain truth --would force posterity to see only pagan copies of one and sole prototype, named Noah -- are all generic names.
It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed, by producing corn or wheat, the great boon of agriculture. What Isis-Osiris, the once living Kabiria, has done in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class.
That the Serpents were ever the emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by the caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the god of wisdom, with Hermes, and so on. The two serpents, entwined around the rod, are phallic symbols of Jupiter and other gods who transformed themselves into snakes for purposes of seducing goddesses -- but only in the unclean fancies of profane symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the adept, and of his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury in his psychopompic character, conducting and guiding with the caduceus the souls of the dead to Hades and even raising the dead to life with it, is simply a very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret Wisdom: the black and the white magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding the Soul after death, and its power to call to life that which is dead -- a very deep metaphor if one thinks over its meaning. Every people of antiquity reverenced this symbol, with the exception of Christians, who chose to forget the brazen Serpent of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and prudence of the Serpent by Jesus himself, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves." The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate successors of the "Serpents" or Initiates, who ruled the early races of the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor's throne is the "Dragon's Seat," and his dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the
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Dragon. The aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the "Dragon" is a human, albeit divine, Being. Speaking of the "Yellow Dragon," the chief of the others, the Twan-ying-
t'u, says: "His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable . . . he does not go in company and does not live in herds (he is an ascetic). He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree (Karma); at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains (invisible).". . . And Kon-fu-tyu is made to say by Lu-lan, "The Dragon feeds in the pure water of Wisdom and sports in the clear waters of Life."
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OUR DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan isle are not the only record that is left of the deluge. China has also her
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tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma-li-ga-si-ma, and which Kaempfer and Faber spell "Maurigosima," for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kaempfer, in his "Japan " (Appendix, p. 13), gives the tradition: The island, owing to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiru-un, the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the divine dynasties of Kings as much as those of any other nations.
At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even multigeneric evolution -- spiritual, psychic, intellectual and physical -- of human beings, just as given in the present work. A few of these claims have now to be considered.
Our races -- they all show -- have sprung from divine races, by whatever name they are called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese Chim-nang and Tchan-gy -- their "divine man" and demi-gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul-lil -- the creative god and the "Gods of the ghost-world"; with the Egyptian Isis-Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew Elohim, or again with Manco Capac and his Peruvian progeny -- the story varies nowhere. Every nation has Amshaspends* (six exoterically), ten and seven Chaldean Anedots,
* The Amshaspends are six -- if Ormazd, their chief and Logos, is excluded. But in the secret doctrine he is the seventh and highest, just as Phtah is the seventh Kabir among the Kabiri.
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ten and seven Sephiroth, etc., etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyan-Chohans of the Esoteric doctrine, or the "Builders" of the Stanzas (Book I.). From Manu, Thot-Hermes, Oannes-
Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato and Panadores, all tell us of seven divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven primitive and dual gods who descend from their celestial abode* and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as "gods" and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as "divine-Kings and Rulers." But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Bosuage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that science flourished in their country only since Isis-Osiris, whom they continue to adore as gods, "though they had become Princes in human form." And he adds of Osiris-Isis (the divine androgyne: -- "It is said that this Prince (Isis-Osiris) built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry."
When Abul-Feda says in his "Historia Anteislamitica " (Fleisher, p. 16) that the Sabean language was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch) -- he means by "Sabean language" astronomy. In the "Melelwa Nohil" (MS. 47 in Nic. Cat.) Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodaemon. And in another account (See Col. Vyse's 2nd Vol. of the "Pyramids of Ghizeh," p. 364, MS. 785, Uri's Cat.) Agathodaemon is mentioned as a "King of Egypt. " Celepas Geraldinus gives curious traditions about Henoch. He calls
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him the "divine giant." In the "Book of the various names of the Nile," the same author (the historian Ahmed-Ben-Yusouf Eltiphas) tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth (become later the Egyptian Typhon, Set), had been one of the seven angels (or Patriarchs in the Bible): then he became a mortal and Adam's son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris) "the author of thirty books, was Sabaean by origin" (i.e., belonging to the Saba, "a Host"); "having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed 140 cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King." Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes -- or rather one, who appeared -- as some Manus and Rishis did -- in several different characters. In the Burham-i-Kati he is mentioned as "Hormig," a name of the planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednes-
* In the Purana it is identified with Vishnu's or Brahma's Sveta Dwipa of Mount Meru.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 367 HERMES IN ASTRONOMY AND ELSEWHERE.
day was sacred both to Hermes and Thot. The Hermes of Oriental tradition, worshipped at Phineata and said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, civilized it under the name of Thoth. But under whichever of these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the sciences from latent to active potency, i.e., with having been the first to teach magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna Graecia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.
Not only Herodotus -- the "father of History" -- tells us of the marvellous dynasties of gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the dynasties of demi-gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole series of classics support him; Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., etc., repeat the same, and never vary the order given.
"It is, indeed," as Creuzer shows: --
"From the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres." "In the system of the ancient priests (Hierophants and Adepts) all things without exception, gods, the genii, manes (souls), the whole world, are conjointly developed in Space and duration. The pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of Spirits. . . . "*
There were more efforts made by the modern historians (French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly) to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never be more unwilling than was Eratosthenes 260 years B.C. to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to recognise its truth. For this, the great astronomer is treated with great contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho became with them "a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying priests of Heliopolis" (Freret). "All those historians and priests," justly remarks the demonologist, de Mirville, "so veracious when repeating stories of human kings and men, suddenly become extremely suspicious no sooner do
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they go back to their gods." . . . But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (Manetho's above all), and that of Ptolemy. In the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of all, in the words of the Egyptologist, de Rouge: --
". . . Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the whole truth. . . . It was the remains of a list of dynasties embracing the furthest mythoic times, or the REIGN OF THE GODS AND HEROES. . . . At the very outset of this curious
papyrus we have to arrive at the conviction that so far back already as the period of Ramses, those mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of Egypt, the gods Seb, Osiris, Horus, Thoth-Hermes, and the goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign of each of these." (Ann. de Philologie Chretienne, Vol. XXXII., p. 442).
The synchronistic tables of Manetho, besides the fact that they were disfigured by Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology of the divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and was kept secret from the profane multitudes.
Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before Europe did; nevertheless it appeared later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. That the whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea, was known firstly through Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and all the Greeks; and, secondly, through geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island; and the Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their gods from the North-east.
When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, which records the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between the Lion and Libra, has found its OEdipus, who understood the riddle of these signs, and justified the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus that: -- (a) The poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided; and (b) That even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic, as the Initiates taught.
Bailly had not sufficient words at his command to express his surprise at the sameness of all such traditions about the divine races. "What are finally," he exclaims, "all those reigns of Indian Devas and Persian Peris? . . . . Or, those reigns and dynasties of the Chinese legends; those Tien-hoang or the
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Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti-hoang, the Kings on Earth, and the Gin-hoang the King's men, a distinction which is in perfect accord with that other one made by the Greeks and the Egyptians, in enumerating their dynasties of Gods, of demi-gods, and of mortals."*
"Now," says Panadoras, "it is before that time (Menes), that the reign of the seven gods who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those benefactors of humanity descended on Earth and taught
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 369 WHAT THE PRIESTS TOLD HERODOTUS.
men to calculate the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic."
Nearly five hundred years before the actual era, Herodotus was shown by the priests of Egypt the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs-piromis (the archi-prophets or Maha-Chohans of the temples), born one from the other (without the intervention of woman) who had reigned before Menes, their first human King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and forty-
five in number, each of which had his name, his history and his annals. And they assured Herodotus* (unless the most truthful of historians, the "Father of History," is now accused of fibbing, just in this instance) that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the three dynasties that preceded the human -- namely, the DYNASTIES OF THE GODS, that of demi-gods, and of the Heroes, or giants. These "three dynasties" are the three Races.**
Translated into the language of the Esoteric doctrine, these three dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of Kimpurushas, and of Danavas and Daityas -- otherwise gods, celestial spirits, and giants or Titans. "Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-Varsha!" exclaim the incarnated gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bharata is India, but in this case it symbolized the chosen land in those days, and was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu-
dwipa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence ; the land of initiation and of divine knowledge.
Can one fail to recognise in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, being almost unacquainted with the Aryan Hindu philosophies, little known in his day, he wrote: --
"We modern Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the Spirits of the Sun, Moon, etc. But we repeat again, the natural good sense and the upright
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** In Vishnu-Purana, Book II., chap. 3, 4, et seq., may be found many corroborations of the same, if one reads carefully. The reigns of gods, lower gods, and men are all enumerated in the descriptions of the seven Islands, seven seas, seven mountains, etc., etc., ruled by Kings. Each king is said invariably to have seven sons, an allusion to the seven sub-races. One instance will do. The King of Kusa dwipa had seven sons (follow names) . . . "after whom the seven portions (Varsha) of the island were called. There reside mankind along with Daityas and Danavas, as well as with spirits of Heaven (Gandharvas, Yakshas, Kimpurushas, etc.) and gods." (Chapter iv.) There is but one exception in the case of King Priyavrata, the son of the first Manu, Swayambhuva -- who had ten sons. But of these, three -- Medha, Agnibahu, and Putra -- became ascetics, and refused their portions. Thus Priyavrata divided the earth again into seven continents.
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judgment of the ancient peoples, quite foreign to our entirely material ideas upon celestial mechanics and physical sciences . . . could not see in the stars and planets only that which we see: namely, simple masses of light, or opaque bodies moving in circuits in sidereal space, merely according to the laws of attraction or repulsion; but they saw in them living bodies, animated by spirits as they saw the same in every kingdom of nature. . . . This doctrine of spirits, so consistent and conformable to nature, from which it was derived, formed a grand and unique conception, wherein the physical, the moral, and the political aspects were all blended together . . . " ("Egypte, " pp. 450 to 455.)
It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct conclusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the universe -- of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without such a psychological link, and the feeling of its presence, no science can ever progress, and the realm of knowledge must be limited to the analysis of physical matter only.
Occultists believe in "spirits," because they feel (and some see) themselves surrounded on every side by them.* Materialists do not. They live on this earth, just as, in the world of insects and even of fishes, some creatures live surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without seeing, or so much as sensing them.**
Plato is the first sage among the classics who speaks at length of the
* As a general rule, now that the very nature of the inner man has become as blind as his physical nature, man is situated on this globe as the Amphioxus is in the Ocean. Surrounded by shoals and millions of various other fishes and creatures that see it, the Amphioxus species --having neither brain nor any of the senses possessed by the other classes -- sees them not. Who knows whether, on the Darwinian theory, these "Branchiostoma" are not the direct ancestors of our Materialists.
** The Occultists have been accused of worshipping gods or devils. We deny this. Among the
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numberless hosts of spirits -- men that were, and those who will be men -- there are those immeasurably superior to the human race, higher and holier than the highest Saint on Earth, and wiser than any mortal without exception. And there are those again who are no better than we are, as some are far worse and inferior to the lowest savage. It is the latter classes that command the readiest communication with our earth, who perceive and sense us, as the clairvoyants perceive and sense them. The close proximity of our respective abodes and planes of perception are in favour of such inter-
communication unfortunately, as they are ever ready to interfere with our affairs for weal or woe. If we are asked how it is that none but sensitive hysterical natures, neuro- and psycho-pathic persons see and occasionally talk with "Spirits," we answer the question by several other queries. We ask: "Do you know the nature of hallucination, and can you define its psychic process? How can you tell that all such visions are due merely to physical hallucinations? What makes you feel so sure that mental and nervous diseases, while drawing a veil over our normal senses (so-called) do not reveal at the same time vistas unknown to the healthy man, by throwing open doors usually closed against your scientific perceptions (?): or that a psycho-spiritual faculty does not forthwith replace the loss, or the temporary atrophy, of a purely physical sense? It is disease, or the exuberance of nervous fluid which produces mediumship and visions --hallucinations, as you call them. But what does Science know even of mediumship?" Truly were the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 371 A UNIVERSAL CORROBORATION.
divine Dynasties, and locates them on a vast continent which he calls Atlantis. Bailly was not the first nor last to believe the same, and he had been preceded and anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher. This learned Jesuit writes in "OEdipus AEgyptiacus" (Vol. I., p. 70): --
"I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this (dynasties and the Atlantis) as pure fables (meras nugas) to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all those legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth. . . . ."
As de Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his Meropis, made the priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as the priests of Sais did when they revealed to Solon the history and fate of Atlantis. According to Theopompus, it was a unique continent of an indefinite size, and containing two countries inhabited by two races -- a fighting, warrior race, and a pious, meditative race,* which Theopompus symbolizes by two cities.** The pious "city" was continually visited by the gods; the belligerent "city" was inhabited by various beings invulnerable to iron, liable to be mortally wounded only by stone and wood."*** De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of Theopompus ("Peuple Primitif, " vol. iii. 157) and even sees a fraud (supercherie) in the assertion of the Saitic priests. This was denounced by the "Demonologists" as illogical. In the words of De Mirville: -- "A supercherie which was based on a belief, the product of faith of the whole antiquity; a supposition which yet gave its name to a whole mountain chain (the Atlas); which specified with the greatest precision a topographical region (by placing some of its lands at a small distance from Cadiz and the strait of Calpetus), which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, the great trans-oceanic land situated beyond that Atlantis and which "is reached" it said -- "by the islands not of the blessed, but of the good spirits [[eudaimonia]] (our 'Iles Fortunees') -- such a supposition can never be an universal chimera." (A word on "Atlantis, " p. 29.)
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] modern Charcots to pay attention to the delirium of their patients from a more psychic standpoint, Science, and physiology especially, might be more benefited than they are now, and truth have a wider field of fact in its knowledge.
* These were the early Aryans and the bulk of the Fourth Root Races -- the former pious and meditative (yoga -contemplation), the latter -- a fighting race of sorcerers, who were rapidly degenerating owing to their uncontrolled passions.
** The Northern and Southern Divisions of Lemuria-Atlantis. The Hyperborean and the Equatorial lands of the two continents. (See Sections about Lemuria and Atlantis in History.)
*** This is Occult and refers to the property of iron which, attracted by magnetic elements, is repelled by others, which are made, by an occult process, as impervious to it as water to a blow.
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about the third great continent which perished some 850,000 years ago.* A continent inhabited by two distinct races; distinct physically and especially morally; both deeply versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets of nature; mutually antagonistic in their struggle, during the course and progress of their double evolution. Whence even the Chinese teachings upon the subject, if it is but a fiction? Have they not recorded the existence once upon a time of a holy island beyond the sun (Tcheou), and beyond which were situated the lands of the immortal men? (See de Rougemont, ibid.) Do they not still believe that the remnants of those immortal men -- who survived when the holy island had become black with sin and perished -- have found refuge in the great desert of Gobi, where they still reside invisible to all, and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits?
"If one has to lend ear to traditions," writes the very unbelieving Boulanger, ("Regne des Dieux, " Introduction) . . . "the latter place before the reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and demi-gods; and still earlier and beyond they place the marvellous reign of the gods and all the fables of the golden age. . . . One feels surprised that annals so interesting should have been rejected by almost all our historians. And yet the ideas communicated by them were once universally admitted and revered by all the peoples; not a few revere them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such considerations seem to necessitate a less hurried judgment. . . . The ancients, from whom we hold these traditions, which we accept no longer because we do not understand them now, must have had motives for believing in them furnished by their greater proximity to the first ages, and which the distance that separates us from them refuses to us . . . . Plato in his fourth book of Laws, says that, long before the construction of the first cities, Saturn had established on earth a certain form of government under which man was very happy. As it is the golden age he refers to, or to that reign of gods so celebrated in
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ancient fables . . . . let us see the ideas he had of that happy age, and what was the occasion he had to introduce this fable into a treatise on politics. According to Plato, in order to obtain clear and precise ideas on royalty, its origin and power, one has to turn back to the first principles of history and tradition. Great changes, he says, have occurred in days of old, in heaven and on earth, and the present state of things is one of the results (Karma). Our traditions tell us of many marvels, of changes that have taken place in the course of the Sun, of Saturn's reign, and of a thousand other matters that remained scattered about in human memory; but one never hears anything of the EVIL which has
* The first continent, or island, if so preferred, "the cap of the North Pole," has never perished; nor will it to the end of the Seven Races.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 373 WHEAT BROUGHT DOWN BY THE GODS.
produced those revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them. Yet . . . . that Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able to treat of royalty and the origin of power. . . ."
That evil, Plato seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the natures of the rulers and the ruled, for he says that long before man built his cities, in the golden age, there was naught but happiness on earth, for there were no needs. Why? Because Saturn, knowing that man could not rule man, without injustice filling forthwith the universe through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal to obtain power over his fellow creatures. To do this the god used the same means we use ourselves with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or a ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd, i.e., a being of a species quite different from their own and of a superior nature. It is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and placed to rule over it no mortal King or prince but -- "Spirits and genii [[daimones]] of a divine nature more excellent than that of man."
It was god, the Logos (the synthesis of the Host) who thus presiding over the genii, became the first shepherd and leader of men.* When the world had ceased to be so governed and the gods retired, "ferocious beasts devoured a portion of mankind." "Left to their own resources and industry, inventors then appeared among them successively and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them . . . ."("De Legibus " 1, iv.; in Crit. and in Politic).
And mankind was right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of nature, the first and chief property of matter that was revealed to man.
"Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the 'Lords of Wisdom' for the benefit of those they ruled -- from other lokas (spheres). . . " say the Commentaries. Now: "The earliest inventions (?) of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made. . . The first use of fire, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses (?) -- these are all discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare. They are all unknown to history -- all lost in the light of an EFFULGENT DAWN." ("Unity
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of Nature," Argyll.)
This will be doubted and denied in our proud generation. But if it is asserted that there are no grains and fruits unknown to earth, then we may remind the reader that wheat has never been found in the wild state: it is not a product of the earth. All the other cereals have been traced to their primogenital forms in various species of wild grasses, but wheat has
* The Secret Doctrine explains and expounds that which Plato says, for it teaches that those "inventors" were gods and demi-gods (Devas and Rishis) who had become -- some deliberately, some forced to by Karma -- incarnated in man.
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hitherto defied the efforts of botanists to trace it to its origin. And let us bear in mind, in this connection, how sacred was that cereal with the Egyptian priests; wheat being placed even with their mummies, and found thousands of years later in their coffins. Remember: -- "The servants of Horus glean the wheat in the field of Aanroo. . . . wheat seven cubits high." ("Book of the Dead, " chap. xcix., 33; and clvi., 4.)* The reader is referred to Stanza VII., Verse 3, Book I., wherein this verse is explained in another of its meanings, and also to the "Book of the Dead, " chap. cix., v. 4 and 5.
"I am the Queen of these regions," says the Egyptian Isis; "I was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. . . . I am she who rises in the constellation of the dog . . . (Dog-star) . . . . Rejoice, O Egypt! thou who wert my nurse." (Book I., chap. XIV.**
Sirius was called the dog-star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha, called the great instructor of mankind, before other Buddhas.
The book of the Chinese Y-King, attributes the discovery of agriculture to "the instruction given to men by celestial genii."
"Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. . . . They are all blind*** since they remain ignorant how much the world is full of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places" (Zohar, Part I., col. 177.)
The "Sons of God" have existed and do exist. From the Hindu Brahmaputras and Manasaputras (Sons of Brahma and Mind-born sons) down to the B'ne-aleim of the Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and
* This is a direct reference to the esoteric division of man's principles symbolised by the divine wheat. The legend which inscribes the third Registrar of the papyrus (Chap. cx. of the "Book of the Dead ")
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states: "This is the region of the Manes (disembodied men) seven cubits high -- to wit: those just translated and supposed to be still sevenfold with all their principles, even the body represented astrally in the Kama-loka or Hades, before their separation . . . . . " and, there is wheat three cubits high for mummies in a state of perfection" (i.e., those already separated, whose three higher principles are in Devachan "who are permitted to glean it." This region (Devachan) is called "the land of the re-
birth of gods," and shown to be inhabited by Scheo, Tefnant, and Seb. The "region for the manes seven cubits high," (for the yet imperfect mummies), and the region for those "in a state of perfection" who "glean wheat three cubits high," is as clear as possible. The Egyptians had the same esoteric philosophy which is now taught by the cis-Himalayan adepts, who, when buried, have corn and wheat placed over them.
** There are Egyptologists who have tried to identify Osiris with Menes, which is quite erroneous. Bunsen assigns to Menes an antiquity of 5867 years B.C., and is denounced for it by Christians. But "Isis-Osiris" reigned in Egypt before the Dendera Zodiac was painted on the ceiling of that temple, and that is over 75,000 years ago!
*** In the text, "corked up" or "screwed up."
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universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value is independent criticism so called, or "internal evidence" (based usually on the respective hobbies of the critics), in the face of the universal testimony, which never varied throughout the historical cycles? Read esoterically the sixth chapter of Genesis, which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, only changing slightly its form, and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the Zohar. "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that when 'the Sons of God' (b'ne-aleim) "came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown" (or giants).*
What does this sentence "and also after that" signify unless it means when explained: "There were giants in the earth BEFORE, i.e., before the sinless sons of the Third Race; and also after that when other sons of God, lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on earth (as Daksha did, when he saw that his Manasaputras would not people the earth)"? And then comes a long break in this chapter vi. of Genesis, between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the "mighty men" . . . . men of renown, among whom is placed Nimrod the "mighty hunter before the Lord," that "god saw that the wickedness of man was great," nor in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.
And if we are taken to task by theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse was ever a dilemma, not alone for the men of science and Biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Peronne puts it: -- "Either they (the B'ne-aleim) were good angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad
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(angels) and in this case could not be called b'ne-aleim, the "sons of God." (Praelectiones theol. ch. ii.) This Biblical riddle -- "the real sense of which no author has ever understood," as candidly confessed by Fourmont** -- can only be explained by the Occult doctrine, through the Zohar to the Western, and the Book of Dzyan to the Eastern. What the former says we have seen; what the Zohar tells us is this: B'ne-aleim was a name common to the Malachim (the good Messengers) and to the Ischin ("the lower angels") (Rabbi Parcha).
We may add for the benefit of the demonologists that their Satan,
** Reflections critiques sur l'origine des anciens peuples.
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"the adversary," is included in Job among the sons of God or b'ne-aleim who visit their father." (Chapter i.) But of this later on.
Now the Zohar says that the Ischin, the beautiful B'ne-aleim, were not guilty, but mixed themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so. (Book of Ruth and Schadash ; fol. 63, col. 3; Amsterdam edition). Elsewhere the same volume shows these b'ne-aleim belonging to the tenth sub-
division of the "Thrones" (Zohar, part iii., col. 113. But see also 1st vol. 184). It also explains that the Ischin, "men-spirits," viri spirituales, now that men can see them no longer, help magicians to produce, through their science, homunculi which are not small men but "men smaller (in the sense of inferiority) than men." Both show themselves under the form that the Ischin had then, i.e., gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.
But Azazel, whom the Church dogma will associate with Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a mystery, as explained elsewhere, and it is so expressed in Maimonides, "In More Nevochim " (chapter xxvi., p. 8). "There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel." And so there is, as Lanci, a librarian to the Vatican and one who ought to know, says -- we have quoted him before -- that "this venerable divine name (nome divino e venerabile) has become through the pen of Biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a mountain, and a he-goat" (Sagra Scrittura). Therefore it seems foolish to derive the name as Spencer does, from Ajal (separated) and El (god), hence "one separated from God," the DEVIL. In the Zohar, Azazel is rather the Sacrificial victim than the "formal adversary of Jehovah," as Spencer would have it (II., pp. 14, 29).
The amount of malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on that "Host" by various fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his "host" are simply the Hebrew "Prometheus," and ought to be viewed from the same standpoint. The Zohar shows the Ischin chained on the mountain in the desert, allegorically; thus simply alluding to those "spirits" as being chained to the earth during the cycle of incarnation. Azazel (or Azaziel) is one of the chiefs of the "transgressing" angels in Enoch, who
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descending upon Ardis, the top of Mount Armon, bound themselves by swearing loyalty to each other. It is said that Azaziel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, to fabricate mirrors (?) to make one see what is behind him (viz., "magic mirrors"). Amazarak taught all the sorcerers and dividers of roots; Amers taught the solution of magic; Barkayal, astrology; Akibeel, the meaning of portents and signs; Tamial, astronomy; and Asaradel taught the motion of the moon. "These seven were the first instructors of the Fourth man" (i.e., of the Fourth Race). But why should allegory be always understood as meaning all that its dead-letter expresses?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 377 THE FALLACIES OF THE TWO CHURCHES.
It is the symbolical representation of the great struggle between divine wisdom, nous, and its earthly reflection, Psuche, or between Spirit and Soul, in Heaven and on Earth. In Heaven --because the divine MONAD had voluntarily exiled itself therefrom, to descend, for incarnating purposes, to a lower plane and thus transform the animal of clay into an immortal god. For, as Eliphas Levi tells us, "the angels aspire to become men; for the perfect man, the man-god, is above even angels." On Earth -- because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was strangled in the coils of matter.
Strange to say, the Occult teaching reverses the characters; it is the anthropomorphous archangel with the Christians, and the man-like God with the Hindus, which represent matter in this case; and the Dragon, or Serpent, Spirit. Occult symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery; theological symbolics conceal it still more. For the former explains many a saying in the Bible and even in the New Testament which have hitherto remained incomprehensible; while the latter, owing to its dogma of Satan and his rebellion, has belittled the character and nature of its would-be infinite, absolutely perfect god, and created the greatest evil and curse on earth -- belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is opened with the key to its metaphysical symbolism now restored; while that of theological interpretation shows the gods and the archangels standing as symbols for the dead letter or dogmatic religions, and as arrayed against the pure truths of Spirit, naked and unadorned with fancy.
Many were the hints thrown out in this direction in "Isis Unveiled," and a still greater number of references to this mystery may be found scattered throughout these volumes. To make the point clear once for all: that which the clergy of every dogmatic religion -- pre-eminently the Christian -- points out as Satan, the enemy of God, is in reality, the highest divine Spirit -- (occult Wisdom on Earth) -- in its naturally antagonistic character to every worldly, evanescent illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions included. Thus, the Latin Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who do not choose to be its slaves; the Church which calls itself the bride of Christ, and the trustee at the same time of Peter, to whom the rebuke of the Master "get thee behind me Satan" was justly addressed; and again the Protestant Church which, while calling itself Christian, paradoxically replaces the New Dispensation by the old "Law of Moses" which Christ openly repudiated: both these Churches are fighting against divine Truth, when repudiating and slandering the Dragon of esoteric (because divine) Wisdom. Whenever anathematizing the Gnostic Solar Chnouphis -- the Agathodaemon -- Christos, or the theosophical Serpent of Eternity, or even the Serpent of Genesis -- they
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are moved by the same Spirit of dark fanaticism that moved the Pharisees to curse Jesus by saying to him "Say we not well thou hast a devil?"
Read the account about Indra (Vayu) in the Rig-Veda, the occult volume par excellence of Aryanism, and then compare it with the same in the Puranas -- the exoteric version thereof, and the purposely garbled account of the true Wisdom religion. In the Rig Veda Indra is the highest and greatest of the Gods, and his Soma-drinking is allegorical of his highly spiritual nature. In the Puranas Indra becomes a profligate, and a regular drunkard on the Soma juice, in the terrestrial way. He is the conqueror of all the "enemies of the gods" -- the Daityas, Nagas (Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent-gods, and of Vritri, the Cosmic Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindu Pantheon -- the chief of the militant Host. Turning to the Bible, we find Satan, one of the "Sons of God" (Job. i. 6), becoming in exoteric interpretation the Devil, and the Dragon in its infernal, evil sense. But in the Kabala ("Book of Numbers ") Samael, who is Satan, is shown to be identical with St. Michael, the slayer of the Dragon. How is this? For it is said that Tselem (the image) reflects alike Michael and Samael who are one. Both proceed, it is taught, from Ruach (Spirit), Neschamah (Soul) and Nephesch (life). In the "Chaldean Book of Numbers" Samael is the concealed (occult) Wisdom, and Michael the higher terrestrial Wisdom, both emanating from the same source but diverging after their issue from the mundane soul, which on Earth is Mahat (intellectual understanding, or Manas (the seat of Intellect). They diverge, because one (Michael) is influenced by Neschamah, while the other (Samael) remains uninfluenced. This tenet was perverted by the dogmatic spirit of the Church; which, loathing independent Spirit, uninfluenced by the external form (hence by dogma), forthwith made of Samael-
Satan (the most wise and spiritual spirit of all) -- the adversary of its anthropomorphic God and sensual physical man, the DEVIL!
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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THE ORIGIN OF THE SATANIC MYTH.
Let us then fathom this creation of the Patristic fancy still deeper, and find its prototype with the Pagans. The origin of the new Satanic myth is easy to trace. The tradition of the Dragon and the Sun is echoed in every part of the world, both in its civilized and semi-savage regions. It took rise in the whisperings about secret initiations among the profane, and was established universally through the once universal heliolatrous religion. There was a time when the four parts of the world were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the Dragon;
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 379 THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON.
but the cult is now preserved mostly in China and the Buddhist countries, "Bel and the Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the priest of the Ophite religion as uniformly assuming the name of his God" ("Archaeology, " Vol. xxv., p. 220, London). In the religions of the past, it is in Egypt we have to seek for its Western origin. The Ophites adopted their rites from Hermes Trismegistus, and heliolatrous worship crossed over with its Sun-gods into the land of the Pharaohs from India. In the gods of Stonehenge we recognise the divinities of Delphi and Babylon, and in those of the latter the devas of the Vedic nations. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Krishna and Kaliya, Osiris and Typhon are all one under many names -- the latest of which are Michael and the Red Dragon, and St. George and his Dragon. As Michael is "one as God," or his "Double," for terrestrial purposes, and is one of the Elohim, the fighting angel, he is thus simply a permutation of Jehovah. Whatever the Cosmic or astronomical event that first gave rise to the allegory of the "War of Heaven," its earthly origin has to be sought in the temples of Initiation and archaic crypts. The following are the proofs: --
We find (a) the priests assuming the name of the gods they served; (b) the "Dragons" held throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality and Wisdom, of secret Knowledge and of Eternity; and (c) the hierophants of Egypt, of Babylon, and India, styling themselves generally the "Sons of the Dragon" and "Serpents"; thus the teachings of the Secret Doctrine are thereby corroborated.
There were numerous catacombs in Egypt and Chaldea, some of them of a very vast extent. The most renowned of them were the subterranean crypts of Thebes and Memphis. The former, beginning on the western side of the Nile, extended towards the Lybian desert, and were known as the Serpent's catacombs, or passages. It was there that were performed the sacred mysteries of the kuklos anagkes, the "Unavoidable Cycle," more generally known as "the circle of necessity"; the inexorable doom
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imposed upon every soul after the bodily death, and when it has been judged in the Amenthian region.
In de Bourbourg's book, Votan, the Mexican demi-god, in narrating his expedition, describes a subterranean passage which ran underground, and terminated at the root of the heavens, adding that this passage was a snake's hole, "un agujero de colubra"; and that he was admitted to it because he was himself "a son of the snakes," or a serpent. ("Die Phoinizier," 70.)
This is, indeed, very suggestive; for his description of the snake's hole is that of the ancient Egyptian crypt, as above mentioned. The hierophants, moreover, of Egypt, as of Babylon, generally styled them-
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selves the "Sons of the Serpent-god," or "Sons of the Dragon," during the mysteries.
"The Assyrian priest bore always the name of his god," says Movers. The Druids of the Celto-
Britannic regions also called themselves snakes. "I am a Serpent, I am a Druid," they exclaimed. The Egyptian Karnak is twin brother to the Carnac of Bretagne, the latter Carnac meaning the serpent's mount. The Dracontia once covered the surface of the globe, and these temples were sacred to the Dragon, only because it was the symbol of the sun, which, in its turn, was the symbol of the highest god -- the Phoenician Elon or Elion, whom Abraham recognised as El Elion.* Besides the surname of serpents, they were called the "builders," the "architects"; for the immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was such that even now the pulverised remains of them "frighten the mathematical calculations of our modern engineers," says Taliesin.**
De Bourbourg hints that the chiefs of the name of Votan, the Quetzo-Cohuatl, or Serpent deity of the Mexicans, are the descendants of Ham and Canaan. "I am Hivim," they say. "Being a Hivim, I am of the great race of the Dragon (snake). I am a snake myself, for I am a Hivim." ("Cartas," 51; "Isis Unveiled," Vol. I., 553, et seq.)
Furthermore, the "War in Heaven" is shown, in one of its significations, to have meant and referred to those terrible struggles in store for the candidate for adeptship, between himself and his (by magic) personified human passions, when the inner enlightened man had to either slay them or fail. In the former case he became the "Dragon-Slayer," as having happily overcome all the temptations; and a "Son of the Serpent" and a Serpent himself, having cast off his old skin and being born in a new body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality in Eternity. (See Part II. on the Satanic Myth.)
Seth, the reputed forefather of Israel, is only a Jewish travesty of Hermes, the God of Wisdom, called also Thoth, Tat, Seth, Set, and Satan. He is also Typhon -- the same as Apophis, the Dragon slain by Horus; for Typhon was also called Set. He is simply the dark side of Osiris, his brother, as Angra Mainyu is the black shadow of Ahura-mazda. Terrestrially, all these allegories were connected with the trials of adeptship and initiation. Astronomically, they referred to the Solar and Lunar eclipses, the mythical explanations of which we find to this day in India and Ceylon, where any one can study the allegorical narratives and traditions which have remained unchanged for many thousands of years.
* See Sanchoniathon in "Eusebius," Pr. Ev. 36; Genesis xiv.
** "Society of Antiquaries of London," vol. xxv. p. 220.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 381 THE THEFT OF RAHU.
Rahu, mythologically is a Daitya -- a giant, a Demi-god, the lower part of whose body ended in a Dragon or Serpent's tail. During the churning of the Ocean, when the gods produced amrita -- the water of Immortality -- he stole some of it, and drinking, became immortal. The Sun and Moon, who had detected him in his theft, denounced him to Vishnu, who placed him in the stellar spheres, the upper portion of his body representing the Dragon's head and the lower (Ketu) the Dragon's tail; the two being the ascending and descending nodes. Since then, Rahu wreaks his vengeance on the Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them. But this fable had another mystic meaning, since Rahu, the Dragon's head, played a prominent part in the mysteries of the Sun's ( Vikarttana's) initiation, when the candidate and the Dragon had a supreme fight.
The caves of the Rishis, the abodes of Tiresias and the Greek seers, were modelled on those of the Nagas -- the Hindu King-Snakes, who dwelled in cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Sesha, the thousand-headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Python, the dragon serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of the myth. In India we find the fact mentioned in the earliest Puranas. The children of Surasa are the "mighty Dragons." The Vayu Purana replacing "Surasa" (of Vishnu Purana) by Danayas or Danavas -- the descendants of Danu by the sage Kasyapa -- and those Danavas being the giants (or Titans) who warred against the gods, they are thus shown identical with the "Dragons" and "Serpents" of Wisdom.
By simply comparing the Sun-gods of every country, one may find their allegories agreeing perfectly with one another; and the more the allegorical symbol is occult the more its corresponding symbol in other systems agrees with it. Thus, if from three systems widely differing from each other in appearance -- the old Aryan, the ancient Greek, and the modern Christian schemes -- we select several Sun-gods and dragons at random, these will be found copied from each other.
Let us take Agni the fire-god, Indra the firmament, and Karttikeya from the Hindus; the Greek Apollo; and Mikael, the "Angel of the Sun," the first of the AEons, called by the Gnostics "the saviour" -- and proceed in order.
(1) Agni -- the fire-god -- is called in the Rig-Veda Vaiswanara. Now Vaisvanara is a Danava -- a giant-
demon,* whose daughters Puloma and Kalaka are the mothers of numberless Danavas (30 millions), by
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Bhagavata Purana calls him a son of Danu, but the name means also "Spirit of Humanity."
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Kasyapa,* and live in Hiranyapura, "the golden city," floating in the air. Therefore, Indra is, in a fashion, the step-son of these two as a son of Kasyapa; and Kasyapa is, in this sense, identical with Agni, the fire-god, or Sun (Kasyapa-Aditya). To this same group belongs Skanda or Karttikeya (god of War, the six-faced planet Mars astronomically), a Kumara, or virgin-youth, born of Agni** for the purpose of destroying Taraka, the Danava Demon, the grandson of Kasyapa by Hiranyaksha, his son,*** whose (Taraka's) yogi austerities were so extraordinary that they became formidable to the gods, who feared such a rival in power.**** While Indra, the bright god of the Firmament, kills Vritra (or Ahi), the Serpent-Demon -- for which feat he is called Vritra-han, "the destroyer of Vritra"; he also leads the hosts of Devas (Angels or gods) against other gods who rebel against Brahma, for which he is entitled Jishnu, "leader of the celestial Host." Karttikeya is found bearing the same titles. For killing Taraka, the Danava, he is Taraka-Jit, "Vanquisher of Taraka,"***** "Kumara Guha, " "the mysterious Virgin-youth" "Siddha-Sena" -- "the leader of the Siddhas"; and Saktidhara -- "Spear-holder."
(2.) Now take Apollo, the Grecian sun-god, and by comparing the mythical accounts given of him, see whether he does not answer both
* Kasyapa is called the Son of Brahma, and is the "Self-Born" to whom a great part of the work of creation is attributed. He is one of the seven Rishis; exoterically, the son of Marichi, the son of Brahma; while Atharva-veda says, "The Self-born Kasyapa sprang from Time"; and esoterically -- Time and Space are forms of the One incognizable Deity. As an Aditya, Indra is son of Kasyapa, as also Vaivasvata Manu, our progenitor. In the instance given in the text, he is Kasyapa-Aditya, the Sun, and the Sun-god, from whom all the "Cosmic" Demons, Dragons (nagas), Serpent, or Snake-gods, and Danavas, the giants, are born. The meaning of the allegories given above is purely astronomical and cosmical, but will serve to prove the identity of all.
** All such stories differ in the exoteric texts. In the Mahabharata, Karttikeya, "the six-faced Mars," is the son of Rudra or Siva, Self-born without a mother from the seed of Siva cast into the fire. But Karttikeya is generally called Agnibhu, "fire born."
*** Hiranyaksha is the ruler or king of the fifth region of Patala, a Snake-god.
**** The Elohim also feared the knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam, and therefore are shown as expelling him from Eden or killing him spiritually.
***** The story told is, that Taraka (called also Kalabhana), owing to his extraordinary Yoga-powers, had obtained all the divine knowledge of yoga-vidya and occult powers of the gods, who conspired against him. Here we see the "obedient" Host of Archangels or minor gods conspiring against the (future) Fallen angels, whom Enoch accuses of the great crime of disclosing to the world all "the
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secret things done in heaven." It is Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Surgal and Uriel who denounced to the Lord God those of their Brethren who were said to have pried into the divine mysteries and taught them to men: by this means they themselves escaped a like punishment. Michael was commissioned to fight the Dragon, and so was Karttikeya, and under the same circumstances. Both are "leaders of the Celestial Host," both Virgins, both "leaders of Saints," "Spear-holders" (Saktidhara), etc., etc. Karttikeya is the original of Michael and St. George, as surely as Indra is the prototype of Karttikeya.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 383 THE GODS, THE FACETS OF ONE GEM.
to Indra, Karttikeya, and even Kasyapa-Aditya, and at the same time to Michael (as the Angelic form of Jehovah) the "angel of the Sun," who is "like," and "one with, God." Later ingenious interpretations for monotheistic purposes, elevated though they be into not-to-be questioned Church dogmas, prove nothing, except the abuse of human authority and power, perhaps.
Apollo is Helios (the Sun), Phoibus-Apollo ("the light of life and of the World"*) who arises out of the golden-winged cup (the sun); hence he is the sun-god par excellence. At the moment of his birth he asks for his bow to kill Python, the Demon Dragon, who attacked his mother before his birth,** and whom he is divinely commissioned to destroy -- like Karttikeya, who is born for the purpose of killing Taraka, the too holy and wise demon. Apollo is born on a sidereal island called Asteria -- "the golden star island," the "earth which floats in the air," which is the Hindu golden Hiranyapura ; "he is called the pure, [[agnos]], Agnus Dei (the Indian Agni , as Dr. Kenealy thinks), and in the primal myth he is exempt "from all sensual love" ("Book of God," p. 88). He is, therefore, a Kumara, like Karttikeya, and as Indra was in his earlier life and biographies. Python, moreover, the "red Dragon," connects Apollo with Michael, who fights the Apocalyptic Dragon, who wants to attack the woman in child-birth (See Revelation xii.), as Python attacks Apollo's mother. Can any one fail to see the identity? Had the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who prides himself on his Greek scholarship and understanding of the spirit of Homer's allegories, ever had a real inkling of the esoteric meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey, he would have understood St. John's "Revelation, " and even the Pentateuch, better than he does. For the way to the Bible lies through Hermes, Bel, and Homer, as the way to these is through the Hindu and Chaldean religious symbols.
The repetition of this archaic tradition is found in ch. xii. of St. John's Revelations, and comes from the Babylonian legends without the smallest doubt, though the Babylonian story had its origin in the allegories of the Aryans. The fragment read by the late George Smith (See "The Chaldean account of Genesis," p. 304) is sufficient to disclose the source of the xii. chapter of the Apocalypse. Here it is as given by the eminent Assyriologist:
"Our . . . fragment refers to the creation of mankind, called Adam; as (the man) in the Bible, he is made perfect . . . but afterwards joins
* The "life and the light" of the material physical world, the delight of the senses -- not of the soul. Apollo is pre-eminently the human god, the god of emotional, pomp-loving and theatrical Church
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ritualism, with lights and music.
** See chap. xii. in Revelation where we find Apollo's mother persecuted by that Python, the Red Dragon, who is also Porphyrion, the scarlet or red Titan.
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with the dragon of the Deep, the animal of Tiamat, the Spirit of Chaos, and offends against his god, who curses him, and calls down on his head all the evils and troubles of Humanity."*
"This is followed by a war between the dragon and the powers of evil, or chaos on one side and the gods on the other."
"The gods have weapons forged for them,** and Merodach (the archangel Michael in Revelation) undertakes to lead the heavenly host against the dragons. The war, which is described with spirit, ends, of course, in the triumph of the principles of Good. . . . ."***
This war of gods with the powers of the Deep, refers also, in its last and terrestrial application, to the struggle between the Aryan adepts of the nascent Fifth Race and the Sorcerers of Atlantis, the Demons of the Deep, the Islanders surrounded with water who disappeared in the Deluge. (See the last pages of Vol. I., "Isis Unveiled, " Atlantis.)
The symbols of the dragons and "War in Heaven" have, as already stated, more than one significance; religious, astronomical and geological events being included in the one common allegory. But it had also a Cosmological meaning. In India the Dragon story is repeated in one of its forms in the battles of Indra with Vritra. In the Vedas this Ahi-Vritra is referred to as the Demon of Drought, the terrible hot Wind. Indra is shown to be constantly at war with him; and with the help of his thunder and lightning the god compels Ahi-Vritra to pour down in rain on Earth, and then slays him. Hence, Indra is called the Vritra-Han or "the slayer of Vritra," as Michael is called the Conqueror and "Slayer of the Dragon." Both these "Enemies" are then the "Old Dragon" precipitated into the depths of the Earth, in this one sense.
The Zend-Avestic Amshaspends are a Host with a leader like St. Michael over them, and seem identical with the legions of Heaven, when one reads the Vendidad. Thus in Fargard XIX., ii. 13 (42), Zarathustra is told by Ahura Mazda to "invoke the Amesha Spenta who rule over the seven Karshvares **** of the Earth"; which Karshvares in their seven
* No "god" who curses his (supposed) own work, because he has made it imperfect, can be the one infinite absolute wisdom, whether called Bel or Jehovah.
** In the Indian allegory of Tarakamaya, the war between the gods and the Asuras headed by Soma
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(the moon, the King of Plants), it is Viswa-Karma, the artificer of the gods, who forges, like Vulcan (Tubal-Kain), their weapons for them.
*** We have said elsewhere that the "woman with child" of Revelation (xii.) was Aime, the great mother, or Binah, the third Sephiroth, "whose name is Jehovah"; and the "Dragon," who seeks to devour her coming child (the Universe), is the Dragon of absolute Wisdom -- that Wisdom which, recognising the non-separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the Absolute ALL, sees in it no better than the great Illusion, Mahamaya, hence the cause of misery and suffering.
**** The "Seven Karshvares of the Earth" -- the seven spheres of our planetary chain, [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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applications refer equally to the seven spheres of our planetary chain, to the seven planets, the seven heavens, etc., according to whether the sense is applied to a physical, supra-mundane, or simply a sidereal world. In the same Fargard (ii. and iii.), in his invocation against Angra Mainyu and his Host, Zarathustra appeals to them in these words: "I invoke the seven bright Sravah with their sons and their flocks" (42 Vendid. Saddh). The "Sravah" -- a word which the Orientalists have given up as one "of unknown meaning" -- means the same Amshaspends, but in their highest occult meaning. The "Sravah" are the noumenoi of the phenomenal Amshaspends, the souls or spirits of those manifested Powers; and "their sons and their flock" refers to the planetary angels and their sidereal flock of stars and constellations. "Amshaspend" is the exoteric term used in terrestrial combinations and affairs only. Zarathustra addresses Ahura Mazda constantly as "thou, the maker of the material world." Ormazd is the father of our earth (Spenta Armaiti), and she is referred to, when personified, as "the fair daughter of Ahura Mazda" (Fargard, XIX. ii.), who is also the creator of the Tree (of occult and spiritual knowledge and wisdom) from which the mystic and mysterious Caresma is taken. But the occult name of the bright God was never pronounced outside the temple.
Samael or Satan, the seducing Serpent of Genesis, and one of the primeval angels who rebelled, is the name of the "Red Dragon." He is the Angel of Death, the Talmud saying that "the Angel of Death and Satan are the same," and, killed by Michael, he is once more killed by St. George, who also is a Dragon Slayer; but see the transformations of this. Samael is identical with the Simoom, the hot wind of the desert, or again with the Vedic demon of drought, as Vritra; "Simoom is called Atabutos " or -- Diabolos, the devil.
Typhon, or the Dragon Aphophis -- the Accuser in the "Book of the Dead" -- is worsted by Horus, who pierces his opponent's head with a spear; and Typhon is the all-destroying wind of the desert, the rebellious element that throws everything into confusion. As Set -- he is the darkness of night, the murderer of Osiris, who is the light of day and the sun. Archaeology demonstrates that Horus is identical with Anubis,* whose effigy was discovered upon an Egyptian monument, with a cuirass and a spear, like Michael and St. George. Anubis is also represented
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the seven worlds -- also mentioned in the Rig-Veda -- are fully referred to elsewhere. There are six rajamsi (worlds) above prithivi -- the earth, or "this" (idam), as opposed to that which is yonder (the six globes on the three other planes). (See Rig-Veda, I., 34; III., 56; VII., 10411, and V., 60, 6. See § on Chronology.)
* Verse 62, chap. xvii., "Book of the Dead": Anubis is Horus who melts in him who is eyeless.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
as slaying a dragon, that has the head and tail of a serpent. (See Lenoir's "Du Dragon de Metz.")
Cosmologically, then, all the Dragons and Serpents conquered by their "Slayers" are, in their origin, the turbulent confused principles in Chaos, brought to order by the Sun-gods or creative powers. In the "Book of the Dead" those principles are called "the Sons of Rebellion." (See also "Egyptian Pantheon, " pp. 20, 23.) "In that night, the oppressor, the murderer of Osiris, otherwise called the deceiving Serpent (Verse 54) . . . . calls the Sons of Rebellion in Air, and when they arrive to the East of Heavens, then there is War in Heaven and in the entire World" (v. 49, "Book of the Dead, " xvii.).
In the Scandinavian Eddas the "War" of the Ases with the Hrim-thurses (frost-giants), and of Asathor with the Jotuns, the Serpents and Dragons and the "wolf" who comes out of "Darkness" --- is the repetition of the same myth. The "evil Spirits,"* having begun by being simply the emblems of Chaos, became euhemerized by the superstition of the rabble, until they have finally won the right of citizenship in the most civilized and learned races of this globe -- since its creation as alleged -- and became a dogma with Christians. As George Smith has it: "The evil principles (Spirits) emblems of Chaos" (in Chaldea and Assyria as in Egypt, we see) . . "resist this change and make war on the Moon, the eldest son of Bel, drawing over to their side the Sun, Venus and the atmospheric god Vul." ("Assyrian Discoveries," p. 403.) This is only another version of the Hindu "War in Heaven," between Soma, the moon, and the gods -- Indra being the atmospheric Vul; which shows it plainly to be both a Cosmogonical and an astronomical allegory, woven into and drawn from the earliest theogony as taught in the Mysteries.
It is in the religious doctrines of the Gnostics that the real meaning of the Dragon, the Serpent, the Goat, and all those symbols of powers now called Evil, can be seen the best; as it is they who divulged the esoteric nature of the Jewish Substitute for AIN-SOPH in their teachings; of the true meaning of which, while the Rabbins concealed it, the Christians, with a few exceptions, knew nothing. Surely Jesus of Nazareth would have hardly advised his apostles to show themselves as wise as the serpent, had the latter been a symbol of the Evil one ; nor would the Ophites, the learned Egyptian Gnostics of "the Brotherhood of the Serpent," have reverenced a living snake in their ceremonies as the emblem of WISDOM, the divine Sophia (and a type of the all-good, not the all-bad), were that reptile so closely connected with Satan. The fact is, that even as a common ophidian it has ever been a dual symbol; and
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* These "evil Spirits" can by no means be identified with Satan or the Great Dragon. They are the Elementals generated or begotten by ignorance -- Cosmic and human passions -- or Chaos.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 387 WHO FIRST CREATED WOMAN?
as a Dragon it had never been anything else than a symbol of the manifested Deity in its great Wisdom. The Draco volans, the flying Dragon of the early painters, may be an exaggerated picture of the real extinct antediluvian animal; but those who have faith in the Occult teachings believe that in the days of old there were such creatures as flying Dragons, or a kind of Pterodactyl, and that it is those gigantic winged lizards that served as the prototypes for the Seraph of Moses and his great Brazen Serpent.* The Jews had worshipped the latter idol themselves, but, after the religious reforms brought about by Hezekiah, turned round, and called that symbol of the great or Higher God of every other nation -- a Devil, and their own usurper -- the "One God."**
The appellation Sa'tan, in Hebrew satan, "an adversary" (from the verb shatana, "to be adverse," to persecute) belongs by right to the first and cruelest "adversary of all the other gods" -- Jehovah, not to the Serpent, which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom, and is at the worst, even in the dogma, "the adversary of men." This dogma, based as it is on chapter iii. of Genesis, is as illogical and unjust as it is paradoxical. For who was the first to create that original and hence-forward universal tempter of man -- the woman? Not the serpent surely, but the "Lord God" himself, who, saying: -- "It is not good that the man should be alone" -- made woman, and "brought her unto the man" (18-22). If the unpleasant little incident that followed was and is still to be regarded as the "original sin," then it exhibits the Creator's divine foresight in a poor light indeed. It would have been far better for the first Adam (of chap. 1.) to have been left either "male and female," or "alone." It is the Lord God, evidently, who was the real cause of all the mischief, the "agent provocateur," and the Serpent -- only a prototype of Azazel, "the scapegoat for the sin of (the God of) Israel," the poor Tragos having to pay the penalty for his Master's and Creator's blunder. This, of course, is addressed only to those who accept the opening events of the drama of humanity in Genesis in their dead-letter sense. Those who read them esoterically, are not reduced to fanciful
* See Numbers xxi. 8-9. God orders Moses to build a brazen Serpent "Saraph"; to look upon which heals those bitten by the fiery serpents. The latter were the Seraphim, each one of which, as Isaiah shows (vi. 2), "had six wings"; they are the symbols of Jehovah, and of all the other Demiurgi who produce out of themselves six sons or likenesses -- Seven with their Creator. Thus, the Brazen Serpent is Jehovah, the chief of the "fiery serpents." And yet, in 2 Kings xviii., it is shown that King Hezekiah, who, like as David his father, "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" -- "brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made . . . and called it Nehushtan, " or piece of brass.
** And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel (Chron. xxi. 1.) "The anger of the Lord Jehovah was kindled against Israel," and he moved David to say: "Go, number Israel" (2 Samuel, xxiv. 1). The two are then identical.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
speculations and hypothesis; they know how to read the symbolism therein contained, and cannot err.
There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name. It was a blind created purposely by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them with ten-fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God-name which was their own property.* But the following statement is made. The personage who is named in the first four chapters of Genesis variously as "God," the "Lord God," and "Lord" simply, is not one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the Kabala, Jehovah appearing only in chapter iv., in the first verse of which he is named Cain, and in the last transformed into mankind -- male and female, jah-veh.** The "Serpent," moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one of the Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who, promising the woman that if they ate of the forbidden fruit "ye shall not surely die," kept his promise, and made man immortal in his incorruptible nature. He is the Iao of the mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne creators of men. Chapter iii. contains (esoterically) the withdrawal of the veil of ignorance that closed the perceptions of the Angelic Man, made in the image of the "Boneless" gods, and the opening of his consciousness to his real nature; thus showing the bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of Immortality, and as the "Enlightener"; while the real Fall into generation and matter is to be sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah-Cain, the male part of Adam the dual man, having separated himself from Eve, creates in her "Abel," the first natural woman,* and sheds the Virgin blood. Now Cain, being shown identical with Jehovah, on the authority of the correct reading of verse i. (chapter iv., Genesis), in the original Hebrew text; and the Rabbins teaching that "Kin (Cain), the Evil, was the Son of Eve by Samael, the devil who took Adam's place"; and the Talmud adding that "the evil Spirit, Satan, and Samael, the angel of Death, are the same" --(Babba Battra, 16a) -- it becomes easy to see that Jehovah (mankind, or "Jah-hovah") and Satan (therefore the tempting Serpent) are one and
* Dozens of the most erudite writers have sifted thoroughly the various meanings of the name J'hovah (with, and without the masoretic points), and shown their multifarious bearings. The best of such works is the "Source of Measures, the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery."
** In the above-mentioned work (p. 233 App.), verse 26 of the 4th chap. of Genesis is correctly translated "then men began to call themselves Jehovah, " but less correctly explained, perhaps, as the last word ought to be written Jah (male) Hovah (female), to show that from that time the race of distinctly separate man and woman began.
*** See for explanation the excellent pages of appendix vii. of the same work.
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the same in every particular. There is no Devil, no Evil, outside mankind to produce a Devil. Evil is a necessity in, and one of the supporters of the manifested universe. It is a necessity for progress and evolution, as night is necessary for the production of Day, and Death for that of Life -- that man may live for ever.
Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in nature.* He is the "adversary," allegorically, the "murderer," and the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole universe that has not two sides -- the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And now the philosophy and the rationale of certain early Christian sects -- called heretical and viewed as the abomination of the times -- will become more comprehensible. We may understand how it was that the sect of SATANIANS came to be degraded, and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future day, since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the CAINITES came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) ISCARIOTES; the true character of the treacherous apostle having never been correctly presented before the tribunal of Humanity.
As a direct consequence, the tenets of the Gnostic sects also become clear. Each of these sects was founded by an Initiate, while their tenets were based on the correct knowledge of the symbolism of every nation. Thus it becomes comprehensible why Ilda-Baoth was regarded by most of them as the god of Moses, and was held as a proud, ambitious, and impure spirit, who had abused his power by usurping the place of the highest God, though he was no better, and in some respects far worse than his brethren Elohim; the latter representing the all-embracing, manifested deity only in their collectivity, since they were the fashioners of the first differentiations of the primary Cosmic substance for the creation of the phenomenal Universe. Therefore Jehovah was called by the Gnostics the Creator of, and one with Ophiomorphos, the Serpent, Satan, or EVIL. (See "Isis Unveiled, " II, 184). They taught that Turbo and Adonai were "names of Jao-Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda Baoth" (Codex Nazaraeus). (See Part II., "The Fallen Angels. ") This amounted in their language to saying what the Rabbins expressed in a more veiled way, by stating that -- "Cain had been generated by Samael or Satan."
* In Demonology, Satan is the leader of the opposition in Hell, the monarch of which was Beelzebub. He belongs to the fifth kind or class of demons (of which there are nine according to mediaeval demonology), and he is at the head of witches and sorcerers. But see in the text the true meaning of Baphomet, the goat-headed Satan, one with Azaziel, the scape goat of Israel. Nature is the god PAN.
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The fallen Angels are made in every ancient system the prototypes of fallen men -- allegorically, and, those men themselves -- esoterically. Thus the Elohim of the hour of creation became the "Beni-
Elohim," the sons of God, among whom is Satan -- in the Semitic traditions; war in heaven between Thraetaona and Azhi-dahaka, the destroying Serpent, ends on earth, according to Burnouf, in the battle
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of pious men against the power of Evil, "of the Iranians with the Aryan Brahmins of India." And the conflict of the gods with the Asuras is repeated in the Great War -- the Mahabharata. In the latest religion of all, Christianity, all the Combatants, gods and demons, adversaries in both the camps, are now transformed into Dragons and Satans, simply in order to connect EVIL personified with the Serpent of Genesis, and thus prove the new dogma.*
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NOAH WAS A KABIR, HENCE HE MUST HAVE BEEN A DEMON.
It matters little whether it is Isis, or Ceres -- the "Kabiria" -- or again the Kabiri, who have taught men agriculture; but it is very important to prevent fanatics from monopolising all the facts in history and legend, and from fathering their distortions of truth, history, and legend upon one man. Noah is either a myth along with the others, or one whose legend was built upon the Kabirian or Titanic tradition, as taught in Samothrace; he has, therefore, no claim to be monopolized by either Jew or Christian. If, as Faber tried to demonstrate at such cost of learning and research, Noah is an Atlantean and a Titan, and his family are the Kabiri or pious Titans, etc. -- then biblical chronology falls by its own weight, and along with it all the patriarchs -- the antediluvian and pre-Atlantean Titans. As now discovered and proven, Cain is Mars, the god of power and generation, and of the first (sexual) bloodshed.** Tubal-
Cain is a Kabir, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron"; or -- if this will please better -- he is one with Hephaestos or Vulcan; Jabal is taken from the Kabiri -- instructors in agriculture, "such as have cattle," and Jubal is "the father of all those who handle the harp," he, or they who fabricated the harp for Kronos and the trident for Poseidon.***
* Vide for further details upon the Satanic myth, Part II. on Symbolism, in this volume.
** As he is also Vulcan or Vul-cain, the greatest god with the later Egyptians, and the greatest Kabir. The god of time was Chium in Egypt, or Saturn, or Seth, and Chium is the same as Cain.
*** See Strabo, comparing them to the Cyclopes -- XIV. p. 653 et seq. (Callim in Del., 31 Stat. Silo. IV., 6, 47; etc., etc.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 391 THE FLOOD LEGENDS.
The history or "fables" about the mysterious Telchines -- fables echoing each and all the archaic events of our esoteric teachings -- furnish us with a key to the origin of Cain's genealogy (Genesis, ch. iii.); they give the reason why the Roman Catholic Church identifies "the accursed blood" of Cain and Ham with Sorcery, and makes it responsible for the Deluge. Were not the Telchines -- it is argued -- the mysterious ironworkers of Rhodes; they who were the first to raise statues to the gods, furnish them with weapons, and men with magic arts? And is it not they who were destroyed by a deluge at the command of Zeus, as the Cainites were by that of Jehovah?
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The Telchines are simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They are the Atlanteans also. "Like Lemnos and Samothrace," says Decharme, "Rhodes, the birth-place of the Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation." (Genii of Fire, p. 271.) The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like Samothrace (of the Kabiri) it is connected in the memory of men with the Flood legends. As enough has been said on this subject, however, it may be left for the present.
But we may add a few more words about Noah, the Jewish representative of nearly every pagan God in one or another character. The Homeric songs contain, poetized, all the later fables about the Patriarchs, who are all sidereal, cosmic, and numerical symbols and signs. The attempt to disconnect the two genealogies -- those of Seth and Cain* -- and the further attempt, as futile, to show them real, historical men, has only led to more serious inquiries into the history of the Past, and to discoveries which have damaged for ever the supposed revelation. For instance, the identity of Noah and Melchizedek being established, the further identity of Melchizedek, or Father Sadik, with Kronos-
Saturn is proved also.
That it is so may be easily demonstrated. It is not denied by any of the Christian writers. Bryant (See "Analysis of Ancient Mythology, " Vol. II., p. 760) concurs with all those who are of opinion, that Sydic, or
* Nothing could be more awkward and childish, we say, than this fruitless attempt to disconnect the genealogies of Cain and of Seth, or to conceal the identity of names under a different spelling. Thus, Cain has a Son ENOCH, and Seth a Son ENOCH also (Enos, Ch'anoch, Hanoch; -- one may do what one likes with Hebrew unvowelled names). In the Cainite line Enoch begets IRAD, Irad MEHUJAEL, the latter METHUSAEL, and Methusael, Lamech. In the Sethite line, Enoch begets Cainan, and this one MAHALEEL (a variation on Mehujael), who gives birth to JARAD (or Irad); Jarad to ENOCH (Number 3), who produces Methuselah (from Methusael), and finally Lamech closes the list. Now all these are symbols (Kabalistically) of solar and lunar years, of astronomical periods, and of physiological (phallic) functions, just as in any other pagan symbolical creed. This has been proven by a number of writers.
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Sadic, was the patriarch Noah (as also Melchizedek); and that the name by which he is called, or
Sadic, corresponds to the character given of him in Genesis, chap. vi., 9. "He was , Sadic, a JUST man, and perfect in his generation. All science and every useful art were attributed to him, and through his sons transmitted to posterity." (See New Encyclopaedia by Abraham Rees, F.R.S.)
Now it is Sanchoniathon, who informs the world that the Kabiri were the Sons of Sydic or Zedek (Melchizedek). True enough, this information, having descended to us through Eusebius (Preparatio Evangelica), may be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, as it is more than likely that he dealt with Sanchoniathon's works as he has with Manetho's Synchronistic Tables. But let us suppose that the
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identification of Sydic, Kronos, or Saturn with Noah and Melchizedek, is based on one of the Eusebian pious hypotheses. Let us accept it as such, along with Noah's characteristic as a just man, and his supposed duplicate, the mysterious Melchizedek, King of Salem, and priest of the high god, after "his own order" (See Hebrews, ch. v. 6, and vii. 1, et seq.); and finally, having seen what they all were spiritually, astronomically, psychically and cosmically, let us now see what they became rabbinically and KABALISTICALLY.
Speaking of Adam, Kain, Mars, etc., as personifications, we find the author of "The Source of Measures " enunciating our very esoteric teachings in his Kabalistic researches. Thus he says: --
"Now Mars was the lord of birth and of death, of generation and of destruction, of ploughing, of building, of sculpture or stone-cutting, of Architecture . . . . in fine, of all . . . . ARTS. He was the primeval principle, disintegrating into the modification of two opposites for production. Astronomically, too,* he held the birthplace of the day and year, the place of its increase of strength, Aries, and likewise the place of its death, Scorpio. He held the house of Venus, and that of the Scorpion. He, as birth, was good; as death, was Evil. As good, he was light; as bad, he was night. As good, he was man; as bad, he was woman. He held the cardinal points, and as Cain, or Vulcan,** or Pater Sadic, or Melchizadek, he was lord of the Ecliptic, or
* The AEolian name of Mars was [[Areus ]], and the Greek Ares, [[Ares ]], is a name over the etymological significance of which, philologists and Indianists, Greek and Sanskrit scholars have vainly worked to this day. Very strangely, Max Muller connects both the names Mars and Ares with the Sanskrit root mar, whence he traces their derivation, and from which, he says, the name of Maruts (the storm-gods) comes. Welcker, however, offers more correct etymologies. (See Griech. Gotterlehre, I., 415.) However it may be, etymologies of roots and words alone will never yield the esoteric meaning fully, though they may help to useful guesses.
** As the same author shows: "The very name Vulcain appears in the reading; for in the first words (of chap. iv. Genesis, 5) is to be found V'elcain, or V'ulcain, agreeably to the deepened u sound of the letter vau. Out of its immediate context, it may be [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 393 THE LEGENDS OF IRAN.
balance, or line of adjustment, and therefore was THE JUST ONE. The ancients held to there being seven planets, or great gods, growing out of eight, and Pater Sadik, the Just or Right One, was lord of the eighth, which was Mater Terra. ("Source of Measures," p. 186-70.)
This makes their functions plain enough after they had been degraded, and establishes the identity.
The Noachian Deluge, as described in its dead letter and within the period of Biblical chronology,
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having been shown to have never existed, the pious, but very arbitrary supposition of Bishop Cumberland has but to follow that deluge into the land of fiction. Indeed it seems rather fanciful to any impartial observer to be told that there were "two distinct races of Kabiri," the first consisting of Ham and Mizraim, whom he conceives to be Jupiter and Dionysus of Mnaseas; the second, "of the children of Shem, are the Kabiri of Sochoniston, while their father Sydyk is consequently the Scriptural Shem." (Append. de Cabiris, ap. Orig. gent. p. 364, 376, and the latter statement on p. 357.)
The Kabirim, "the mighty ones," are identical with our primeval Dhyan-Chohans, with the corporeal and the incorporeal Pitris, and with all the rulers and instructors of the primeval races, which are referred to as the Gods and Kings of the divine Dynasties.
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THE OLDEST PERSIAN TRADITIONS ABOUT THE POLAR, AND THE
SUBMERGED CONTINENTS.
Legendary lore could not distort facts so effectually as to reduce them to unrecognisable shape. Between the traditions of Egypt and Greece on the one hand, and Persia on the other -- a country ever at war with the former -- there is too great a similarity of figures and numbers to allow such coincidence to be due to simple chance. This was well proven by Bailly. Let us pause for a moment to examine these traditions from every available source, to compare the better those of the Magi with the so-called Grecian "fables."
Those legends have now passed into popular tales, the folklore of Persia, as many a real fiction has found its way into our universal History. The stories of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are also fairy tales to all appearance; yet they are based on facts, and pertain to the History of England. Why should not the folklore of Iran be part and parcel of the history and the pre-historic events of Atlantis? That folklore says as follows:
[[Footnote ]]----------------------------
[[Continued from previous page]] read as "and the god Cain," or Vulcain. If, however, anything is
wanting to confirm the Cain-Vulcain idea, Fuerst says: , Cain, the iron point of a lance, a smith (blacksmith), inventor of sharp iron tools and smith work" (p. 278).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Before the creation of Adam, two races lived and succeeded each other on Earth; the Devs who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who reigned but 2,000, during the existence of the former. The Devs were giants, strong and wicked; the Peris were smaller in stature, but wiser and kinder.
Here we recognize the Atlantean giants and the Aryans, or the Rakshasas of the Ramayana and the
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children of Bharata Varsha, or India; the ante- and the post-diluvians of the Bible.
Gyan (or rather Gnan, true or occult Wisdom and knowledge), also called Gian-ben-Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris.* He had a shield as famous as that of Achilles, only instead of serving against an enemy in war, it served as a protection against black magic, the sorcery of the Devs. Gian-ben-Gian had reigned 2,000 years when Iblis, the devil, was permitted by God to defeat the Devs and scatter them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield, which, produced on the principles of astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments, and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate (or Karma).** They count ten kings in their last metropolis called Khanoom, and make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam. These kings answer to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given by Berosus.
Distorted as those legends are now found, one can hardly fail to identify them with the Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew traditions. The latter, disdaining in its exclusiveness to speak of pre-
adamite nations, yet allows these to be clearly inferred, by sending out Cain -- one of the two only living men on earth -- into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city (Gen. iv.), etc.
Now if we compare the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the 9,000 years, which Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the last Atlantis, a very strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked, but distorted it by his interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may restore the figures to their true meaning. "First of all," we read in "Critias" that "one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed since the war of the nations, which lived above and outside the Pillars of Hercules, and those which peopled the lands on this side."
* Some derive the word from Paras which produced Pars, Persia, Pars ; but it may be equally derived from Pitar or Pitris, the Hindu progenitors of the Fifth Race -- the Fathers of Wisdom or the Sons of "Will and Yoga" -- who were called Pitar, as were the divine Pitars of the First Race.
** See for these traditions the "Collection of Persian Legends," in Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Persian; Herbelot's narrative Legendes Persanes, "Bibliotheque Orientale," p. 298, 387, etc., and Danville's Memoires. We give in a condensed narrative that which is scattered in hundreds of volumes in European and Asiatic languages, as well as in oral traditions.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 395 ESOTERIC CHRONOLOGY.
In "Timaeus" Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Aryans were 200,000 years old when the first great "island" or continent was submerged, there hardly seems any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldea and Persia, through whose exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, one finds the Hebrews calling a week "seven days," and "a week of years" when each of its days represents 360 solar years,
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and the whole "week" is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years -- in their secret calculations of the Sods. We of the present times call an age a century. They of Plato's day, the initiated writers, at any rate, meant by a millenium, not a thousand but 100,000 years; Hindus, more independent than any, never concealed their chronology. Thus, when saying 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years, during which space of time -- i.e, from the first appearance of the Aryan race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began gradually sinking* and other continents to appear on the surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato's small island of Atlantis, the Aryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the Kali Yug, and was the Mahabharatean war so famous in Indian History. Such blending of the events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years that had elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures given. The latter event has never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because isolated; for, being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our era.
History, for the first time, catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great mysteries through Herodotus, if we do not take into account the Bible, and its queer chronology.** And how little Herodotus could tell is
* The main continent perished in the Miocene times, as already stated.
** From Bede downwards all the chronologists of the Church have differed among themselves, and contradicted each other. "The chronology of the Hebrew text has been grossly altered, especially in the interval next after the Deluge": -- says Whiston (Old Test., p. 20).
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confessed by himself when speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate at Sais, in the sacred precinct of Minerva. There, he says "behind the chapel . . . is the tomb of One, whose name I consider it impious to divulge . . . In the enclosure stand large obelisks and there is a lake near, surrounded with a stone wall formed in a circle. In this lake they perform by night, that person's adventures, which they call Mysteries: on these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I must observe a discreet silence " (ii. 170).
On the other hand, it is well to know that no secret was so well preserved and so sacred with the ancients, as that of their cycles and computations. From the Egyptians down to the Jews it was held as the highest sin to divulge anything pertaining to the correct measure of time. It was for divulging the secrets of the Gods, that Tantalus was plunged into the infernal regions; the keepers of the sacred Sibylline Books were threatened with the death penalty for revealing a word from them. Sigalions (images of Harpocrates) were in every temple -- especially in those of Isis and Serapis -- each pressing
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a finger to the lips; while the Hebrews taught that to divulge, after initiation into the Rabbinical mysteries, the secrets of Kabala, was like eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: it was punishable by death.
And yet, we Europeans accepted the exoteric chronology of the Jews! What wonder that it has influenced and coloured ever since all our conceptions of science and the duration of things!
The Persian traditions, then, are full of two nations or races, now entirely extinct, as some think; whereas, they are only transformed. They are ever speaking of, and describing the mountains of Kaf (Kafaristan?), which contain a gallery built by the giant Argeak, wherein the statues of the ancient men under all their forms are preserved. They call them Sulimans (Solomons), or the wise kings of the East, and count seventy-two kings of that name.* Three among them reigned for 1,000 years each. (Herbelot, p. 829.)
Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, died murdered by his giant brother. The father had a perpetual fire preserved on the tomb which contained his cremated ashes; hence -- the origin of fire-worship, as some Orientalists think.
Then came Huschenk, the prudent and the wise. It was his dynasty which re-discovered metals and precious stones, which had been concealed by the Devs or Giants in the bowels of the earth; how to make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk, again, who is credited with having written the work called
* Thence King Solomon, whose traces are nowhere to be found outside of the Bible, and the description of whose magnificent palace and city dovetail with those of the Persian tales; though they were unknown to all pagan travellers, even to Herodotus.
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"Eternal Wisdom," and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and Ispahan, though they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is built on six other older cities, so these just-named cities may be built on emplacements of other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it can only be inferred from another legend.
In the same tradition that wise prince is credited with having made war against the giants on a twelve-
legged horse, whose birth is attributed to the amours of a crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This dodecaped was found on the "dry island" or new continent; much force and cunning had to be used to secure the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk mounted him, than he defeated every enemy. No giants could withstand his tremendous power. Notwithstanding, this king of kings was killed by an enormous rock thrown at him by the giants from the great mountains of Damavend. *
Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the best of,
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and who kills, the Dragon. He is the great enemy of the Devs who, in his day, dwelled in the mountains of Kaf, and occasionally made raids on the Peris. The old French chronicles of the Persian folklore call him the Dev-bend, the conqueror of the giants. He, too, is credited with having founded Babylon, Nineveh, Diarbek, etc., etc. Like his grand-sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz) also had his steed, only far more rare and rapid -- a bird called Simorgh-Anke. A marvellous bird, in truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious. (See Orient. Collect. ii., 119.) What says that Persian Phoenix? It complains of its old age, for it is born cycles and cycles before the days of Adam (also Kaimurath). It has witnessed the revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the birth and the close of twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied esoterically will give us again 840,000 years.** (Orient. Collect. ii., 119 et seq.) Simorgh is born with the last deluge of the pre-Adamites, says the "romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif"! (Tales of Derbent.)
What says the "Book of Numbers"? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the lunar Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris) and his three Sons -- Ka-yin, Habel, and Seth -- represent the three races, as already explained. Noah-Xisuthrus represents in his turn (in the cosmo-geological key) the 3rd Race separated, and his three sons, its last three races; Ham, moreover, symbolizing that race which uncovered the "nakedness" of the Parent Race, and of the "Mindless," i.e., committed sin.
* Orient. Trad., p. 454. See also Bailly's "Lettres sur l'Atlantide. "
** Remember that the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe; that each will last 7,000 years, the total duration being thus 49,000 years (See Rabbi Parcha's "wheel"; also Kenealy's "Book of God, " p. 176). This refers to 7 Rounds, 7 Root-races, and sub-races, the truly occult figures, though sorely confused.
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Tahmurath visits on his winged steed (Ahriman) the Mountains of Koh-Kaf or Kaph. He finds there the Peris ill-treated by the giants, and slays Argen, and the giant Demrusch. Then he liberates the good Peri, Mergiana*, whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the dry island, i.e., the new continent of Europe.** After him came Giamschid, who builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns 700 years, and believes himself, in his great pride, immortal, and demands divine honours. Fate punishes him, he wanders for 100 years in the world under the name of Dhulkarnayn "the two horned." But this epithet has no connection with the "two-horned" gentleman of the cloven foot. The "two-
horned" is the epithet given in Asia, uncivilized enough to know nothing of the attributes of the devil, to those conquerors who have subdued the world from the East to the West.
Then come the usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who vanquishes the former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend. These are followed by many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new dynasty.
Such is the legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. What are the mountains of Kaf to
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begin with?
Whatever they may be in their geographical status, whether they are the Caucasian or Central Asian mountains, it is far beyond these mountains to the North, that legend places the Devs and Peris; the latter the remote ancestors of the Parses or Farses. Oriental tradition is ever referring to an unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which, nevertheless, are situated the Fortunate Islands, wherein bubbles, from the beginning of life on earth, the fountain of life (Herbelot, p. 593 ; Armenian Tales, p. 35). But the legend asserts, moreover, that a portion of the first dry island (continent), having detached itself from the main body, has remained, since then, beyond the mountains of Koh-kaf, "the stony girdle that surrounds the world." A journey of seven months' duration will bring him who is possessed of "Soliman's ring" to that "fountain," if he keeps on journeying North straight before him as the bird flies. Journeying therefore from Persia straight north, will bring one along the sixtieth degree of longitude, holding to the west, to Nova Zemblia; and from the Caucasus to the eternal ice beyond the Arctic circle would land one between 60 and 45 degrees of longitude, or between Nova Zemblia and Spitzbergen. This, of course, if one has the dodecapedian horse of
* Mergain, or Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown of Oriental descent.
** Where we find her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the Knights of the Round Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy-hood, if both heroines did not symbolize the same historical event which had passed into a legend?
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Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath (or Taimuraz), upon which to cross over the Arctic Ocean.*
Nevertheless, the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will maintain, to this day, that far beyond the snow-capped summits of Kap, or Caucasus, there is a great continent now concealed from all. That it is reached by those who can secure the services of the twelvelegged progeny of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings**; or by those who have the patience to wait for the good pleasure of Simorgh-anke, who promised that before she dies she will reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once more visible and within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs will build between that portion of the "dry island" and its severed parts.*** This relates, of course, to the seventh race, Simorgh being the Manvantaric cycle.
It is very curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century A.D., should have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt at first in a country beyond the Ocean, a proof of which had been given him in India, by a learned Chaldean (Cosmas Indicopleustes in Collect. nova Patrum, t. ii, p. 188; also see Journ. des Savants, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.) He says: "The lands we live in are surrounded by the ocean, but beyond that ocean there is another land which touches the walls of the sky; and it is
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in this land that man was created and lived in paradise. During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his ark into the land his posterity now inhabits." (Ibid.) The twelve-legged horse of Huschenk was found on that continent named the dry island. (Supra, p. 154.)
The "Christian topography" of Cosmas Indicopleustes and its merits are well known; but here the good father repeats a universal tradition, now, moreover, corroborated by facts. Every arctic traveller suspects a continent or a "dry island" beyond the line of eternal ice. Perhaps now the meaning of the following passage from one of the Commentaries may become clearer.
* To this day the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as Kap-kaz, using the consonant p instead of the usual v (Kavkaz or Caucasus). But their bards say that it requires seven months for a swift horse to reach the "dry land" beyond Kaf, holding north without ever deviating from one's way.
** Bailly thought he saw in this horse a twelve-oared ship. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the early Third Race built boats and flotillas before it built houses. But the "horse," though a much later animal, has, nevertheless, a more occult primitive meaning. The crocodile and the hippopotamus were held sacred and represented divine symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the Mexicans. Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects of that "horse," which is a cycle.
*** The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"In the first beginnings of (human) life, the only dry land was on the Right end * of the sphere, where it (the globe) is motionless.** The whole earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid . . . . There man was born on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara. *** There was eternal spring in darkness. (But) that which is darkness to the man of today, was light to the man of his dawn. There, the gods rested, and Fohat**** reigns ever since . . . . Thus the wise fathers say that man is born in the head of his mother (earth), and that her feet at the left end generated (begot) the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon . . . . Between the first and second (races) the eternal central (land) was divided by the water of life.*****
"It flows around and animates her (mother earth's) body. Its one end issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet (the Southern Pole). It gets purified (on its return) to her heart -- which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah, which then (in the beginnings) was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man's dwelling (the earth) that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes.****** During the first and second (races) the belt was covered with the great waters. (But) the great mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-
gear (the cap). She travailed harder for the third (race) and her waist and navel appeared above the
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* The two poles are called the right and left ends of our globe -- the right being the North Pole -- or the head and feet of the earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with and influence "right" and "left" hand magic.
** The more one approaches the poles the less rotation is felt; at the poles proper, the diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Thence the expression that the sphere is "motionless."
*** It is averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the North Pole like a skull-cap, is the only one which prevails during the whole Manvantara of our "Round." All the central continents and lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this land will never change.
**** Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestian name of Fohat is Apam-Napat. In the Avesta he stands between the fire-yazatas and the water-yazatas. The literal meaning is "Son of the Waters," but these "waters" are not the liquid we know, but Ether -- the fiery waters of space. Fohat is the "Son of Ether" in its highest aspect, Akasa, the Mother-Father of the primitive Seven, and of Sound or LOGOS. Fohat is the light of the latter. See Book I.
***** This "water" is the blood or fluid of life which animates the earth, compared here to a living body.
****** Occult teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the existence of a fountain of life in the bowels of the earth and in the North Pole. It is the blood of the earth, the electromagnetic current, which circulates through all the arteries; and which is said to be found stored in the "navel" of the earth.
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water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world.* She broke toward the setting sun from her neck** downward (to the south west), into many lands and islands, but the eternal land (the cap) broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the world. All these perished (in their turn). Then appeared the abode of the wicked (the Atlantis). The eternal land was now hid, for the waters became solid (frozen) under the breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon's mouth," etc., etc.
This shows that Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its root-continent, so to speak, already existed; that part of the world now known as Asia being only cut off from it in a later age, and divided by the glacial waters.
If, then, the teaching is understood correctly, the first continent which came into existence capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust, and remains so to this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the few arctic travellers who perceived it.
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During the Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a continuation of the "head" from the neck. Beginning on both hemispheres, on the line above the most northern part of Spitzbergen*** on
* Occultism points to the Himalayan chain as that "belt," and maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the globe. The navel is described as situated to the setting sun or to the west of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which mountain is north of the Himalaya. Meru is not "the fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth," but its roots and foundations are in that navel, though it is in the far north itself. This connects it with the "central" land "that never perishes"; the land in which "the day of the mortal lasts six months and his night another six months." As the Vishnu Purana has it: "for the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day in other regions; for Meru is north of all the dwipas and varshas" (islands and countries). (Book II., chap. viii.) Meru is therefore neither on Atlas as Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show, "absolutely in the centre of the globe," only because "relatively with the inhabitants of the several portions, to all of whom the East is that quarter where the sun first appears."
** Even the Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The globe is likened to the body of a woman, "mother earth." From her neck downward, means from the inland sea now beyond the impassable barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parasara says: "is the mother and nurse, augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the comprehender of all the worlds."
*** For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the commentary as a place of no latitude (niraksha) the abode of the gods. As a scholiast says from the Surya-Sidhanta:
"Above this (the Siddha) goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (akshonnati, v. 42). In both directions from these are two pole-stars (dhruvatara), fixed in the midst of the sky; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Mercator's Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the American side, the localities that are now occupied by Baffin's Bay and the neighbouring islands and promontories. There it hardly reached, southward, the 70th degree of latitude; here -- it formed the horse-shoe continent of which the commentary speaks; of the two ends of which, one included Greenland with a prolongation which crossed the 50th degree a little south west, and the other Kamschatka, the two ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the early part of the Third Race -- Lemuria was formed ( Vide supra). When it was destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] to those who are situated in places of no latitude (niraksha) both these have their place in the horizon. Hence there is (on that land) no elevation of the poles, the two pole-stars being situated in their horizon; but their degrees of colatitude (lumbaka) are 90; at Meru the degrees of latitude (aksha) are of the same number." (43 and 44.)
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he Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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[[This page continued from previous section]]
WESTERN SPECULATIONS,
FOUNDED ON THE GREEK AND PURANIC TRADITIONS.
Thus it becomes natural to find that, on even such meagre data as have reached the profane historian, Rudbeck, a Swedish scientist, tried to prove about two centuries ago that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He thought, even, that he had found in the configuration of ancient Upsala, the situation and measurements given by the Greek sage of the capital of "Atlantis." As Bailly proved, Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly likewise, and still more. For Sweden and Norway had formed part and parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis on the European side, just as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had belonged to it, on the Asiatic. Only, once more, when was it? We can find it out approximately only by studying the Puranas, if we will have nought to do with the Secret teachings.
Three quarters of a century have already elapsed since Captain (now Colonel) Wilford brought forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the "White Island," the Atala of the Puranas. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala is one of the seven dwipas, or islands, belonging to the nether lokas, one of the seven regions of Patala (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford* shows, the Puranas place it "on
* Wilford makes many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Sveta-dwipa (the white Island), the "island in the northern part of Toyambhudi," with England, and then tries to identify it with Atala (a nether region) and Atlantis. Now the former is the abode of Vishnu, exoterically, and Atala is a hell. He also places it in the Euxine or Icshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it, in another place, with Africa and Atlas.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 403 ORIENTALISTS IN THE WRONG BOX.
the seventh zone or seventh climate," -- rather, on the seventh measure of heat: which thus locates it between the latitudes of 24 and 28 degrees north. It is then to be sought on the same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between the 50th and 60th degrees of latitude. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis, the white island. And in vol. viii. of Journal of Asiatic Researches, p. 280, its
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enemy is called the "White Devil," the demon of terror. For he says: "In their (the Hindu and Mahomedan) romances, we see Kai-caus going to the mountain of 'As-burj, at the foot of which the Sun sets,' to fight the Dev-Sefid, or white devil, the Taradaitya of the Puranas, whose abode was on the seventh stage of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the Buddhists, or the White Island."
Now here the Orientalists have been, and are still, facing the Sphinx's riddle, the wrong solution of which will ever destroy their authority, if not their persons, in the eyes of every Hindu scholar, even those who are not initiates. For there is not a statement in the Puranas -- on the conflicting details of which Wilford based his speculations -- which has not several meanings, and does not apply to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. If the old Hindus divided the face of the globe geographically into seven zones, climates, dwipas, and into seven hells and seven heavens, allegorically, that measure of seven did not apply in both cases to the same localities. It is the north pole, the country of "Meru," which is the seventh division, as it answers to the Seventh principle (or fourth metaphysically), of the occult calculation, for it represents the region of Atma, of pure soul, and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara is shown as the seventh zone, or dwipa, which encompasses the Kshira Ocean, or Ocean of milk (the ever-frozen white region) in the Vishnu (and other) Puranas (Book II ch. iv.). And Pushkara, with its two Varshas, lies directly at the foot of Meru. For it is said that "the two countries north and south of Meru are shaped like a bow," . . and that "one half of the surface of the earth is on the south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru -- beyond which is half of Pushkara " (Vishnu Purana, Asiatic Researches, etc.). Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu-dwipa* in the middle of
* Every name in the Puranas has to be examined at least under two aspects; geographically, and metaphysically, in its allegorical application; e.g., Nila, the (blue) mountain which is one of the boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sought geographically in a mountain range in Orissa, and again in a mountain quite different from the others (in Western Africa). Jambu-dwipa is Vishnu's dominion -- the world, limited in the Puranas to our globe, the region which contains Meru only, and again it is divided to contain Bharata-varsha (India), its best division, and the fairest, says Parasara. Likewise with Pushkara and all others.
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which stands Meru, for it is the country inhabited by beings who live ten thousand years, who are free from sickness or failing; where there is neither virtue nor vice, caste or laws, for these men are "of the same nature as the Gods," (Vishnu Purana, Book II. ch. iv.). Wilford is inclined to see Meru in Mount Atlas, and locates there also the Loka-lokas. Now Meru, we are told, which is the Swar-loka, the abode of Brahma, of Vishnu, and the Olympus of Indian exoteric religions, is described geographically as "passing through the middle of the earth-globe, and protruding on either side" (Surya Siddhanta, v. 5, Whitney's trans.). On its upper station are the gods, on the nether (or South pole) is the abode of demons (hells). How can then Meru be Mount Atlas? Besides which, Taradaitya, a demon, cannot be placed on the seventh zone if the latter is identified with the "white" Island, which is Sveta-dwipa, for reasons given in the foot-note. ( Vide infra.)
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Wilford accuses the modern Brahmans "of having jumbled them (islands and countries) all together" (A.R. III. 300); but he jumbled them still more. He believes that as the Brahmanda and Vayu Puranas divide the old continent into seven dwipas, said to be surrounded by a vast ocean, beyond which lie the regions and mountains of Atala (ibid), hence "most probably the Greeks divided the nation of Atlantis, which, as it could not be found after having once been discovered, they conceived to have been destroyed by some shock of nature."
Finding certain difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests, Plato, and even Homer, had all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala -- a nether region located at the Southern pole -- we prefer holding to the statements given in the secret books. We believe in the seven "continents," four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future. We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,* refers to the geographical names given (i.) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole earth during the period of a Root-Race, in general; and (ii.) to what remained of these after a geological (race) Pralaya -- as "Jambu," for instance: and (iii.) to those localities which will enter, after the future cataclysms, into the formation of new universal "continents," peninsulas, or dwipas** -- each continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever
* Jambu, Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka, and Pushkara.
** Such as Saka and Pushkara, for instance, which do not yet exist, but into which will enter such lands as some portions of America, of Africa, and Central Asia, with the Gobi region. Let us bear in mind that Upadwipas means "root" islands, or the dry land in general.
"jumble" the nomenclature of these may represent to the profane, there is none, in fact, to him who has the key.
Thus, we believe we know that, though two of the Puranic "islands" -- the sixth and seventh "continents" -- are yet to come, nevertheless there were, or there are, lands which will enter into the composition of the future dry lands, of new earths whose geographical faces will be entirely changed, as were those of the past. Therefore we find in the Puranas that Saka-dwipa is (or will be) a continent, and that Sankha-dwipa, as shown in the Vayu Purana, is only "a minor island," one of the nine divisions (to which Vayu adds six more) of Bharata Varsha. Because Sankha-dwipa was peopled by "Mlechchhas (unclean foreigners), who worshipped Hindu divinities," therefore they were connected with India.* This accounts for Sankhasura, a King of a portion of Sankha-dwipa, who was killed by Krishna; that King who resided in the palace "which was an ocean shell, and whose subjects lived in shells also," says Wilford.
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"On the banks of the Nile** (?) there were frequent contests between the Devatas (divine beings, demi-
gods) and the Daityas (giants); but the latter tribe having prevailed, their King, Sankhasura, who resided in the Ocean, made frequent incursions in the night" (As. Res., Vol. III. 225.)
It is not on the banks of the Nile, but on the coasts of Western Africa, south of where now lies Morocco, that these battles took place. There was a time when the whole of the Sahara desert was a sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then, only after another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that other wilderness, the desert of Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in Puranic tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said: "The people were between two fires; for, while Sankhasura was ravaging one side of the continent, Krauncha (or Cracacha), King of Kraunch, used to desolate the other; both armies . . . thus changed the most fertile regions into a savage desert."
That not only the last island of Atlantis, spoken of by Plato, but a large continent, first divided, and then broken later on into seven peninsulas and islands (called dwipas), preceded Europe, is sure. It covered the whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as portions of the North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated by Indian Puranas, Greek writers, and Asiatic, Persian, and Mohammedan traditions. Wilford, who confuses sorely the Hindu and the Mussulman legends, shows this, however, clearly. (See Vol. VIII., X. and XI. of
* They were called demons, Asuras, giants, and monsters, because of their wickedness; and thus their country was likened to Atala -- a hell, because of that.
** Not on the river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the Atlas range.
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Asiatic Researches.) And his facts and quotations from the Puranas give direct and conclusive evidence that the Aryan Hindus and other ancient nations were earlier navigators than the Phoenicians, who are now credited with having been the first seamen that appeared in the post- diluvian times. This is what is given in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, III., pp. 325, et seq.: --
"In their distress the few nations who survived (in the war between Devatas and Daityas) raised their hands to Bhagavan, 'Let him who can deliver us . . . be our King'; using the word I'T (a magic term not understood by Wilford, evidently) which re-echoed through the whole country."
Then comes a violent storm, the waters of the Kali are strangely agitated, "when there appeared from the waves . . a man, afterwards called I'T, at the head of a numerous army, saying abhayan, no fear" . . . and scattered the enemy. "The King I'T," explains Wilford, "is a subordinate incarnation of M'rira" (Mrida, a form of Rudra, probably?) who "re-established peace and prosperity throughout all Sankha-
dwipa, through Barbaradesa, Hissast'han and Awasthan or Arabia . . " etc., etc.
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Surely, if the Hindu Puranas give a description of wars on continents and islands situated beyond Western Africa in the Atlantic Ocean; if their writers speak of Barbaras and other people such as Arabs -- they who were never known to navigate, or cross the Kala pani (the black waters of the Ocean) in the days of Phoenician navigation -- then their Puranas must be older than those Phoenicians (placed at from 2,000 to 3,000 years B.C.). At any rate those traditions must have been older;* as --
"In the above accounts," writes an adept, "the Hindus speak of this island as existing and in great power; it must, therefore, have been more than eleven thousand years ago."
But another calculation and proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindu Aryans who knew of (because they had once dwelt in it) and described the last surviving island of Atlantis -- or rather of that remnant of the Eastern portion of that continent which had
* Says Wilford of the division of Atlantis and Bharata or India, confusing the two accounts and Priyavrata with Medhatithi: -- "The division was made by Priyavrata. . . . He had ten sons, and it was his intention to divide the whole world. In the same manner Neptune divided Atlantis between his ten sons. . . . One of them had . . . the extremity of the Atlantis" -- which "is probably the old continent. . . . This Atlantis was overwhelmed by a flood. . . . and it seems that by Atlantis we should understand the Antediluvian Earth over which ten princes were born to rule according to the mythology of the West (and of the East, also) but seven only of them sat upon the throne." ( Vol. III. p. 286.) . . Some also are of opinion that of the seven dwipas six were destroyed by a flood ( Vol. VIII. p. 367). Wilford takes it to be "Gades which included Spain," but it was Plato's island -- rather.
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perished soon after the upheaval of the two Americas* -- the two Varshas of Pushkara. This may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by an adept who criticises Wilford. For recalling what the Orientalist had brought forward concerning the Mount Ashburj "at the foot of which the sun sets," where was the war between the Devatas and the Daityas,** he says: --
"We will consider, then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island, and of the remaining Mount Ashburj. It was on the seventh stage of the world, i.e., in the seventh climate (which is between the latitude of 24 degrees and latitude 28 degrees north) . . . This island, the daughter of the Ocean, is frequently described as lying in the West; and the sun is represented as setting at the foot of its mountain (Ashburj, Atlas, Teneriffe or Nila, no matter the name), and fighting the white Devil of the 'White Island.' "
Now, considering this statement from its astronomical aspect, and knowing that Krishna is the incarnated Sun (Vishnu), a solar God; and that he is said to have killed Dev-Sefid, the white giant -- a possible personification of the ancient inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas -- perchance Krishna may be only a representation of the vertical beams of the Sun? Those inhabitants (the Atlantides) are, we have seen, accused by Diodorus of daily cursing the Sun, and ever fighting his influence. This is an
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astronomical interpretation of course. But it will now be proved that Sankhasura, and Sancha dwipa, and all their history, is also geographically and ethnologically Plato's "Atlantis" in Hindu dress.
It was just remarked that since, in the Puranic accounts, the island is still existing, then those accounts must be older than the 11,000 years elapsed since Sancha dwipa, or the Poseidonis of Atlantis, disappeared. Is it not barely possible that Hindus should have known the island still earlier? Let us turn again to astronomical demonstrations, which make this quite plain if one assumes, according to the said adept, that "at the time when the summer tropical 'colure' passed through the Pleiades, when cor-
Leonis would be upon the equator; and when Leo was vertical to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the island of Atlantis at noon. "
This explains, perhaps, why the Singhalese, the heirs of the
* America, the "new" world -- is thus, though not much, older; still it is older than Europe, the "old world."
** If Div or Dev-Sefid's (the Taradaitya's) abode was on the seventh stage, it is because he came from Pushkara, the Patala (antipodes) of India, or from America. The latter touched the walls, so to say, of Atlantis, before the latter sank finally. The word Patala, meaning both the antipodal countries and infernal regions, thus became synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.
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Rakshasas and Giants of Lanka, and the direct descendants of Singha, or Leo, became connected with Sancha dwipa or Poseidonis (Plato's Atlantis). Only, as shown by Mackey's "Sphinxiad," this must have occurred about 23,000 years ago, astronomically; at which time the obliquity of the ecliptic must have been rather more than 27 degrees, and consequently Taurus must have passed over "Atlantis" or "Sancha dwipa." And that it was so is clearly demonstrated.
"The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bharata to Sancha to meet Rishabha (Taurus) every Kalpa. But when those of the White Island (who descended originally from Sveta dwipa),* who had mixed with the Daityas (giants) of the land of iniquity, had become black with Sin, then Nandi remained for ever in the "White Island" (or Sveta dwipa.) "Those of the Fourth World (race) lost AUM" -- say the Commentaries.
Asburj (or Azburj), whether the peak of Teneriffe or not, was a volcano, when the sinking of the "western Atala" (or hell) began, and those who were saved told the tale to their children. Plato's Atlantis perished between water below and fire above; the great mountain vomiting flames all the while. "The 'fire-vomiting Monster' survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate island."
Do the Greeks, accused of borrowing a Hindu fiction (Atala), and inventing from it another (Atlantis), stand also accused of getting their geographical notions and the number seven from them? (Vide in
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Part II. the several sections on the SEPTENATE in nature.)
"The famous Atlantis exists no longer, but we can hardly doubt that it did once," says Proclus, "for Marcellus, who wrote a history of Ethiopian affairs, says that such, and so great an island once existed, and this is evidenced by those who composed histories relative to the external sea. For they relate that in this time there were seven islands in the Atlantic sea sacred to Proserpine; and besides these, three of immense magnitude, sacred to Pluto . . . Jupiter . . . and Neptune. And, besides this, the inhabitants of the last island (Poseidonis) preserved the memory of the prodigious magnitude of the Atlantic island as related by their ancestors, and of its governing for many periods all the islands in the Atlantic sea. From this isle one may pass to other large
* Neither Atlantis, nor yet Sancha dwipa, was ever called "White Island." When tradition says that "the White Island became black on account of the sins of people" it only means the denizens of the "White Island," or Siddhapura, or Sveta dwipa, who descended to the Atlantis of the Third and Fourth races, to "inform the latter; and who, having incarnated, became black with sin" -- a figure of speech. All the Avatars of Vishnu are said to come originally from the White Island. According to Tibetan tradition the White Island is the only locality which escapes the general fate of other dwipas and can be destroyed by neither fire nor water, for -- it is the "eternal land."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 409 WHAT MARCELLUS SAYS.
islands beyond, which are not far from the firm land, near which is the true sea."
"These seven dwipas (inaccurately rendered islands) constitute, according to Marcellus, the body of the famous Atlantis," writes Wilford himself. . . . . This evidently shows that Atlantis is the old continent. . . . The Atlantis was destroyed after a violent storm (?): this is well known to the Puranics, some of whom assert that in consequence of this dreadful convulsion of nature, six of the dwipas disappeared" . . . (xi., 27).
Enough proofs have now been given to satisfy the greatest sceptic. Nevertheless, direct proofs based on exact science are also added. Volumes might be written, however, to no purpose for those who will neither see nor hear, except through the eyes and ears of their respective authorities.
Hence the teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon, the mount in the land of Mizpeth -- meaning "anathema," "destruction" -- is the same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the "Lord loved well"; and so mixed up are facts and personages in the said scholiasts' brains, that, when the Zohar explains the "birds" which inspired Balaam to mean "Serpents," to wit, the wise men and adepts at whose school he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy -- the opportunity is again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the "winged dragons of Evil, whose chief is Samael" (the Jewish Satan).
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"It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scapegoat of Israel, who assumed the name of one of them (Azaz(y)el), was sent" (Spencer).
We say it is not so. The Zohar has the following explanation on the practice of magic which is called in Hebrew Nehhaschim, or the "Serpents' Works." It says (Part III. col. 302): -- "It is called nehhaschim, because the magicians (practical Kabalists) work surrounded by the light of the primordial serpent, which they perceive in heaven as a luminous zone composed of myriads of small stars" . . . which means simply the astral light, so called by the Martinists, by Eliphas Levi, and now by all the modern Occultists. (Vide Sections about.)
-------
THE "CURSE" FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW.
The foregoing teachings of the SECRET DOCTRINE, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brahmanas and Puranas, the Yathas and other Mazdean Scriptures,
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down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish Sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane: all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition. Space forbids us from entering, in these two volumes, into further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our Fifth (Aryan) humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one philosopher and scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our Esoteric Doctrine are corroborated by inferential as well as by direct proof in almost every case. That neither the "legendary" giants, nor the lost continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding races, are quite baseless tales. In the Addenda which close this volume, science will find itself more than once unable to reply; they will, it is hoped, finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number in nature, and our figures in general. (Vide §§ on the Septenaries.)
Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete: that of disposing of that most pernicious of all the theological dogmas -- the CURSE under which mankind is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed disobedience of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden.
Creative powers in man were the gift of divine wisdom, not the result of sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour of Jehovah, who first curses Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the supposed committed crime, and then blesses his "chosen people" by saying "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth" (Gen. ix. 1). The curse was not brought on mankind by the Fourth Race, for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the still more gigantic Antediluvians, had perished in the same
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way; hence the Deluge was no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and geological law. Nor was the curse of KARMA called down upon them for seeking natural union, as all the mindless animal-world does in its proper seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the divine gift, and wasting the life-essence for no purpose except bestial personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of Genesis will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and the commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as easy for woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never intended that woman should bring forth her young ones "in sorrow." Since that period, however, during the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 411 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN MAN.
evolution of the Fourth Race, there came enmity between its seed, and the "Serpent's" seed, the seed or product of Karma and divine wisdom. For the seed of woman or lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge, by turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the law of Karma "bruised the heel" of the Atlantean race, by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,* until, from the healthy King of animal creation of the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our race, a helpless, scrofulous being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the globe to constitutional and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all animals!**
This is the real CURSE from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in the Kabalistic esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead of a blessing -- a gift quickened by the "Lords of Wisdom," who have poured on the human manas the fresh dew of their own spirit and essence. The divine Titan has then suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by AEschylus, in his "Prometheus Bound," when, at the close of the first Titanic age (the age that followed that of ethereal man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlocha), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as --
"Seeing, they saw in vain;
Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams,
Through the long time all things at random mixed."
Our Saviours, the Agnishwatta and other divine "Sons of the Flame of Wisdom" (personified by the Greeks in Prometheus***), may well, in
* How wise and grand, how far-seeing and morally beneficent are the laws of Manu on connubial life, when compared with the licence tacitly allowed to man in civilized countries. That those laws have been neglected for the last two millenniums does not prevent us from admiring their forethought. The Brahmin was a grihasta, a family man, till a certain period of his life, when, after begetting a son, he broke with married life and became a chaste Yogi. His very connubial life was regulated by his
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Brahmin astrologer in accordance with his nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjab, for instance, where the lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of European, licentiousness, has hardly touched the orthodox Aryan castes, one still finds the finest men -- so far as stature and physical strength go -- on the whole globe; whereas the mighty men of old have found themselves replaced in the Deccan, and especially in Bengal, by men whose generation becomes with every century (and almost with every year) dwarfed and weakened.
** Diseases and over-population are facts that can never be denied.
*** In Mrs. Anna Swanwick's volumes, "The Dramas of AEschylus," it is said of "Prometheus Bound" (Vol. II., pp. 146, 147), that Prometheus truly appears in it "as [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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the injustice of the human heart, be left unrecognized and unthanked. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora's gift: but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, the EVIL ONES, is too heavy a Karma for "Him" "who dared alone "-- when Zeus "ardently desired" to quench the entire human race -- to save "that mortal race" from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is made to say: --
"From sinking blasted down to Hades' gloom.
For this by the dire tortures I am bent,
Grievous to suffer, piteous to behold,
I who did mortals pity! . . . . "
The chorus remarking very pertinently: --
"Vast boon was this thou gavest unto mortals . . . ."
Prometheus answers: --
"Yea, and besides 'twas I that gave them fire.
CHORUS: Have now these short-lived creatures flame-eyed fire? PROM.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn. . . . . "
But, with the arts, the fire received has turned into the greatest curse: the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.* It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect; "the restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law."**
Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's "Protagoras," with that "wisdom which
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] the champion and benefactor of mankind, whose condition . . . . is depicted as weak and miserable in the extreme. . . . Zeus, it is said, proposed to annihilate these puny ephemerals, and to plant upon the earth a new race in their stead." We see the Lords of Being doing likewise, and exterminating the first product of nature and the sea, in the Stanzas (V, et seq.). . . . Prometheus represents himself as having frustrated this design, and as being consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to the most agonising pain, inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of Zeus. We have, thus, the Titan, the symbol of finite reason and free will (of intellectual humanity, or the higher aspect of Manas), depicted as the sublime philanthropist, while Zeus, the supreme deity of Hellas, is portrayed as the cruel and obdurate despot, a character peculiarly revolting to Athenian sentiment." The reason for it is explained further on. The "Supreme Deity" bears, in every ancient Pantheon -- including that of the Jews -- a dual character, composed of light and shadow.
* The animal world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its seasons of procreation, and the sexes become neutralized during the rest of the year. Therefore, the free animal knows sickness but once in its life -- before it dies.
** Introduction to "Prometheus Bound, " p. 152.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 413 THE TRAVESTY OF PROMETHEUS.
instead of "an untainted mind, heaven's first gift" (AEschylus), there was created the eternal vulture of the ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair coupled with "the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals" (p . 556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.
Now Christians -- Roman Catholics especially -- have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true theosophist, the pursuer of divine wisdom and worshipper of ABSOLUTE perfection -- the unknown deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah -- will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never was an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence -- the psychic being guided by the animal, and both putting out the light of the spiritual. He will say, "All ye who can read between the lines, study ancient wisdom in the old dramas -- the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the one just mentioned, one enacted on the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago, namely 'Prometheus Bound' " The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor AEschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it "is older than the Hellenes themselves," for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The Crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the "Host," and of the "Lords of Wisdom" or the HEAVENLY MAN, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name Pro-me-theus, meaning "he who sees before him" or futurity, shows* -- in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanos: --作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:23
* From [[pro metis ]] pro metis , "forethought." "Professor Kuhn," we are told in the above-named volumes of "The Dramas of AEschylus," "considers the name of the Titan to be derived from the Sanskrit word Pramantha, the instrument used for kindling fire. The root mand or manth, implies rotatory motion, and the word manthami (used to denote the process of fire kindling) acquired the secondary sense of snatching away; hence we find another word of the same stock, pramatha , signifying theft." This is very ingenious, but perhaps not altogether correct; besides, there is a very prosaic element in it. No doubt in physical nature, the higher forms may develop from the lower ones, but it is hardly so in the world of thought. And as we are told that the word manthami passed into the Greek language and became the word manthano, to learn; that is to say, to appropriate knowledge; whence prometheia, fore-knowledge, fore-thought; we may find, in searching, a more poetical origin for the "fire-bringer" than that displayed in its Sanskrit origin. The Svastica, the sacred sign and the instrument for kindling sacred fire, may explain it better. "Prometheus, the fire-bringer, is the Pramantha personified," goes on the author; "he finds his prototype in the Aryan [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early races, this will be no real digression.
The subject of AEschylus' drama (the trilogy is lost) is known to all cultured readers. The demi-god robs the gods (the Elohim) of their secret -- the mystery of the creative fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by KRONOS* and delivered unto Zeus, the FATHER and creator of a mankind which he would wish to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a personal deity, which will not see MAN "like one of us." Hence Prometheus, "the fire and light-giver," is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus: --
"E'en he the fore-ordained cannot escape. . . "
-- ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus --
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"One of thine (Io's) own descendants it must be. ."(791)
-- is born. This "Son" will deliver Prometheus (the suffering Humanity) from his own fatal gift. His name is, "He who has to come. . . . "
On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning; namely, on the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the daughter of Inachos, persecuted by Zeus -- a whole prophecy is constructed by some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan: --
"And, portent past belief, the speaking oaks
By which full clearly, in no riddling phrase
Wast hailed as the illustrious spouse of Zeus . . . . . . . . . (v. 853). . . . . stroking thee
With touch alone of unalarming hand; Then thou dark Epaphos shalt bear, whose name
Records his sacred gendering . . . . " (870)
This was construed by several fanatics -- des Mousseaux and de Mir-
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Matarisvan, a divine . . . . personage, closely associated with the fire god of the Veda, Agni. . . ." Mati, in Sanskrit, is "understanding," and a synonym of MAHAT and manas, and must be of some account in the origin of the name: Promati is the son of Fohat, and has his story also.
* Kronos is "time," and thus the allegory becomes very suggestive. (See closing pages of this Sub-
section.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 415 CHRIST CONNECTED WITH EPAPHOS.
ville amongst others -- into a clear prophecy. Io -- "is the mother of God," we are told, and "dark Epaphos" -- Christ. But, the latter has not dethroned his father, except metaphorically, if one has to regard Jehovah as that "Father"; nor has the Christian Saviour hurled his Father down into Hades. Prometheus says, in verse 930, that Zeus will be humbled yet; as for himself: --
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And wielding with both hands the fiery bolt;
For these shall not avail, but fail he shall, A fall disgraceful, not to be endured . . . . " (v. 980).
"Dark Epaphos" was the Dionysos-Sabazius, the son of Zeus and of Demeter in the Sabasian Mysteries, during which the "father of the gods," assuming the shape of a Serpent, begot on Demeter, Dionysos, or the solar Bacchus. Io is the moon, and at the same time the EVE of a new race, and so is Demeter -- in the present case. The Promethean myth is a prophecy indeed; but it does not relate to any of the cyclic Saviours who have appeared periodically in various countries and among various nations, in their transitionary conditions of evolution. It points to the last of the mysteries of cyclic transformations, in the series of which mankind, having passed from the ethereal to the solid physical state, from spiritual to physiological procreation, is now carried onward on the opposite arc of the cycle, toward that second phase of its primitive state, when woman knew no man, and human progeny was created, not begotten.
That state will return to it and to the world at large, when the latter shall discover and really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast problem of sex. It will be like "the light that never shone on sea or land," and has to come to men through the Theosophical Society. That light will lead on and up to the true spiritual intuition. Then (as expressed once in a letter to a theosophist), "the world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the world will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers to procreate Buddha-like children -- or demons. " "When that knowledge comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the demons, will die out."
If we reflect upon the serial development of the allegory, and the character of the heroes, the mystery may be unriddled. KRONOS is of course "time" in its cyclic course. He swallows his children -- the
* See, for explanation of this curse, the last page of the present sub-section.
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personal gods of exoteric dogmas included. He has swallowed instead of Zeus, his stone idol; but the symbol has grown, and has only developed in human fancy as mankind was cycling down toward only its physical and intellectual -- not spiritual -- perfection. When it is as far advanced in its spiritual evolution Kronos will be no longer deceived. Instead of the stone image he will have swallowed the anthropomorphic fiction itself. Because, the serpent of wisdom, represented in the Sabasian mysteries by the anthropomorphised Logos, the unity of spiritual and physical Powers, will have begotten in Time (Kronos) a progeny -- Dionysos-Bacchus or the "dark Epaphos," the "mighty one" -- the race that will overthrow him. Where will he be born? Prometheus traces him to his origin and birth-place in his prophecy to Io. Io is the moon-goddess of generation -- for she is Isis and she is Eve, the great mother.* He traces the path of the (racial) wanderings as plainly as words can express it. She has to quit Europe and go to Asia's continent, reaching there the highest of the mountains of Caucasus (737), the Titan telling her: --
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"When thou hast crossed the flood, limit betwixt
Two continents, fronting the burning East." (810)
that she must travel eastward, after passing the "Kimmerian Bosphorus," and cross what is evidently the Volga and now Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. After this she will encounter "fierce northern blasts" and cross thither to the land of the "Arimaspian host" (east of Herodotus' Scythia) to --
"Pluto's gold-abounding flood. . . ."(825)
Which is rightly conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the
* It is complained by the author of the version on, and translator of, "Prometheus Bound" that in this tracing of Io's wanderings, "no consistency with our known geography is attainable" (p. 191, Vol. II). There may be good reason for it. First of all it is the journey and wandering from place to place of the race from which the "tenth," or Kalki Avatar, so called, is to issue. This he calls the "Kingly race born in Argos" (888). But Argos has no reference here to Argos in Greece. It comes from Arg or arca -- the female generative power symbolised in the moon -- the navi-formed Argha of the mysteries, meaning the Queen of Heaven. Eustathius shows that, in the dialect of the Arg-ians, Io signified the moon; while esotericism explains it as the divine Androgyne, or the mystic 10; in Hebrew 10 is the perfect number, or Jehovah. Arghya in Sanskrit is the libation cup, the navi-form or boat-shaped vessel in which flowers and fruit are offered to the deities. Arghyanath is a title of the Maha-Chohan, meaning "the Lord of Libations;" and Arghya Varsha -- "the land of libations" -- is the mystery name of that region which extends from Kailas mountain nearly to the Schamo Desert -- from within which the Kalki Avatar is expected. The Airyana-Varsedya of the Zoroastrians, as a locality, is identical with it. It is now said to have been situated between the sea of Aral, Baltistan, and little Tibet; but in olden times its area was far larger, as it was the birth-place of physical humanity, of which Io is the mother and symbol.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 417 THE MISTAKE OF ARRIAN EXPLAINED.
Ural, the Arimaspi of Herodotus being "the recognised inhabitants of this golden region."
And here comes, between verses 825 and 835, a puzzle to all the European interpreters. Says the Titan: --
"To these (Arimaspi and Grypes) approach not; a far border land
Thou next wilt reach, where dwells a swarthy race
Near the Sun's founts, where is the AEthiop "river"; Along its banks proceed till thou attain
The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights
Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends . . . "
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There Io was ordained to found a colony for herself and sons. Now we must see how the passage is interpreted. As Io is told that she has to travel eastward till she comes to the river Ethiops, which she is to follow till it falls into the Nile -- hence the perplexity. "According to the geographical theories of the earliest Greeks" we are informed by the author of the version on "Prometheus Bound" --
"This condition was fulfilled by the river Indus. Arrian (vi. i.) mentions that Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the Indus (having seen crocodiles in the river Indus, and in no other river except the Nile . . . ), seemed to himself to have discovered the sources of the Nile, as though the Nile, rising from some place in India, and flowing through much desert land, and thereby losing its name Indus, next . . . flowed through inhabited land, being now called the Nile by the Ethiopians of those parts and afterwards by the Egyptians. Virgil in the 4th Georgic echoes the absolute error" (p . 197, Vol. II.).
Both Alexander and Virgil may have erred considerably in their geographical notions; but the prophecy of Prometheus has not so sinned, in the least -- not, at any rate, in its esoteric spirit. When a certain race is symbolised, and events pertaining to its history are rendered allegorically, no topographical accuracy ought to be expected in the itinerary traced for its personification. Yet it so happens, that the river "Ethiops" is certainly the Indus, and it is also the Nil or Nila. It is the river born on the Kailas (heaven) mountain, the mansion of the gods -- 22,000 feet above the level of the sea. It was the Ethiops river -- and was so called by the Greeks, long before the days of Alexander, because its banks, from Attock down to Sind, were peopled by tribes generally referred to as the Eastern Ethiopians. India and Egypt were two kindred nations, and the Eastern Ethiopians -- the mighty builders -- have come from India, as is pretty well proved, it is hoped, in "ISIS UNVEILED." (Vol. I. p. 569-70).
Then why could not Alexander, and even the learned Virgil have used the word Nile or Neilos when speaking of the Indus, since it is one of its names? To this day that river is called, in the regions around Kala-Bagh, nil (blue), and Nilah, "the blue river." The water here is of such dark blue colour that the name given to it from time immemorial led to
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a small town on its banks being called by the same name. It exists to this day. Evidently Arrian -- who wrote far later than the day of Alexander, and who was ignorant of the old name of the Indus -- has unconsciously slandered the Greek conqueror. Nor are our modern historians much wiser, in judging as they do. For they often make the most sweeping declarations on mere appearances, as much as their ancient colleagues ever did in days of old, when no Encyclopaedias were yet ready for them.
The race of IO, "the cow-horned maid" is then simply the first pioneer race of the AEthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile (which received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India*). For does not Prometheus say to Io** that the sacred Neilos (the god, not the river) --
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. . . "He to the land, three-cornered, thee shall guide," -- namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained to found -- . . . . . "that far-off colony . . ." (v. 830 et seq.).
It is there that a new race (the Egyptians) will begin, and a "female race" (873) which, "fifth in descent" from dark Epaphos --
"Fifty in number shall return to Argos."
. . . . . . . .
Then one of the fifty virgins will fail through love and shall -- . . .
A kingly race in Argos bear
. . . . . . . .
But from this seed shall dauntless heroes spring,
Bow-famous, who shall free me from these ills."
When this hero shall arise, the Titan does not reveal; for as he remarks: --
"This, to set forth at large needs lengthy speech."
* Alexander, who was better acquainted with Attock than with India (where he never went) could not have failed to hear the Indus near its very sources called Nil and Nilah. Even if a mistake, it is thus easily accounted for.
** That Io is identical allegorically with Isis and the moon is shown by her being "cow-horned." The allegory undeniably reached Greece from India, where Vach -- "the melodious cow" (Rig-Veda) "from whom mankind was produced" (Bhagavata Purana) is shown in the Aitareya Brahmana as pursued by her father Brahma, who was moved by an illicit passion, and changed her into a deer. Hence Io, refusing to yield to Jupiter's passion, becomes "horned." The cow was in every country the symbol of the passive generative power of nature, Isis, Vach, Venus -- the mother of the prolific god of love, Cupid, but, at the same time, that of the Logos whose symbol became with the Egyptians and the Indians -- the bull -- as testified to by Apis and the Hindu bulls in the most ancient temples. In esoteric philosophy the cow is the symbol of creative nature, and the Bull (her calf) the spirit which vivifies her, or "the Holy Spirit," as Mr. Kenealy shows. Hence the symbol of the horns. These were sacred also with the Jews, who placed near the altar horns of Shittim wood, by seizing which a criminal ensured his safety.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 419 WAS AESCHYLUS INITIATED?
But "Argos" is Arghya Varsha, the land of libation of the old Hierophants, whence the deliverer of
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Humanity will appear, a name which became ages later that of its neighbour, India -- the Arya-varta of old.
That the subject formed part of the Sabasian mysteries is made known by several ancient writers: by Cicero (in Tuscul. Quaest. I, ii. No. 20) and by Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. I, ii., oper. tom. 1, p. 467 -- Ed. Potter's). The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact that AEschylus was charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death, to its true cause. They say that having been himself uninitiated, AEschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his trilogies on a public stage.* But he would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated -- which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a daimon to reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical drama of initiation. At all events, it is not the "father of the Greek tragedy" who invented the prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed by the priests during the MYSTERIA of the Sabasia.** The latter, however, is one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras (the Sun, called Sabasius on some old monuments) with Jupiter and Bacchus. But it was never the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.
The translators of the drama wonder how AEschylus could become guilty of such "discrepancy between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the 'Prometheus Bound' and that depicted in the remaining dramas." (Mrs. A. Swanwick.) This is just because AEschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain the intellectual "Sphinx" of the ages. Between Zeus, the abstract deity of Grecian thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter represented during the mysteries no higher a principle than the lower aspect of human physical intelligence -- Manas wedded to Kama ; Prometheus -- its divine aspect merging into and aspiring to Buddhi -- the divine Soul. Zeus was the human soul and nothing more, whenever shown yielding to his lower passions, -- the jealous God, revengeful and cruel in its egotism or I-AM-NESS. Hence, Zeus is represented as a serpent -- the intellectual tempter of man -- which, nevertheless, begets in the course of
* Herodotus and Pausanias supposed that the cause of the condemnation was that AEschylus, adopting the theogony of the Egyptians, made Diana, the daughter of Ceres, and not of Latona. (See AElian Var. Hist. I, v. c . xviii., tom. 1, p. 433 Edition Gronov.) But AEschyIus was initiated.
** Sabasia was a periodical festival with mysteries enacted in honour of some gods, a variant on the Mithraic Mysteries. The whole evolution of the races was performed in them.
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cyclic evolution the "Man-Saviour," the solar Bacchus or "Dionysos," more than a man.
Dionysos is one with Osiris, with Krishna, and with Buddha (the heavenly wise), and with the coming (tenth) Avatar, the glorified Spiritual Christos, who will deliver the suffering Christos (mankind, or Prometheus, on its trial). This, say Brahminical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the Zoroastrian and
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now by the Christian teachings (the latter only occasionally), will happen at the end of Kaliyuga. It is only after the appearance of Kalki-Avatar, or Sosiosh, that man will be born from woman without sin. Then will Brahma, the Hindu deity; Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd), the Zoroastrian; Zeus, the Greco-
Olympian Don Juan; Jehovah, the jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their likes in the universal Pantheon of human fancy -- vanish and disappear in thin air. And along with these will vanish their shadows, the dark aspects of all those deities, ever represented as their "twin brothers" and creatures, in exoteric legend, their own reflection on earth -- in esoteric philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans, must be all dethroned on that day, when every dark evil passion will be subdued.
There is one eternal Law in nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this law of spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become freed from its false gods, and find itself finally -- SELF-
REDEEMED.
In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus -- his proto- and anti-types being found in every ancient theogony -- stands in each of them at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human physical life. KRONOS is "Time," whose first law is that the order of the successive and harmonious phases in the process of evolution during cyclic development should be strictly preserved -- under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development that man -- higher animal though he may be -- should become at once -- intellectually, spiritually, and psychically -- the demi-god he is on earth, while his physical frame remains weaker and more helpless and ephemeral than that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent; the tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling god. The gift of Prometheus thus became a CURSE -- though foreknown and foreseen by the HOST personified in that personage, as his name well shows.* It is in this that rests, at one and the same time,
* Vide supra, a foot-note concerning the etymology of [[prometis ]] prometis or forethought. Prometheus confesses it in the drama when saying: -- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 421 ONE OF THE FUNCTIONS OF ZEUS.
its sin and its redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual self-conscious pain and even torture "while myriad time shall flow" -- to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation was premature and not in the programme of nature, the heavenly host, "Prometheus," still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.* But while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility -- the result of his free will -- besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir to. This torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was still unachieved at that period of formation.
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Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical, once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the chief cause, if not the sole origin of Evil. ** The allegory which shows KRONOS cursing Zeus for dethroning him (in the primitive "golden" age of Saturn, when all men were demi-gods), and for creating a physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then as delivering to his (Zeus') revenge the culprit, who despoiled the gods of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their level, intellectually and spiritually -- is highly philosophical. In the case of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the primeval progenitors, of the PITAR, the "Fathers" who created man senseless
And yet what say I? Clearly I foreknew All that must happen . . . .
. . . . The Destined it behoves,
As best I may, to bear, for well I wot
How incontestable the strength of Fate . . . . (88-105)
"Fate" stands here for KARMA, or Nemesis.
* Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The "sacred spark" is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is "of one blood," but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent.
** The philosophical view of Indian metaphysics places the Root of Evil in the differentiation of the Homogeneous into the Heterogeneous, of the unit into plurality.
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and without any mind; while the divine Titan stands for the Spiritual creators, the devas who "fell" into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically stronger, than the "Prometheans": therefore, the latter are shown conquered. "The lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled and thus defeated the plans of Zeus," was on this earth in its own sphere and plane of action; whereas, the superior Host was an exile from Heaven, who had got entangled in the meshes of matter. They (the
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inferior "Host") were masters of all the Cosmic and lower titanic forces; the higher Titan possessed only the intellectual and spiritual fire. This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual mankind: the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and repentance. In every such case one sees once more --
"A god . . . in fetters, anguish fraught;
The foe of Zeus, in hatred held by all. . . . "
A god, bereft even of that supreme consolation of Prometheus, who suffered in self-sacrifice --
"For that to men he bare too fond a mind. . ."
as the divine Titan is moved by altruism, but the mortal man by Selfishness and Egoism in every instance.
The modern Prometheus has now become Epi-metheus, "he who sees only after the event"; because the universal philanthropy of the former has long ago degenerated into selfishness and self-adoration. Man will rebecome the free Titan of old, but not before cyclic evolution has re-established the broken harmony between the two natures -- the terrestrial and the divine; after which he becomes impermeable to the lower titanic forces, invulnerable in his personality, and immortal in his individuality, which cannot happen before every animal element is eliminated from his nature. When man understands that "Deus non fecit mortem " (Sap. I., 13), but that man has created it himself, he will re-become the Prometheus before his Fall.
For the full symbolism of Prometheus and the origin of this mythos in Greece, the reader is referred to Part II. of this Volume, chapter "A Second Key to Prometheus," etc. In the said Part -- a kind of supplement to the present portion -- every additional information is given upon those tenets that will be the most controverted and questioned. This work is so heterodox, when confronted with the acknowledged standards of theology and modern science, that no proof which tends to show that these standards often usurp an illegal authority should be neglected.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 423 THE "BUDDHAS OF CONFESSION."
ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE VERSES OF STANZA XII.
THE MS. from which these additional explanations are taken belongs to the group called "Tongshaktchi Sangye Songa," or the Records of the "Thirty-five Buddhas of Confession," as they are exoterically called. These personages, however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion "Buddhas," may just as well be called Rishis, or Avatars, etc., as they are "Buddhas who have preceded Sakyamuni" only for the Northern followers of the ethics preached by Gautama. These great Mahatmas, or Buddhas, are a universal and common property: they are historical sages -- at any rate, for all the Occultists who believe in such a hierarchy of Sages, the existence of which has been proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity. They are chosen from among some ninety-seven Buddhas in one group, and fifty-three in another,* mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifications of the powers of the first-named.** These "baskets" of the oldest writings on "palm leaves" are kept very secret. Each MS. has appended to it a short synopsis of the history of that sub-
race to which the particular "Buddha-Lha" belonged. The one special MS. from which the fragments which follow are extracted, and then rendered into a more comprehensible language, is said to have been copied from stone tablets which belonged to a Buddha of the earliest day of the Fifth Race, who had witnessed the Deluge and the submersion of the chief continents of the Atlantean race. The day when much, if not all, of that which is given here from the archaic records, will be found correct, is not far distant. Then the modern symbologists will acquire the certitude that even Odin, or the god Woden, the highest god in the German and Scandinavian mythology, is one of these thirty-five Buddhas; one of the earliest, indeed, for the continent to which he and his race belonged, is also one of the earliest. So early, in truth, that in the days when tropical nature was to be found, where now lie eternal unthawing snows, one could cross almost by dry land from Norway via Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present surround Hudson's
* Gautama Buddha, named Shakya Thub-pa, is the twenty-seventh of the last group, as most of these Buddhas belong to the divine dynasties which instructed mankind.
** Of these "Buddhas," or the "Enlightened," the far distant predecessors of Gautama the Buddha, and who represent, we are taught, once living men, great adepts and Saints, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatars of the Celestial Beings -- eleven only belong to the Atlantean race, and 24 to the Fifth race, from its beginnings. They are identical with the Tirtankaras of the Jainas.
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Bay.* Just, as in the palmy days of the Atlantean giants, the sons of the "giants from the East," a pilgrim could perform a journey from what in our days is termed the Sahara desert, to the lands which now rest in dreamless sleep at the bottom of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Events which were never written outside the human memory, but which were religiously transmitted from one generation to another, and from race to race, may have been preserved by constant transmission "within the book volume of the brain," and through countless aeons, with more truth and accuracy than inside any written document or record. "That which is part of our souls is eternal," says Thackeray; and what can be nearer to our souls than that which happens at the dawns of our lives? Those lives are countless, but the soul or spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and though "the book and volume" of the physical brain may forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections can never desert the divine soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever present before its mind's eye.
It is this soul-voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradition more than in written History, that what is said below is all true, and relates to pre-historic facts.
This is what is written in one passage: --
"THE KINGS OF LIGHT HAVE DEPARTED IN WRATH. THE SINS OF MEN HAVE BECOME SO BLACK THAT EARTH QUIVERS IN HER GREAT AGONY. . . . THE AZURE SEATS REMAIN EMPTY. WHO OF THE BROWN, WHO OF THE RED, OR YET AMONG THE BLACK (races), CAN SIT IN THE SEATS OF THE BLESSED, THE SEATS OF KNOWLEDGE AND MERCY! WHO CAN ASSUME THE FLOWER OF POWER, THE PLANT OF THE GOLDEN STEM AND THE AZURE BLOSSOM?"
* This may account for the similarity of the artificial mounds in the U. S. of America, and the tumuli in Norway. It is this identity that led some American archaeologists to suggest that Norwegian mariners had discovered America some one thousand years ago. ( Vide Holmboe's Traces de Bouddhisme en Norvege, p. 23). There is no doubt that America is that "far distant land into which pious men and heavy storms had transferred the sacred doctrine," as a Chinese writer suggested by his description to Neumann. But neither Professor Holmboe, of Stockholm, nor the American archaeologists, have guessed the right age of the mounds, or the tumuli. The fact that Norwegians may have re-discovered the land that their long-forgotten forefathers believed to have perished in the general submersion, does not conflict with that other fact that the Secret Doctrine of the land which was the cradle of physical man, and of the Fifth Race, had found its way into the so-called New World ages and ages before the "Sacred Doctrine" of Buddhism.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 425 THE OLDEST RECORDS ABOUT ATLANTIS.
The "Kings of Light" is the name given in all old records to the Sovereigns of the divine Dynasties. The "azure seats" are translated "celestial thrones" in certain documents. The "flower of power" is now the Lotus; what it may have been at that period, who can tell.
The writer proceeds, like the later Jeremiah, to bewail the fate of his people. They had become bereft of their "azure" (celestial) kings, and "they of the Deva hue," the moon-like complexion, and "they of the refulgent (golden) face" have gone "to the land of bliss, the land of metal and fire"; or -- agreeably with the rules of symbolism -- to the lands lying North and East, from whence "the great waters have been swept away, sucked in by the earth and dissipated in the air." The wise races had perceived "the black storm-dragons, called down by the dragons of wisdom" -- and "had fled, led on by the shining Protectors of the most Excellent Land" -- the great ancient adepts, presumably; those the Hindus refer to as their Manus and Rishis. One of them was Vaivasvata Manu.
They "of the yellow hue" are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now classes as the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations; and the land they fled to was no other than Central Asia. There entire new races were born; there they lived and died until the separation of the nations. But this "separation" did not take place either in the localities assigned for it by modern science, nor in the way the Aryans are shown to have divided and separated by Mr. Max Muller and other Aryanists. Nearly two-thirds of one million years have elapsed since that period. The yellow-faced giants of the post-Atlantean day, had ample time, throughout this forced confinement to one part of the world, and with the same racial blood and without any fresh infusion or admixture in it, to branch off during a period of nearly 700,000 years into the most heterogeneous and diversified types. The same is shown in Africa; nowhere does a more extraordinary variability of types exist, from black to almost white, from gigantic men to dwarfish races; and this only because of their forced isolation. The Africans have never left their continent for several hundred thousands of years. If to-morrow the continent of Europe were to disappear and other lands to re-emerge instead; and if the African tribes were to separate and scatter on the face of the earth, it is they who, in about a hundred thousand years hence, would form the bulk of the civilized nations. And it is the descendants of those of our highly cultured nations, who might have survived on some one island, without any means of crossing the new seas, that would fall back into a state of relative savagery. Thus the reason given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.
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Such are the statements made and facts given in the archaic records. Collating and comparing them with some modern theories of Evolution, minus natural selection ( Vide "Physiological Selection" by G. J. Romanes, F.R.S.), these statements appear quite reasonable and logical.* Thus, while the Aryans are the descendants of the yellow Adams, the gigantic and highly civilized tlanto-Aryan race, the Semites -- and the Jews along with them -- are those of the red Adam; and both de Quatrefages and the writers of the Mosaic Genesis are right. For, could chapter v. of the First Book of Moses be compared with the genealogies found in our Archaic Bible, the period from Adam unto Noah would be found noticed therein, of course under different names, the respective years of the Patriarchs being turned
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into periods, the whole being shown symbolical and allegorical. In the MS. under consideration many and frequent are the references to the great knowledge and civilization of the Atlantean nations, showing the polity of several of them and the nature of their arts and sciences. If the Third Root-Race, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, are already spoken of as having been drowned "with their high civilizations and gods" ( "Esoteric Buddhism," p. 65), how much more may the same be said of the Atlanteans!
It is from the Fourth Race that the early Aryans got their knowledge of "the bundle of wonderful things," the Sabha and Mayasabha, mentioned in the Mahabharata, the gift of Mayasur to the Pandavas. It is from them that they learnt aeronautics, Viwan Vidya (the "knowledge of flying in air-
vehicles"), and, therefore, their great arts of meteorography and meteorology. It is from them, again, that the Aryans inherited their most valuable science of the hidden virtues of precious and other stones, of chemistry, or rather alchemy, of mineralogy, geology, physics and astronomy.
Several times the writer has put to herself the question: "Is the story of Exodus -- in its details at least -- as narrated in the Old Testament, original? Or is it, like the story of Moses himself and many others, simply another version of the legends told of the Atlanteans?" For who, upon hearing the story told of the latter, will fail to perceive the great similarity of the fundamental features? The anger of "God" at the obduracy of Pharaoh, his command to the "chosen" ones, to spoil the Egyptians, before departing, of their "jewels of silver and jewels of gold" (Exod. xi.); and finally the Egyptians and their Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea (xiv.). For here is a fragment of the earlier story from the Commentary: --
* Vide the first pages of Part III., SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 427 THE DOOM OF ATLANTIS.
. . . "And the 'great King of the dazzling Face,' the chief of all the Yellow-faced, was sad, seeing the sins of the Black-faced.
"He sent his air-vehicles (Viwan) to all his brother-chiefs (chiefs of other nations and tribes) with pious men within, saying: 'Prepare. Arise ye men of the good law, and cross the land while (yet) dry.'
'The Lords of the storm are approaching. Their chariots are nearing the land. One night and two days only shall the Lords of the Dark Face (the Sorcerers) live on this patient land. She is doomed, and they have to descend with her. The nether Lords of the Fires (the Gnomes and fire Elementals) are preparing their magic Agneyastra (fire-weapons worked by magic). But the Lords of the Dark Eye ("Evil Eye") are stronger than they (the Elementals) and they are the slaves of the mighty ones. They are versed in Ashtar (Vidya, the highest magical knowledge).* Come and use yours (i.e., your magic powers, in order to counteract those of the Sorcerers). Let every lord of the Dazzling Face (an adept of the White Magic) cause the Viwan of every lord of the Dark Face to come into his hands (or possession), lest any (of the Sorcerers) should by its means escape from the waters, avoid the rod of the Four, (Karmic deities) and save his wicked' (followers, or people).
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'May every yellow face send sleep from himself (mesmerize?) to every black face. May even they (the Sorcerers) avoid pain and suffering. May every man true to the Solar Gods bind (paralyze) every man under the lunar gods, lest he should suffer or escape his destiny.
'And may every yellow face offer of his life-water (blood) to the speaking animal of a black face, lest he awaken his master.**
'The hour has struck, the black night is ready, etc., etc.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
'Let their destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the great Four. *** May the Kings of light return.' "
* Wrote the late Brahmachari Bawa, a Yogi of great renown and holiness: "Extensive works on Ashtar Vidya and such other sciences were at different times compiled in the languages of the times. But the Sanskrit originals were lost at the time of the partial deluge of our country." . . . (See Theosophist of June, 1880, "Some Things the Aryans Knew.") For Agneyastra, see Wilson's Specimens of the Hindu Theatre, I., p. 297.
** Some wonderful, artificially-made beast, similar in some way to Frankenstein's creation, which spoke and warned his master of every approaching danger. The master was a "black magician," the mechanical animal was informed by a djin, an Elemental, according to the accounts. The blood of a pure man alone could destroy him. Vide Part II., xxvii., "Seven in Astronomy, Science, and Magic."
*** The four Karmic gods, called the Four Maharajahs in the Stanzas.
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"The great King fell upon his dazzling Face and wept. . . .
"When the Kings assembled the waters had already moved. . . .
"(But) the nations had now crossed the dry lands. They were beyond the water mark. Their Kings reached them in their Viwans, and led them on to the lands of Fire and Metal (East and North)."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Still, in another passage, it is said: --
" . . . . Stars (meteors) showered on the lands of the black Faces; but they slept.
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"The speaking beasts (the magic watchers) kept quiet.
"The nether lords waited for orders, but they came not, for their masters slept.
"The waters arose, and covered the valleys from one end of the Earth to the other. High lands remained, the bottom of the Earth (the lands of the antipodes) remained dry. There dwelt those who escaped; the men of the yellow-faces and of the straight eye (the frank and sincere people).
"When the Lords of the Dark Faces awoke and bethought themselves of their Viwans in order to escape from the rising waters, they found them gone."
Then a passage shows some of the more powerful magicians of the "Dark Face" -- who awoke earlier than the others -- pursuing those who had "spoilt them" and who were in the rear-guard, for -- "the nations that were led away, were as thick as the stars of the milky way," says a more modern Commentary, written in Sanskrit only.
"Like as a dragon-snake uncoils slowly its body, so the Sons of men, led on by the Sons of Wisdom, opened their folds, and spreading out, expanded like a running stream of sweet waters. . . . . . many of the faint-hearted among them perished on their way. But most were saved."
Yet the pursuers, "whose heads and chests soared high above the water," chased them "for three lunar terms" until finally reached by the rising waves, they perished to the last man, the soil sinking under their feet and the earth engulfing those who had desecrated her.
This sounds a good deal like the original material upon which the similar story in Exodus was built many hundred thousands of years later. The biography of Moses, the story of his birth, childhood and rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, is now shown to have been adapted from the Chaldean narrative about Sargon. And if so, the Assyrian tile in the British Museum being a good proof of it, why not that of the Jews robbing the Egyptians of their jewels, the death of Pharaoh and his army, and so on? The gigantic magicians of Ruta and Daitya, the "lords of the Dark Face," may have become in the later narrative the Egyptian Magi, and the yellow-faced nations of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 429 SHADOWY MEMENTOS OF THE PAST.
the Fifth Race, the virtuous sons of Jacob, the "chosen people." . . . One more statement has to be made: There have been several Divine Dynasties -- a series for every Root Race beginning with the Third, each series according and adapted to its Humanity. The last Seven Dynasties referred to in the Egyptian and Chaldean records belong to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Aryan, was not entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethnology gives other names. It would be impossible, in view of the limited space at our disposal, to go any further into the description of the Atlanteans, in whom the whole East believes as much as we believe in the ancient Egyptians, but whose existence the majority of the Western Scientists deny, as they have denied, before this,
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many a truth, from the existence of Homer down to that of the carrier pigeon. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater even than that of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato's Atlantis, which built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainly before the advent of the "Eastern AEthiopians," as Herodotus calls the Egyptians. This may be well inferred from the statement made by Ammianus Marcellinus, who says of the Pyramids that "there are also subterranean passages and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful in the ancient mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost."
These men who "divined the coming of floods" were not Egyptians, who never had any, except the periodical rising of the Nile. Who were they? The last remnants of the Atlanteans, we maintain. Those races which are dimly suspected by Science, and thinking of which Mr. Ch. Gould, the well-known geologist, says: "Can we suppose that we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in fact, penetrated yet beyond its antechambers? Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and of China, shadowy mementos of pre-historic man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands from others, which, like the fabled (?) Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization" ( "Mythical Monsters," p . 19).
After this one can turn with more confidence to the words of a Master who wrote, several years before these words were penned by Mr. Gould: -- "The Fourth Race had its periods of the highest civilization. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian civilizations are nothing com-
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pared to the civilizations that began with the Third Race" -- after its separation.
But if this civilization and the mastery of arts and sciences are denied to the Third and Fourth Races, no one will deny that between the great civilizations of antiquity, such as those of Egypt and India, there stretched the dark ages of crass ignorance and barbarism ever since the beginning of the Christian era up to our modern civilization; during which period all recollection of these traditions was lost. As said in Isis Unveiled: "Why should we forget that, ages before the prow of the adventurous Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phoenician vessels had circumnavigated the globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What archaeologist will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did not erect the monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia? or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin? or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums -- last mementos of the long 'lost arts' -- speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediaeval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will --
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at least, in the present century."
And the same question may be put now that was put then; it may be once more asked: "How does it happen that the most advanced standpoint that has been reached in our times, only enables us to see in the dim distance up the Alpine path of knowledge the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they had reached and occupied?
"If modern masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they not restore to us the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do they not give us the unfading colours of Luxor -- the Tyrian purple; the bright vermilion and dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this place, and are as bright as on the first day of their application? The indestructible cement of the pyramids and of ancient aqueducts; the Damascus blade, which can be turned like a corkscrew in its scabbard without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of the stained glass that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And if chemistry is so little able to rival even the early mediaeval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, accord-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 431 MISTAKES OF THE EGYPTOLOGISTS.
ing to strong probability, were perfectly known thousands of years ago? The more archeology and philology advance, the more humiliating to our pride are the discoveries which are daily made, the more glorious testimony do they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps on account of the distance of their remote antiquity, have been until now considered ignorant flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition."
Among other arts and sciences, the ancients -- ay, as a heirloom from the Atlanteans -- had those of astronomy and symbolism, which included the knowledge of the Zodiac.
As already explained, the whole of antiquity believed, with good reason, that humanity and its races are all intimately connected with the planets, and these with Zodiacal signs. The whole world's History is recorded in the latter. In the ancient temples of Egypt this was proved by the Dendera Zodiac; but except in an Arabic work, the property of a Sufi, the writer has never met with a correct copy of these marvellous records of the past, as also of the future, history of our globe. Yet the original records exist, most undeniably.
As Europeans are unacquainted with the real Zodiacs of India, nor do they understand those they happen to know (witness Bentley), the reader is advised, in order to verify the statement, to turn to the work of Denon (Travels in Egypt, Vol. II.) in which, if understood, the two famous Egyptian Zodiacs, can be found and examined. Having seen them personally, the writer has no longer need to trust to what other students -- who have examined and studied both very carefully - have to say of them. As asserted by the Egyptian Priests to Herodotus, who was informed that the terrestrial Pole and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, thus was it found and corroborated by Mackey.* For he states that the Poles are represented on the Zodiacs in both positions, "And in that which shows the Poles (polar axes) at right angles, there are marks which prove that 'it was not the last time they were in that
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position; but the first' -- after the Zodiacs had been traced." "Capricorn," he adds, "is represented at the North Pole, and Cancer is divided, near its middle, at the South Pole; which is a confirmation that originally they had their winter when the Sun was in Cancer; but the chief characteristics of its being a monument commemorating the first time that the Pole had been in that position, are the Lion and the Virgin." (See in Part II., §"A Mystery of the Zodiac.")
Broadly calculated, it is believed by the Egyptologists that the great Pyramid was built 3,350 B.C. (See Proctor, Knowledge, Vol. I. pp . 242, 400); and that Menes and his Dynasty existed 7 50 years before the Fourth
* "The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated" by a strangely intuitional symbologist and astronomer, a kind of a self-made adept of Norwich, who lived in the first quarter of this century.
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Dynasty (supposed to have built the Pyramids) had appeared ("The Great Pyramid," Staniland Wake). Thus 4,100 years B.C. is the age assigned to Menes. Now Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson's declaration that "all the facts lead to the conclusion that the Egyptians had already made very great progress in the arts of civilization before the age of Menes, and perhaps before they immigrated into the valley of the Nile" (Rawlinson's "Herodotus," vol. ii. p. 345) is very suggestive, as destroying this hypothesis. It points to great civilization in prehistoric times, and a still greater antiquity. The Schesoo-Hor ("the servants of Horus") were the people who had settled in Egypt; and, as M. G. Maspero affirms, it is to this prehistoric race that "belongs the honour . . . of having founded the principal cities of Egypt, and established the most important sanctuaries." This was before the great Pyramid epoch, and when Egypt had hardly arisen from the waters. Yet "they possessed the hieroglyphic form of writing special to the Egyptians, and must have been already considerably advanced in civilization." It was, says Lenormant, "the country of the great prehistoric sanctuaries, seats of the sacerdotal dominion, which played the most important part in the origin of civilization." What is the date assigned to this people? We hear of 4,000, at the utmost of 5,000 years B.C. (Maspero). Now it is claimed that it is by means of the cycle of 25,868 years (the Sidereal year) that the approximate year of the erection of the Great Pyramid can be ascertained. "Assuming that the long narrow downward passage was directed towards the pole star of the pyramid builders, astronomers have shown that . . . . Alpha Draconis, the then pole-star, was in the required position about 3,350 B.C., as well as in 2,170 B.C. (Proctor, quoted by Staniland Wake.) But we are also told that "this relative position of Alpha Draconis and Alcyone being an extraordinary one . . it could not occur again for a whole sidereal year" (ibid). This demonstrates that, since the Dendera Zodiac shows the passage of three sidereal years, the great Pyramid must have been built 78,000 years ago, or in any case that this possibility deserves to be accepted at least as readily as the later date of 3,350 B.C.
Now on the Zodiac of a certain temple in far Northern India, as on the Dendera Zodiac, the same characteristics of the signs are found. Those who know well the Hindu symbols and constellations, will be able to find out by the description of the Egyptian, whether the indications of the chronological
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time are correct or not. On the Dendera Zodiac as preserved by the modern Egyptian Coptic and Greek adepts, and explained a little differently by Mackey, the Lion stands upon the Hydra and his tail is almost straight, pointing downwards at an angle of forty or fifty degrees, this position agreeing with the original conformation of these constellations. "But in many places we see the Lion (Simha),"
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 433 THEORIES OF A SELF-MADE ADEPT.
Mackey adds, "with his tail turned up over his back, and ending with a Serpent's head; thereby showing that the Lion had been 'inverted'; which, indeed, must have been the case with the whole Zodiac and every other Constellation, when the Pole had been inverted."
Speaking of the Circular Zodiac, given also by Denon, he says: -- There, "the Lion is standing on the Serpent, and his tail forming a curve downward, from which it is found that though six or seven hundred thousand years must have passed between the two positions, yet they had made but little difference between in the constellations of Leo and the Hydra; while Virgo is represented very differently in the two. In the circular Zodiac, the Virgin is nursing her child; but it seems that they had not had that idea when the pole was first within the plane of the Ecliptic; for in this Zodiac, as given by Denon, we see three Virgins between the Lion and the Scales, the last of which holds in her hand an ear of wheat. It is much to be lamented that there is in this Zodiac a breach of the figure in the latter part of Leo and the beginning of Virgo which has taken away one Decan out of each sign."
Nevertheless, the meaning is plain, as the three Zodiacs belong to three different epochs: namely, to the last three family races of the fourth Sub-race of the Fifth Root-race, each of which must have lived approximately from 25 to 30,000 years. The first of these (the "Aryan-Asiatics") witnessed the doom of the last of the populations of the "giant Atlanteans"* who perished some 850,000 years ago (the Ruta and Daitya Island-Continents) toward the close of the Miocene Age.** The fourth sub-race witnessed the destruction of the last remnant of the Atlanteans -- the Aryo-Atlanteans in the last island of Atlantis, namely, some 11,000 years ago. In order to understand this the reader
* The term "Atlantean" must not mislead the reader to regard these as one race only, or even a nation. It is as though one said "Asiatics." Many, multityped, and various were the Atlanteans, who represented several humanities, and almost a countless number of races and nations, more varied indeed than would be the "Europeans" were this name to be given indiscriminately to the five existing parts of the world; which, at the rate colonization is proceeding, will be the case, perhaps, in less than two or three hundred years. There were brown, red, yellow, white and black Atlanteans; giants and dwarfs (as some African tribes comparatively are, even now).
** Says a teacher in "Esoteric Buddhism," on p. 64: "In the Eocene age, even in its very first part, the great cycle of the fourth race men the (Lemuro) Atlanteans had already reached its highest point (of civilization), and the great continent, the father of nearly all the present continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking. . . ." And on page 70, it is shown that Atlantis as a whole perished during the Miocene period. To show how the continents, races, nations and cycles overlap each other, one has but
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to think of Lemuria, the last of whose lands perished about 700,000 years before the beginning of the Tertiary period (see p. 65 of the same work), and the last of "Atlantis" only 11,000 years ago; thus both overlapping -- one the Atlantean period, and the other the Aryan.
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is asked to glance at the diagram of the genealogical tree of the Fifth Root-Race -- generally, though hardly correctly, called the Aryan race, and the explanations appended to it.
Let the reader remember well that which is said of the divisions of Root Races and the evolution of Humanity in this work, and stated clearly and concisely in Mr. Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism."
1. There are seven ROUNDS in every manvantara; this one is the Fourth, and we are in the Fifth Root-
Race, at present.
2. Each Root-Race has seven sub-races.
3. Each sub-race has, in its turn, seven ramifications, which may be called Branch or "Family" races.
4. The little tribes, shoots, and offshoots of the last-named are countless and depend on Karmic action. Examine the "genealogical tree" hereto appended, and you will understand. The illustration is purely diagrammatic, and is only intended to assist the reader in obtaining a slight grasp of the subject, amidst the confusion which exists between the terms which have been used at different times for the divisions of Humanity. It is also here attempted to express in figures -- but only within approximate limits, for the sake of comparison -- the duration of time through which it is possible to definitely distinguish one division from another. It would only lead to hopeless confusion if any attempt were made to give accurate dates to a few; for the Races, Sub-Races, etc., etc., down to their smallest ramifications, overlap and are entangled with each other until it is nearly impossible to separate them.
The human Race has been compared to a tree, and this serves admirably as an illustration.
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The main stem of a tree may be compared to the ROOT-RACE (A).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 435 ILLUSTRATION OF THE RACES.
Its larger limbs to the various SUB-RACES; seven in number (B1, B2).
On each of these limbs are seven BRANCHES, OR FAMILY-RACES. (C).
After this the cactus-plant is a better illustration, for its fleshy "leaves" are covered with sharp spines, each of which may be compared to a nation or tribe of human beings.
Now our Fifth Root-Race has already been in existence -- as a race sui generis and quite free from its parent stem -- about 1,000,000 years; therefore it must be inferred that each of the four preceding Sub-
Races has lived approximately 210,000 years; thus each Family-Race has an average existence of about 30,000 years. Thus the European "Family Race" has still a good many thousand years to run, although the nations or the innumerable spines upon it, vary with each succeeding "season" of three or four thousand years. It is somewhat curious to mark the comparative approximation of duration between the lives of a "Family-Race" and a "Sidereal year."
The knowledge of the foregoing, and the accurately correct division, formed part and parcel of the Mysteries, where these Sciences were taught to the disciples, and where they were transmitted by one hierophant to another. Everyone is aware that the European astronomers assign (arbitrarily enough) the
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date of the invention of the Egyptian Zodiac to the years 2000 or 2400 B.C. (Proctor); and insist that this invention coincides in its date with that of the erection of the Great Pyramid. This, to an Occultist and Eastern astronomer, must appear quite absurd. The year of the Kaliyuga is said to have begun between the 17th and 18th of February in the year 3102 B.C. Now the Hindus claim that in the year 20400 before Kaliyugam, the origin of their Zodiac coincided with the spring equinox -- there being at the time a conjunction of the Sun and Moon -- and Bailly proved by a lengthy and careful computation of that date, that, even if fictitious, the epoch from which they had started to establish the beginning of their Kaliyug was very real. That "epoch is the year 3102 before our era," he writes. (See Part III., Book I. "Hindu Astronomy defended by an Academician".) The lunar eclipse arriving just a fortnight after the beginning of the black Age -- it took place in a point situated between the Wheat Ear of Virgo and the star [[theta]] of the same constellation. One of their most esoteric Cycles is based upon certain conjunctions and respective positions of Virgo and the Pleiades -- (Krittika). Hence, as the Egyptians brought their Zodiac from Southern India and Lanka,* the esoteric meaning was evidently identical. The three "Virgins," or Virgo in three different positions, meant, with both, the record of the first three "divine or astronomical Dynasties," who taught the Third
Root-Race; and after having abandoned the Atlanteans to their doom, returned (or redescended, rather) during the third Sub-Race of the Fifth, in order to reveal to saved humanity the mysteries of their birth-
place -- the sidereal Heavens. The same symbolical record of the human races and the three Dynasties (Gods, Manes -- semi-divine astrals of the Third and Fourth, and the "Heroes" of the Fifth Race), which preceded the purely human kings, was found in the distribution of the tiers and passages of the Egyptian Labyrinth. As the three inversions of the Poles of course changed the face of the Zodiac, a new one had to be constructed each time. In Mackey's "Sphinxiad" the speculations of the bold author must have horrified the orthodox portion of the population of Norwich, as he says, fantastically enough: --
"But, after all, the greatest length of time recorded by those monuments (the Labyrinth, the Pyramids and the Zodiacs) does not exceed five millions of years (which is not so)*; which falls short of the records given us both by the (esoteric) Chinese and Hindus; which latter nation has registered a knowledge of time for seven or eight millions of years**; which I have seen upon a talisman of porcelain. . . . "
The Egyptian priests had the Zodiacs of the Atlantean Asura-Maya, as the modern Hindus still have. As stated in "Esoteric Buddhism, " the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and "Romans" some thousand years ago, were "remnants of the Atlanto-Aryans," i.e., the former, of the older, or the Ruta Atlanteans; the last-named, the descendants of the last race of that island, whose sudden disappearance was narrated to Solon by the Egyptian Initiates. The human Dynasty of the older Egyptians, beginning with Menes, had all the knowledge of the Atlanteans, though there was no more Atlantean blood in
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their veins. Nevertheless, they had preserved all their Archaic records. All this has been shown long ago.*** And it is just because the Egyptian Zodiac is between 75 and 80,000 years old that the Zodiac of the Greeks is far later. Volney has correctly pointed out in his "Ruins of Empires" (p. 360) that it is only 16,984 years old, or up to the present date 17,082.****
* The forefathers of the Aryan Brahmins had their Zodiacal calculations and Zodiac from those born by Kriyasakti power, the "Sons of Yoga"; the Egyptians from the Atlanteans of Ruta.
** The former, therefore, may have registered time for seven or eight millions of years, but the Egyptians could not.
*** This question was amply challenged, and as amply discussed and answered. See Five Years of Theosophy. (Art. "Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism," pp. 325-46).
**** Volney says that, as Aries was in its 15th degree 1447 B.C., it follows that the first degree of "Libra" could not have coincided with the vernal equinox more lately than 15,194 years B.C., to which if you add 1790 since Christ, when Volney wrote this, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the (Greek or rather Hellenic) origin of the Zodiac.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 437 MORE IN THE FORTHCOMING VOLUMES.
CONCLUSION.
Space forbids us to say anything more, and this part of the "Secret Doctrine" has to be closed. The forty-nine Stanzas and the few fragments from the Commentaries just given are all that can be published in these volumes. These, with some still older records -- to which none but the highest Initiates have access -- and a whole library of comments, glossaries, and explanations, form the synopsis of Man's genesis.
It is from the Commentaries that we have hitherto quoted and tried to explain the hidden meaning of some of the allegories, thus showing the true views of esoteric antiquity upon geology, anthropology, and even ethnology. We will endeavour in the Part which follows, to establish a still closer metaphysical connection between the earliest races and their Creators, the divine men from other worlds; accompanying the statements proffered with the most important demonstrations of the same in esoteric Astronomy and Symbolism.
In Volume III. of this work (the said volume and the IVth being almost ready) a brief history of all the great adepts known to the ancients and the moderns in their chronological order will be given, as also a bird's eye view of the Mysteries, their birth, growth, decay, and final death -- in Europe. This could not find room in the present work. Volume IV. will be almost entirely devoted to Occult teachings.
The duration of the periods that separate, in space and time, the Fourth from the Fifth Race -- in the historical* or even the legendary beginnings of the latter -- is too tremendous for us to offer, even to a Theosophist, any more detailed accounts of them. During the course of the post-diluvian ages -- marked at certain periodical epochs by the most terrible cataclysms -- too many races and nations were born, and have disappeared almost without leaving a trace, for any one to offer any description of the slightest value concerning them. Whether the Masters of Wisdom have a consecutive and full history of our race from its incipient stage down to the present times; whether they possess the uninterrupted record of man since he became the complete physical being, and became thereby the king of the animals and master on this earth -- is not for the writer to say. Most probably they have,
* The word "historical" is used, because, although historians have dwarfed almost absurdly the dates that separate certain events from our modern day, nevertheless, once that they are known and accepted, they belong to history. Thus the Trojan War is an historical event; and though even less than 1,000 years B.C. is the date assigned to it, yet in truth it is nearer 6,000 than 5,000 years B.C.
and such is our own personal conviction. But if so, this knowledge is only for the highest Initiates, who do not take their students into their confidence. The writer can, therefore, give but what she has herself been taught, and no more.
But even this will appear to the profane reader rather as a weird, fantastic dream, than as a possible reality.
This is only natural and as it should be, since for years such was the impression made upon the humble writer of these pages herself. Born and bred in European, matter-of-fact and presumably civilized countries, she assimilated the foregoing with the utmost difficulty. But there are proofs of a certain character which become irrefutable and are undeniable in the long run, to every earnest and unprejudiced mind. For a series of years such were offered to her, and now she has the full certitude that our present globe and its human races must have been born, grown and developed in this, and in no other way.
But this is the personal view of the writer; and her orthodoxy cannot be expected to have any more weight than any other "doxy," in the eyes of those to whom every fresh theory is heterodox until otherwise proved. Therefore are we Occultists fully prepared for such questions as these: "How does one know that the writer has not invented the whole scheme? And supposing she has not, how can one tell that the whole of the foregoing, as given in the Stanzas, is not the product of the imagination of the ancients? How could they have preserved the records of such an immense, such an incredible antiquity?"
The answer that the history of this world since its formation and to its end "is written in the stars," i.e., is recorded in the Zodiac and the Universal Symbolism whose keys are in the keeping of the Initiates, will hardly satisfy the doubters. The antiquity of the Zodiac in Egypt is much doubted, and it is denied point-blank with regard to India. "Your conclusions are often excellent, but your premises are always doubtful," the writer was once told by a profane friend. To this, the answer came that it was one point, at least, gained on the scientific syllogisms. For, with the exception of a few problems from the domain of purely physical science, both the premises and conclusions of the men of Science are as hypothetical as they are almost invariably erroneous. And if they do not so appear to the profane, the reason is simply this: the said profane is very little aware, taking as he does his scientific data on faith, that both premises and conclusions are generally the product of the same brains, which, however learned, are not infallible; a truism demonstrated daily by the shifting and re-shifting of scientific theories and speculations.
However it may be, the records of the temples, Zodiacal and traditional, as well as the ideographic records of the East, as read by the
adepts of the Sacred Science and Vidya, are not a whit more doubtful than the so-called ancient history of the European nations, now edited, corrected, and amplified by half a century of archaeological discoveries, and the very problematical readings of the Assyrian tiles, cuneiform fragments, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. So are our data based upon the same readings, in addition to an almost inexhaustible number of Secret works of which Europe knows nothing -- plus the perfect knowledge by the Initiates of the symbolism of every word so recorded. Some of these records belong to an immense antiquity. Every archaeologist and palaeontologist is acquainted with the ideographic productions of certain semi-savage tribes, who from time immemorial have aimed at rendering their thoughts symbolically. This is the earliest mode of recording events and ideas. And how old this knowledge is in the human race may be inferred from some signs, evidently ideographic, found on hatchets of the Palaeolithic period. The red Indian tribes of America, only a few years ago comparatively speaking, petitioned the President of the United States to grant them possession of four small lakes, the petition being written on the tiny surface of a piece of a fabric, which is covered with barely a dozen representations of animals and birds. (See Lubbock.) The American savages have a number of such different kinds of writing, but not one of our Scientists is yet familiar, or even knows of the early hieroglyphic cypher, still preserved in some Fraternities, and named in Occultism the Senzar. Moreover, all those who have decided to regard such modes of writing -- e.g., the ideographs of the Red Indians, and even the Chinese characters -- as "attempts of the early races of mankind to express their untutored thoughts," will decidedly object to our statement, that writing was invented by the Atlanteans, and not at all by the Phoenicians. Indeed, such a claim as that writing was known to mankind many hundreds of millenniums ago, in the face of the philologists who have decreed that writing was unknown in the days of, and to Panini, in India, as also to the Greeks in the time of Homer, will be met by general disapprobation, if not with silent scorn. All denial and ridicule notwithstanding, the Occultists will maintain the claim, and simply for this reason: from Bacon down to our modern Royal Society, we have a too long period, full of the most ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing in modern scientific assumptions rather than in the denials of our Teachers. Writing, our scientists say, was unknown to Panini; and this sage nevertheless composed a grammar which contains 3,996 rules, and is the most perfect of all the grammars that were ever made! Panini is made out to have lived barely a few centuries B.C., by the most liberal; and the rocks in Iran and Central Asia (whence the philologists and historians
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
show us the ancestors of the same Panini, the Brahmins, coming into India) are covered with writing, two and three thousand years old (12,000, according to some fearless palaeontologists).
Writing was an ars incognita in the days of Hesiod and Homer, agreeably to Grote, and unknown to the Greeks so late as 770 B.C.; and the Phoenicians who had invented it, and knew writing as far back as 1500 B.C., at the earliest,* were living among the Greeks, and elbowing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory conclusions disappeared, however, into thin air, when Schliemann discovered (a) the site of ancient Troy, whose actual existence had been so long regarded as a fable; and (b), excavated on that site earthenware vessels with inscriptions in characters unknown to the paleontologists and the all-denying Sanskritists. Who will now deny Troy, or these Archaic inscriptions? As Professor Virchow witnesses: -- "I was myself an eye-witness of two such
discoveries, and helped to gather the articles together. The slanderers have long since been silenced, who were not ashamed to charge the discoverer with an imposture."** Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du Chaillu, Gordon-Cumming, Madame Merian,*** Bruce, and a host of others were charged with lying.
Madame Merian -- says the author of "Mythical Monsters, " who gives this information in the Introduction -- was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her description of a bird-eating spider nearly two hundred years ago. But now-a-days reliable observers have confirmed it in regard to South America, India, and elsewhere. Audubon was accused by botanists of having invented the yellow water-lily, which he figured in his Birds of the South under the name of Nymphaea lutea, and after having lain under the imputation for years, was confirmed at last by the discovery of the long-lost flower in Florida in 1876 (Pop. Sci. Monthly, No. 60, April 1877). And, as Audubon was called a liar for this, and for his Holiaetus Washingtonii,**** so Victor Hugo was ridiculed for . . . . his marvellous word-painting of the devil-fish, and his description of a man becoming its helpless victim. "The thing was derided as an impossibility; yet within a few years were discovered, on the shores of Newfoundland, cuttle fish with arms extending to thirty feet in length, and capable of dragging a good-
* It is an historical fact that Sanchoniathon compiled and wrote in Phoenician characters -- from annals and State documents in the archives of the older Phoenician cities -- the full record of their religion in 1250 B.C.
** Prof. Virchow, in Appendix I to Schliemann's Ilios . Murray, 1880.
*** Gosse writes of the latter: "She is set down a thorough heretic, not at all to be believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts in science." ("Romance of Natural History," p. 227.)
**** Dr. Cover writes: "That famous bird of Washington was a myth; either Audubon was mistaken, or else, as some do not hesitate to affirm, he lied about it."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 441 A WHOLESALE DENIAL.
boat beneath the surface; and their action has been reproduced for centuries past . . . . by Japanese artists." ("Mythical Monsters, " p. 11 Introd .).
And if Troy was denied, and regarded as a myth; the existence of Herculaneum and Pompeii declared a fiction; the travels of Marco Polo laughed at and called as absurd a fable as one of Baron Munchausen's tales, why should the writer of "Isis Unveiled" and of the "Secret Doctrine" be any better treated? Mr. Charles Gould, the author of the above-cited volume quotes in his excellent work a few lines from Macmillan (1860), which are as true as life, and too much to the point not to be reproduced: "When a naturalist, either by visiting such spots of earth as are still out of the way, or by
his good fortune, finds a very queer plant or animal, he is forthwith accused of inventing his game. . . . . . As soon as the creature is found to sin against preconception, the great (mis ?) guiding Spirit, a priori by name, who furnishes philosophers with their omniscience pro re nata, whispers that no such thing can be, and forthwith there is a charge of hoax. The heavens themselves have been charged with hoaxes. When Leverrier and Adams predicted a planet by calculation, it was gravely asserted in some quarters that the planet which had been calculated was not the planet but another which had clandestinely and improperly got into the neighbourhood of the true body. The disposition to suspect hoax is stronger than the disposition to hoax. Who was it that first announced that the classical writings of Greece and Rome were one huge hoax perpetrated by the monks in what the announcer would be as little or less inclined than Dr. Maitland to call the dark ages?" (p. 13).
Thus let it be. No disbeliever who takes the "Secret Doctrine" for a "hoax" is forced or even asked to credit our statements. These have already been proclaimed to be such by certain very clever American journalists before even the work went to press.*
Nor, is it after all, necessary that any one should believe in the Occult Sciences and the old teachings, before one knows anything or even
* So far back as July, 1888, at a time when the MSS. of this work had not yet left my writing table, and the Secret Doctrine was utterly unknown to the world, it was already being denounced as a product of my brain and no more. These are the flattering terms in which the Evening Telegraph (of America) referred to this still unpublished work in its issue of June 30, 1888: "Among the fascinating books for July reading is Mme. Blavatsky's new book on Theosophy . . . (!) the SECRET DOCTRINE. . . . But because she can soar back into the Brahmin ignorance . . . (! ?) . . . is no proof that everything she says is true." And once the prejudiced verdict given on the mistaken notion that my book was out, and that the reviewer had read it, neither of which was or could be the case, now that it is really out the critic will have to support his first statement, whether correct or otherwise, and thus get out of it, probably by a more slashing criticism than ever.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 442 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
believes in his own soul. No great truth was ever accepted a priori, and generally a century or two passed before it began to glimmer in the human consciousness as a possible verity, except in such cases as the positive discovery of the thing claimed as a fact. The truths of to-day are the falsehoods and errors of yesterday, and vice versa. It is only in the XXth century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated.
It is no fact going against our statements, therefore, even if Sir John Evans does affirm that writing was unknown in the stone age. For it may have been unknown during that period in the Fifth Aryan race, and have been perfectly known to the Atlanteans of the Fourth, in the palmy days of their highest civilization. The cycles of the rise and fall of the nations and races are there to account for it.
If told that there have been cases before now of forged pseudographs being palmed off on the credulous, and that our work may be classed with Jacolliot's "Bible in India" (in which, by the way, there are more truths among its errors than are found in the works of orthodox and recognized Orientalists) -- the charge and comparison will dismay us very little. We bide our time. Even the famous "Ezour-Veda" of the last century, considered by Voltaire "the most precious gift from the East to the West," and by Max Muller "about the silliest book that can be read," is not altogether without facts and truths in it. The cases when the a priori negations of specialists became justified by subsequent corroborations form but an insignificant percentage of those that were fully vindicated by subsequent discoveries, and confirmed to the great dismay of the learned objectors. "Ezour Veda," was a very small bone of contention compared with the triumph of Sir William Jones, Anquetil de Perron, and others in the matter of Sanskrit and its literature. Such facts are recorded by Professor Max Muller himself, who, speaking of the discomfiture of Dugald Stewart and Co. in connection with this, states that "if the facts about Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars, the Brahmans, and that the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition" (Science of Language, p. 168). The writer is quite willing and feels proud to keep company with these Brahmans, and other historical "liars," in the opinion of our modern Dugald Stewarts. She has lived too long, and her experience has been too varied and personal, for her not to know at least something of human nature. "When you doubt, abstain," says the wise Zoroaster,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 443 PARADOXES OF SCIENCE.
whose prudent aphorism is found corroborated in every case by daily life and experience. Yet, like St. John the Baptist, this sage of the past Ages is found preaching in the desert, in company with a more modern philosopher, namely Bacon, who offers the same priceless bit of practical Wisdom. "In contemplation," he says (in any question of Knowledge, we add), "if a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
With this piece of advice from the father of English Philosophy to the representatives of British scepticism we ought to close the debate, but our theosophical readers are entitled to a final piece of Occult information.
Enough was said to show that evolution in general, events, mankind, and everything else in Nature proceed in cycles. We have spoken of seven Races, five of which have nearly completed their earthly career, and have claimed that every Root-Race, with its sub-races and innumerable family divisions and tribes, was entirely distinct from its preceding and succeeding race. This will be objected to, on the authority of uniform experience in the question of Anthropology, and Ethnology. Man was -- save in colour and type, and perhaps a difference in facial peculiarities and cranial capacity -- ever the same under every climate and in every part of the world, say the Naturalists: ay, even in stature. This, while maintaining that man descends from the same unknown ancestor as the ape, a claim that is logically impossible without an infinite variation of stature and form, from his first evolution into a biped. The very logical persons who maintain both propositions are welcome to their paradoxical views. Once more we address only those who, doubting the general derivation of myths from "the contemplation of
the visible workings of external nature" . . . . think it, "less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demi-gods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions, are transformations, than to believe them to be inventions." It is only such "transformations" in physical nature, as much as in the memory and conceptions of our present mankind, that the Secret Doctrine teaches. It confronts the purely speculative hypotheses of modern Science, based upon the experience and exact observations of barely a few centuries, with the unbroken tradition and records of its Sanctuaries; and brushing away that tissue of cobweb-like theories, spun in the darkness that covers a period of hardly a few millenniums back, and which Europeans call their "History," the Old Science says to us: Listen, now, to my version of the memoirs of Humanity.
The human Races are born one from the other, grow, develop, become
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
old, and die. Their sub-races and nations follow the same rule. If your all-denying modern science and so-called philosophy do not contest that the human family is composed of a variety of well-defined types and races, it is only because the fact is undeniable, no one would say that there was no external difference between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand it is formally denied by most naturalists that mixed human races, i.e., the seeds for entirely new races, are any longer formed in our days. But this last is maintained on good grounds by de Quatrefages and some others.
Nevertheless our general proposition will not be accepted. It will be said that whatever forms man has passed through in the long pre-historic Past there are no more changes for him (save certain variations, as at present) in the future. Hence that our Sixth and Seventh Root Races are fictions.
To this it is again answered: How do you know? Your experience is limited to a few thousand years, to less than a day in the whole age of Humanity and to the present types of the actual continents and isles of our Fifth Race. How can you tell what will or will not be? Meanwhile, such is the prophecy of the Secret Books and their no uncertain statements.
Since the beginning of the Atlantean Race many million years have passed, yet we find the last of the Atlanteans, still mixed up with the Aryan element, 11,000 years ago. This shows the enormous overlapping of one race over the race which succeeds it, though in character and external type the elder loses its characteristics, and assumes the new features of the younger race. This is proved in all the formations of mixed human races. Now, Occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.
Pure Anglo-Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis, not only mentally, but also physically. "Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings," says de Quatrefages. "Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly, for the greatest part, by the successive
crossing of a number of races at present undetermined" ("The Human Species," p. 274.)
Thus the Americans have become in only three centuries a "primary race," pro tem., before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all other now existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the Sixth sub-race, and in some few hundred years more, will become
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 445 THE COMING NEW RACE.
most decidedly the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present European or fifth sub-race, in all its new characteristics. After this, in about 25,000 years, they will launch into preparations for the seventh sub-race; until, in consequence of cataclysms -- the first series of those which must one day destroy Europe, and still later the whole Aryan race (and thus affect both Americas), as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines of our continent and isles -- the Sixth Root-Race will have appeared on the stage of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them. All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums shall its pioneers -- the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women -- be regarded as anomalous lusus naturae, abnormal oddities physically and mentally. Then, as they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find themselves in a majority. It is the present men who will then begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until these die out in their turn in civilised lands; surviving only in small groups on islands -- the mountain peaks of to-day -- where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All these are the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection of whose existence has entirely died out of the remembrance of the modern generations, just as we shall vanish from the memory of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap the Sixth Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it slower than its new successor, still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality, just as the Fourth overlapped our Aryan race, and the Third had overlapped the Atlanteans.
This process of preparation for the Sixth great Race must last throughout the whole sixth and seventh sub-races (vide supra, the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Race). But the last remnants of the Fifth Continent will not disappear until some time after the birth of the new Race; when another and new dwelling, the sixth continent, will have appeared above the new waters on the face of the globe, so as to receive the new stranger. To it also will emigrate and settle all those who shall be fortunate enough to escape the general disaster. When this shall be -- as just said -- it is not for the writer to know. Only, as nature no more proceeds by sudden jumps and starts, than man changes suddenly from a child into a mature man, the final cataclysm will be preceded by many smaller submersions and destructions both by wave and volcanic fires. The exultant pulse will beat
high in the heart of the race now in the American zone, but there will be no more Americans when the Sixth Race commences; no more, in fact, than Europeans; for they will have now become a new race, and many new nations. Yet the Fifth will not die, but survive for a while: overlapping the new Race for many hundred thousands of years to come, it will become transformed with it -- slower than its new successor -- still getting entirely altered in mentality, general physique, and stature. Mankind will not grow again into giant bodies as in the case of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans; because while the evolution of the Fourth race led the latter down to the very bottom of materiality in its physical development, the present Race is on its ascending arc; and the Sixth will be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh.
Thus it is the mankind of the New world -- one by far the senior of our Old one, a fact men had also forgotten -- of Patala (the Antipodes, or the Nether World, as America is called in India), whose mission and Karma it is, to sow the seeds for a forthcoming, grander, and far more glorious Race than any of those we know of at present. The Cycles of Matter will be succeeded by Cycles of Spirituality and a fully developed mind. On the law of parallel history and races, the majority of the future mankind will be composed of glorious Adepts. Humanity is the child of cyclic Destiny, and not one of its Units can escape its unconscious mission, or get rid of the burden of its co-operative work with nature. Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind.
Such is the course of Nature under the sway of KARMIC LAW: of the ever present and the ever-
becoming Nature. For, in the words of a Sage, known only to a few Occultists:-- "THE PRESENT IS THE CHILD OF THE PAST; THE FUTURE, THE BEGOTTEN OF THE PRESENT. AND YET, O PRESENT MOMENT! KNOWEST THOU NOT THAT THOU HAST NO PARENT, NOR CANST THOU HAVE A CHILD; THAT THOU ART EVER BEGETTING BUT THYSELF? BEFORE THOU HAST EVEN BEGUN TO SAY 'I AM THE PROGENY OF THE DEPARTED MOMENT, THE CHILD OF THE PAST,' THOU HAST BECOME THAT PAST ITSELF. BEFORE THOU UTTEREST THE LAST SYLLABLE, BEHOLD! THOU ART NO MORE THE PRESENT BUT VERILY THAT FUTURE. THUS, ARE THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE, THE EVER-LIVING TRINITY IN ONE -- THE MAHAMAYA OF THE ABSOLUTE IS."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, intro
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page 447]]
BOOK II., PART II.
THE
ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE
WORLD-RELIGIONS.
---------
"The narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the garment -- that is, upon the narrative of the Doctrine; more they know not. The instructed, however, see not merely the cloak, but what the cloak covers.
(The Z OHAR, iii., 152; Franck, 119.)
"THE MYSTERIES OF THE FAITH (are) NOT TO BE DIVULGED TO ALL. . . . . It is requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken." (Clem. Alex., "Strom." 12.)
[[Vol. 2, Page 448]]
CONTENTS.
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§ ESOTERIC TENETS CORROBORATED IN EVERY SCRIPTURE ... 449
------
XVI. ADAM-ADAMI ... 452
------
XVII. THE "HOLY OF HOLIES" -- ITS DEGRADATION ... 459
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, intro
XXV. THE MYSTERIES OF THE HEBDOMAD ... 590
Saptaparna ... 590
The Tetraktis in relation to the Heptagon ... 598
The Septenary Element in the Vedas. It corroborates the Occult Teaching concerning the Seven Globes and the Seven Races ... 605
The Septenary in the Exoteric Works ... 611
Seven in Astronomy, Science and Magic ... 618
The Seven Souls of the Egyptologists ... 630
[[Vol. 2, Page 449]]
BOOK II. -- PART II.
--------
ESOTERIC TENETS CORROBORATED IN EVERY
SCRIPTURE.
IN view of the strangeness of the teachings, and of many a doctrine which from the modern scientific stand-point must seem absurd, some necessary and additional explanations have to be made. The theories contained in the Second Part of the Stanzas are even more difficult to assimilate than those which are embodied in Vol. 1, on Cosmogony. Theology, therefore, has to be questioned here, as Science will be in the Addenda (Part III.). Since our doctrines differ so widely from the current ideas of both Materialism and Theology, the Occultists must be ever prepared to repel the attacks of either or of both.
The reader can never be too often reminded that, as the abundant quotations from various old Scriptures prove, these teachings are as old as the world; and that the present work is a simple attempt to render, in modern language and in a phraseology with which the scientific and educated student is familiar, archaic Genesis and History as taught in certain Asiatic centres of esoteric learning. They must be accepted or rejected on their own merits, fully or partially; but not before they have been carefully compared with the corresponding theological dogmas and the modern scientific theories and speculations.
One feels a serious doubt whether, with all its intellectual acuteness, our age is destined to discover in each western nation even one solitary uninitiated scholar or philosopher capable of fully
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, intro
comprehending the spirit of archaic philosophy. Nor can one be expected to do so, before the real meaning of these terms, the Alpha and the Omega of Eastern esotericism, the words Sat and Asat, -- so freely used in the Rig-Veda, and elsewhere -- is thoroughly assimilated. Without this key to the Aryan Wisdom, the Cosmogony of the Rishis and the Arhats is in danger of remaining a dead letter to the average Orientalist. Asat is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it the "not yet existing"; for Sat is in itself neither the "existent," nor "being." SAT is the immutable, the ever present, changeless and eternal root, from and through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the seed, which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called evolution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting.* Sat
* The Hegelian doctrine, which identifies Absolute Being or "Be-ness" with "non-Being," and represents the Universe as an eternal becoming, is identical with the Vedanta philosophy.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 450 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is born from Asat , and ASAT is begotten by Sat: the perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Paranirvana.
Barth started a reflection on the Rig-Veda which was meant for a stern criticism, an unusual, therefore, as was thought, an original view of this archaic volume. It so happened, however, that, while criticising, that scholar revealed a truth, without being himself aware of its full importance. He premises by saying that "neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig-Veda" has he "been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity, which so many are fain to see in it." Barth had Max Muller in his mind's eye when writing this. For the famous Oxford professor has throughout characterised the hymns of the Rig Veda, as the unsophisticated expression of the religious feeling of a pastoral innocent people. "In the Vedic hymns the ideas and myths appear in their simplest and freshest form;" -- the Sanskrit scholar thinks. Barth is of a different opinion, however.
So divided and personal are the opinions of Sanskritists as to the importance and intrinsic value of the Rig Veda, that those opinions become entirely biassed whichever way they incline. Thus Mr. Max Muller declares that: "Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt, than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full grown and decayed myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real Theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a distorted caricature of the original image." This is a sweeping assertion, and perhaps rather unjust in its general application. But why not try to account for it? Orientalists cannot do so, for they reject the chronology of the Secret Doctrine, and could hardly admit the fact that between the Rig-Vedic hymns and Hesiod's Theogony tens of thousands of years have elapsed. So they fail to see that the Greek myths are no longer the primitive symbolical language of the Initiates, the disciples of the gods-Hierophants, the divine ancient "sacrificers," and that disfigured by the distance, and encumbered by the exuberant growth of human profane fancy, they now stand like distorted images of stars in running waves. But if Hesiod's Cosmogony and Theogony are to be viewed as caricatures of the original images, how much more so
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, intro
the myths in the Hebrew Genesis in the sight of those, for whom they are no more divine revelation or the word of God, than Hesiod's Theogony is for Mr. Gladstone.
"The poetry it (the Rig Veda) contains appears to me, on the contrary," says Barth "to be of a singularly refined character and
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 451 THE VEDAS WRITTEN BY INITIATES.
artificially elaborated, full of allusions and reticences, of pretensions (?) to mysticism and theosophic insight, and the manner of its expression is such as reminds one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of initiated, than the poetic language of a large community." ("The Religions of India, " p. xiii.)
We will not stop to enquire of the critic what he can know of the phraseology in use among the "initiated," or whether he belongs himself to such a group; for, in the latter case, he would hardly have used such language. But the above shows the remarkable disagreement between scholars even with regard to the external character of the Rig Veda. What, then, can any of the modern Sanskritists know about its internal or esoteric meaning, beyond the correct inference of Barth, that this Scripture has been compiled by INITIATES?
The whole of the present work is an endeavour to prove this truth. The ancient adepts have solved the great problems of science, however unwilling modern materialism may be to admit the fact. The mysteries of Life and Death were fathomed by the great master-minds of antiquity; and if they have preserved them in secresy and silence, it is because these problems formed part of the sacred mysteries; and, secondly, because they must have remained incomprehensible to the vast majority of men then, as they do now. If such teachings are still regarded as chimeras by our opponents in philosophy, it may be a consolation to the Theosophists to learn, on good proofs, that the speculations of modern psychologists -- whether serious Idealists, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, or wool-gathering pseudo-Idealists -- are far more chimerical. Indeed, instead of resting on the firm foundation of facts in Nature, they are the unhealthy will-o'-the-wisps of materialistic imagination, of the brains that evolved them -- and no more. While they deny, we affirm; and our affirmation is corroborated by almost all the sages of antiquity. Believing in Occultism and a host of invisible Potencies for good reasons, we say: Certus sum, scio quod credidi; to which our critics reply: Credat Judaeus Apella. Neither is converted by the other, nor does such result affect even our little planet. E pur se muove!
Nor is there any need of proselytizing. As remarked by the wise Cicero, "Time destroys the speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature." Let us bide our time. Meanwhile, it is not in the human constitution to witness in silence the destruction of one's gods, whether they be true or false. And as theology and materialism have combined together to destroy the old gods of antiquity and seek to disfigure every old philosophical conception, it is but just that the lovers of old wisdom should defend their position, by proving that the whole arsenal of the two is, at best, formed of new weapons made out of very old material.
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§ XVI.
ADAM-ADAMI.
NAMES such as Adam-Adami, used by Mr. Chwolsohn in his "Nabathean Agriculture"* and derided by M. Renan, may prove little to the profane. To the Occultist, however, once that the term is found in a work of such immense antiquity as the above cited, it proves a good deal: for instance that Adami was a manifold symbol, originating with the Aryan people, as the root word shows, and having been taken from them by the Semites and the Turanians -- as many other things were.
"Adam-Adami" is a generic compound name as old as languages are. The Secret Doctrine teaches that Ad -i was the name given to the first speaking race of mankind -- in this Round -- by the Aryans. Hence the Adonim and Adonai (the ancient plural form of the word Adon), which the Jews applied to their Jehovah and angels, who were simply the first spiritual and ethereal sons of the earth; and the god Adonis, who in his many variations stood for the "First Lord." Adam is the Sanskrit Ada-Nath, also meaning first Lord, as Ad -Iswara, or any Ad (the first) followed by any adjective or substantive. The reason for this is that such truths were a common inheritance. It was a revelation received by the first mankind before that time which, in Biblical phraseology, is called "the period of one lip and word," or speech; knowledge expanded by man's own intuition later on, but still later hidden from profanation under an adequate symbology. The author of the "Qabbalah, (according to), the philosophical writings of Ibn Gebirol," shows the Israelite using "Adonai," (Lord) instead of Eh'yeh (I am) and YHVH, and adds that, while Adonai is rendered "Lord" in the Bible, "the lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is translated God." (p. 175.)
A curious work was translated in 1860 or thereabout, by the Orientalist Chwolsohn, and presented to ever-incredulous and flippant Europe under the innocent title of Nabathean Agriculture. In the opinion of the translator that archaic volume is "a complete initiation into the mysteries of the pre-Adamite nations, on the authority of undeniably authentic documents." It is "an invaluable compendium, the full epitome of the Doctrines held, of the arts and sciences, not only of the Chaldeans, but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites of the prehistoric ages." These
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"Nabatheans " -- as some critics thought -- were simply the Sabeans, or Chaldean star-worshippers. The work is a retranslation from the Arabic, into which language it was at first translated from the Chaldean.
Masoudi, the Arabic Historian, speaks of those Nabatheans, and explains their origin in this wise: "After the Deluge (?) the nations established themselves in various countries. Among these were the Nabatheans, who founded the city of Babylon, and were those descendants of Ham who settled in the same province under the leadership of Nimrod, the son of Cush, who was the son of Ham, and great-
grandson of Noah. . . . . This took place at the time when Nimrod received the governorship of Babylonia as the delegate of Dzahhak named Biurasp."
The translator, Chwolsohn, finds that the assertions of this historian are in perfect accord with those of Moses in Genesis; while more irreverent critics might express the opinion that for this very reason their truth should be suspected. It is useless to argue this point, which is of no value in the present question. The weather-beaten, long-since-buried problem, and the difficulty of accounting, on any logical ground, for the phenomenal derivation of millions of people of various races, of many civilized nations and tribes, from three couples (Noah's sons) in 346 years* after the Deluge, may be left to the Karma of the author of Genesis, whether he is called Moses or Ezra. That which is interesting in the work noticed is its contents, the doctrines enunciated in it, which are again, if read esoterically, almost all of them identical with the Secret Teachings.
Quatremere suggested that this book might have been simply a copy made under Nebuchadnezzar II., from some Hamitic treatise, "infinitely more ancient," while the author maintains, on "internal and external evidence," that its Chaldean original was written out from the oral discourses and teachings of a wealthy Babylonian landowner, named Qu-tamy, who had used for those lectures still more ancient materials. The first Arabic translation is placed by Chwolsohn so far back as the XIII. cent. B.C. On the first page of this "revelation," the author, or amanuensis, Qu-tamy, declares that "the doctrines propounded therein, were originally told by Saturn to the Moon, who communicated them to her idol, which idol revealed them to her devotee, the writer -- the adept Scribe of that work -- Qu-tamy.
The details given by the God for the benefit and instruction of mortals, show periods of incalculable duration and a series of numberless kingdoms and Dynasties that preceded the appearance on Earth of
* See Genesis and the authorised Chronology. In Chapt. ix. "Noah leaveth the Ark" "B.C. 2348." Chapter x. "Nimrod the first Monarch," stands over "B.C. 1998."
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Adami (the "red-earth"). These periods have aroused, as might have been expected, the defenders of the chronology of the Biblical dead-letter meaning almost to fury. De Rougemont was the first to make a levee-in-arms against the translator. He reproaches him* with "sacrificing Moses to an anonymous
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author." Berosus, he urges, "however great were his chronological errors, was at least in perfect accord with the prophet with regard to the first men, since he speaks of Alorus-Adam, of Xisuthrus-
Noah, and of Belus-Nimrod, " etc. "Therefore," he adds, "the work must be an APOCRYPHA to be ranged with its contemporaries -- the fourth book of Esdras, that of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Book of Hermes -- every one of these dating no further back than two or three centuries B.C." Ewald came down still harder on Chwolsohn, and finally M. Renan. In the "Revue Germanique,"** the ex-pupil pulls down the authority of his master, by asking him to show a reason why his Nabathean Agriculture should not be the fraudulent work of some Jew of the third or fourth century of our era? It can hardly be otherwise -- argues the romancer of the "Life of Jesus." Since, in this in-folio on astrology and Sorcery we recognise in the personages introduced by Qu-tamy, all the patriarchs of the Biblical legends, such as Adam-Adami, Anouka-Noah, and his Ibrahim-Abraham etc., etc."
This is no reason, since Adam and others are generic names. Meanwhile it is humbly submitted that, all things considered, an apocrypha -- if even of the third century A.D., instead of the thirteenth century B.C., as suggested by Quatremere -- is old enough to appear genuine as a document, and so satisfy the demands of the most exacting archaeologist and critic. For, even admitting, for argument's sake, that this literary relic has been compiled by "some Jew of the third century of our era" -- what of that? Leaving the credibility of its doctrines for a moment aside, why should it be less entitled to a hearing, or less instructive as reflecting older opinions, than any other religious work, also a "compilation from old texts" or oral tradition -- of the same or even a later age? In such case we should have to reject and call "apocryphal" the Quran -- two centuries older, though we know it to have sprung, Minerva-like, direct from the brain of the Arabian prophet; and we should have to pooh-pooh all the information we can get from the Talmud, which, in its present form, was also compiled from older materials, and is not earlier than the IX. century of our era.
The curious "Bible" of the Chaldean adept, and the various criticisms upon it (as in the Chwolsohn's translation), are noticed, because it has an important bearing upon a great portion of the present work.
With the exception of M. Renan, an iconoclast by principle -- so pointedly called by Jules Lemaitre "le Paganini du Neant " -- the worst fault found with the work is, it would seem, that the "apocrypha" pretends to have been communicated as a revelation to an adept by, and from, the "idol of the moon," who received it from "Saturn." Hence, very naturally, it is "a fairy tale all round." To this there is but one answer: it is no more a fairy tale than the Bible, and if one falls, the other must follow it. Even the mode of divination through "the idol of the moon" is the same as practised by David, Saul, and the High Priests of the Jewish Tabernacle by means of the Teraphim. In Volume III., Part II. of this present work, the practical methods of such ancient divination will be found.
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The "Nabathean Agriculture" is a compilation indeed; it is no apocrypha, but the repetition of the tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the exoteric Chaldean form of national symbols, for the purpose of "cloaking" the tenets, just as the Books of Hermes and the Puranas are Egyptian and Hindu attempts at the same. The work was as well known in antiquity as it was during the Middle Ages. Maimonides speaks of it, and refers more than once to this Chaldeo-Arabic MS., calling the Nabatheans by their co-
religionary name, i.e., "star-worshippers," or Sabeans, but yet failing to see in this disfigured word "Nabatheans" the mystic name of the caste devoted to Nebo (god of secret wisdom), which shows on its face that the Nabatheans were an occult Brotherhood.* The Nabatheans who, according to the Persian Yezidi, originally came to Syria from Busrah, were the degenerate members of that fraternity; still their religion, even at that late day, was purely Kabalistic.** Nebo is the deity of the planet
Mercury, and Mercury is the god of Wisdom or Hermes, and Budha, which the Jews called "the Lord on high, the aspiring," . . . and the Greeks Nabo, [[Nabo]], hence Nabatheans. Notwithstanding that Maimonides calls their doctrines "heathenish foolishness" and their archaic literature "Sabaeorum foetum, " he places their "agriculture," the Bible of Qu-tamy, in the first rank of Archaic literature; and Abarbinel
* "I will mention to thee the writings . . . respecting the belief of the Sabeans," he says. "The most famous is the Book 'The Agriculture of the Nabatheans, ' which has been translated by Ibn Wahohijah. This book is full of heathenish foolishness. . . . It speaks of preparations of TALISMANS, the drawing down of the powers of the SPIRITS, MAGIC, DEMONS, and ghouls, which make their abode in the desert." (Maimonides, quoted by Dr. D. Chwolsohn, "Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus," II., p. 458.) The Nabatheans of Mount Lebanon believed in the Seven Archangels, as their forefathers had believed in the Seven Great Stars, the abodes and bodies of these Archangels, believed in to this day by the Roman Catholics, as is shown elsewhere.
** See "Isis Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 197.
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praises it in unmeasured terms. Spencer, quoting the latter, speaks of it as that "most excellent Oriental work," adding (vol. 1., p. 354) that by Nabatheans, the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, and the Egyptians, in short all those nations against whom the laws of Moses were most severely enacted, have to be understood.
Nebo, the oldest God of Wisdom of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, was identical with the Hindu Budha and Hermes-Mercury of the Greeks. A slight change in the sexes of the parents is the only alteration. As Budha was the Son of Soma (the Moon) in India, and of the wife of Brihaspati (Jupiter), so Nebo was the son of Zarpa-nitu (the Moon deity) and of Merodach, who had become Jupiter, after having been a Sun God. As Mercury the planet, Nebo was the "overseer" among the seven gods of the planets; and as the personification of the Secret Wisdom he was Nabin, a seer and a prophet. The fact that
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Moses is made to die and disappear on the mount sacred to Nebo, shows him an initiate and a priest of that god under another name; for this God of Wisdom was the great creative deity, and was worshipped as such, not alone at Borsippa in his gorgeous Temple, or planet-tower. He was likewise adored by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, and throughout the whole of Palestine: then why not by the Israelites? "The planetary temple of Babylon" had "its holy of holies" within the shrine of Nebo, the prophet god of Wisdom. We are told in the Hibbert Lectures, "The ancient Babylonians had an intercessor between men and the gods . . . and Nebo, was the 'proclaimer' or 'prophet,' as he made known the desire of his father Merodach."
Nebo is a creator, like Budha, of the Fourth and also of the Fifth Race. For the former starts a new race of Adepts, and the latter, the Solar-Lunar Dynasty, or the men of these Races and Round. Both are the Adams of their respective creatures. Adam-Adami is a personation of the dual Adam: of the paradigmic Adam-Kadmon, the creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial, who, as the Syrian Kabalists have it, had only nephesh, "the breath of life," but no living soul, until after his Fall.
If, therefore, Renan persists in regarding the Chaldean Scriptures -- or what remains of them -- as apocryphal, it is quite immaterial to truth and fact. There are other Orientalists who may be of a different opinion; and even were they not, it would still really matter very little. These doctrines contain the teachings of Esoteric philosophy, and this must suffice. To those who understand nothing of symbology it may appear astrolatry, pure and simple, or to him who would conceal the esoteric truth, even "heathenish foolishness." Maimonides, however, while expressing scorn for the esotericism in the religion of other nations, confessed esotericism and symbology in his own, preached
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 457 THE KABALISTIC FOUR ADAMS.
silence and secresy upon the true meaning of Mosaic sayings, and thus came to grief. The Doctrines of Qu-tamy, the Chaldean, are, in short, the allegorical rendering of the religion of the earliest nations of the Fifth Race.
Why then should M. Renan treat the name "Adam-Adami" with such academical contempt? The author of the "Origins of Christianity" evidently knows nothing of the "origins of pagan symbolism" or of Esotericism either, otherwise he would have known that the name was a form of universal symbol, referring, even with the Jews, not to one man, but to four distinct humanities or mankinds. This is very easily proven.
The Kabalists teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or the transformation of four consecutive Adams, the emanations from the Dyooknah (divine phantom) of the Heavenly Man, an ethereal combination of Neschamah, the highest Soul or Spirit: this Adam having, of course, neither a gross human body, nor a body of desire. This "Adam" is the prototype (tzure) of the second Adam. That they represent our Five Races is certain, as everyone can see by their description in the Kabala: the first being the "perfect, Holy Adam"; . . . "a shadow that disappeared" (the Kings of Edom) produced from the divine Tzelem (Image); the second is called the protoplastic androgyne Adam of the future terrestrial and separated Adam; the third Adam is the man made of "dust" (the first, innocent Adam); and the fourth, is the supposed forefather of our own race -- the Fallen Adam. See, however, the
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admirably clear description of these in Mr. Isaac Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 418, et seq. He gives only four Adams, because of the Kings of Edom, no doubt. "The fourth Adam," he writes, " . . . . was clothed with skin, flesh, nerves, etc. This answers to the Lower Nephesch and Guff, i.e., body, united. He has the animal power of reproduction and continuance of species," and this is the human Root-Race.
It is just at this point that the modern Kabalists -- led into error by the long generations of Christian mystics who have tampered with the Kabalistic records wherever they could -- diverge from the Occultists in their interpretations, and take the later thought for the earlier idea. The original Kabala was entirely metaphysical, and had no concern with animal, or terrestrial sexes; the later Kabala has suffocated the divine ideal under the heavy phallic element. The Kabalists say: -- "God made man male and female." "Among the Qabbalists, the necessity to continued creation and existence is called the Balance," says the author of Qabbalah; and being without this "Balance," connected with Ma-qom (mysterious place),* even the First Race is not,
* Simply, the womb, the "Holy of Holies" with the Semites.
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as we have seen, recognized by the Sons of the Fifth Adam. From the highest Heavenly Man, the upper Adam who is "male female" or Androgyne, down to the Adam of dust, these personified symbols are all connected with sex and procreation. With the Eastern Occultists it is entirely the reverse. The sexual relation they consider as a "Karma" pertaining only to the mundane relation of man, who is dominated by Illusion, a thing to be put aside, the moment that the person becomes "wise." They considered it a most fortunate circumstance if the Guru (teacher) found in his pupil an aptitude for the pure life of Brahmacharya. Their dual symbols were to them but the poetical imagery of the sublime correlation of creative Cosmic forces. And this ideal conception is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, however coarse and grotesque, in the crowded galleries of the sombre fanes of India and other Mother lands of cults.
This will be demonstrated in the following Section.
Meanwhile, it may be added that, with the Gnostics, the second Adam also emanates from the Primeval Man, the Ophite Adamas, in "whose image he is made"; the third, from this second -- an Androgyne. The latter is symbolized in the 6th and 7th pairs of the male-female AEons, --Amphian-
Essumene, and Vannanin-Lamer (Father and Mother; vide Valentinian Table, in Epiphanius) -- while the fourth Adam, or Race, is represented by a Priapean monster. The latter -- a post-Christian fancy -- is the degraded copy of the ante-Christian Gnostic symbol of the "Good One," or "He, who created before anything existed," the Celestial Priapus -- truly born from Venus and Bacchus when that God returned from his expedition into India, for Venus and Bacchus are the post-types of Aditi and the Spirit. The later Priapus, one, however, with Agathodaemon, the Gnostic Saviour, and even with Abraxas, is no longer the glyph for abstract creative Power, but symbolizes the four Adams, or Races, the fifth being represented by the five branches cut off from the Tree of Life on which the old man
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stands in the Gnostic gems. The number of the Root-Races was recorded in the ancient Greek temples by the seven vowels, of which five were framed in a panel in the Initiation halls of the Adyta. The Egyptian glyph for it was a hand with five fingers spread, the fifth or little finger being only half-
grown, and also five "N's" -- hieroglyphs standing for that letter. The Romans used the five vowels A E I O V in their fanes; and this archaic symbol was adopted during the middle ages as a motto by the House of the Hapsburgs. Sic transit gloria!
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§ VII.
THE "HOLY OF HOLIES."
ITS DEGRADATION.
THE Sanctum Sanctorum of the Ancients, i.e., that recess on the Western side of the Temple which was enclosed on three sides by blank walls and had its only aperture or door hung over with a curtain -- also called the Adytum -- was common to all ancient nations.
Nevertheless, a great difference is found between the secret meanings of this symbolical place, in the esotericism of the Pagans and that of later Jews; though the symbology of it was originally identical throughout the ancient Races and Nations. The Gentiles, by placing in the Adytum a sarcophagus, or a tomb (taphos), and the solar-god to whom the temple was consecrated, held it, as Pantheists, in the greatest veneration. They regarded it -- in its esoteric meaning -- as the symbol of resurrection, cosmic, solar (or diurnal), and human. It embraced the wide range of periodical and (in time) punctual, Manvantaras, or the re-awakenings of Kosmos, Earth, and Man to new existences; the sun being the most poetical and also the most grandiose symbol of the same in heaven, and man -- in his re-
incarnations -- on Earth. The Jews -- whose realism, if judged by the dead letter, was as practical and gross in the days of Moses as it is now* -- in the course of their estrangement from the gods of their pagan neighbours, consummated a national and levitical polity, by the device of setting forth their Holy of Holies as the most solemn sign of their Monotheism -- exoterically; while seeing in it but a universal phallic symbol -- esoterically. While the Kabalists knew but Ain-Soph and the "gods" of the Mysteries, the Levites had no tomb, no god in their adytum but the "Sacred" Ark of the Covenant -- their "Holy of Holies."
When the esoteric meaning of this recess is made clear, however, the profane will be better able to understand why David danced "uncovered" before the ark of the Covenant, and was so anxious to appear vile for the sake of his "Lord," and base in his own sight. (See 2 Samuel vi. 16-22.)
The ark is the navi-form Argha of the Mysteries. Parkhurst, who has
* But it was not so, in reality, witness their prophets. It is the later Rabbis and the Talmudic scheme that killed out all spirituality from the body of their symbols; leaving only their Scriptures -- a dead shell, from which the Soul has departed.
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a long dissertation upon it in his Greek dictionary, and who never breathes a word about it in the Hebrew lexicon, explains it thus: -- "[[Arche ]] in this application answers to the Hebrew rasit or wisdom . . . . a word which had the meaning of the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of all nature was supposed to float or brood on the great abyss during the interval which took place after every mundane cycle." Quite so; and the Jewish ark of the Covenant had precisely the same significance; with the supplementary addition that, instead of a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus (the symbol of the matrix of Nature and resurrection) as in the Sanctum sanctorum of the pagans, they had the ark made still more realistic in its construction by the two cherubs set up on the coffer or ark of the covenant, facing each other, with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni (as now seen in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance
enforced by the four mystic letters of Jehovah's name, namely, ; or meaning Jod (membrum
Virile, see Kabala); (the womb); (Vau, a crook or a hook, a nail), and again, meaning also "an opening"; the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol or Y (e) H (o) V (a) H, the male and female symbol.
Perhaps also, when people realise the true meaning of the office and title of the Kadesh Kadeshim, "the holy ones," or "the consecrated to the temple of the Lord," -- the "Holy of Holies" of the latter may assume an aspect far from edifying.
Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. "Who shall ascend into the hill (the high place) of the Lord?" asks the holy king David, "who shall stand in the place of
his Kadushu ?" (Psalms xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to devote, hallow, sanctify, and even to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministry of lascivious rites (the Venus-
worship) and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and Genesis xxxvii. from verses 15 to 22. The "holy" Kadeshuth of the Bible were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or galli, lived "by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove," or the bust of Venus-Astarte, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.
The dance performed by David round the ark was the "circle-dance." said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges xxi. 21, 23 et passim ), and the leaping of the prophets of Baal (I Kings xviii. 26). It was simply a characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is
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apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michal and the King's reply are very expressive. Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 49.
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"The Ark, in which are preserved the germs of all living things necessary to repeople the earth, represents the survival of life, and the supremacy of spirit over matter, through the conflict of the opposing powers of nature. In the Astro-Theosophic chart of the Western Rite, the Ark corresponds with the navel, and is placed at the sinister side, the side of the woman (the moon), one of whose symbols is the left pillar of Solomon's temple -- BOAZ. The umbilicus is connected through the placenta with the receptacle in which are fructified the embryos of the race. . . The Ark is the sacred Argha of the Hindus, and thus the relation in which it stands to Noah's ark may be easily inferred when we learn that the Argha was an oblong vessel, used by the high priests as a sacrificial chalice in the worship of Isis, Astarte, and Venus-Aphrodite, all of whom were goddesses of the generative powers of nature, or of matter -- hence representing symbolically the Ark containing the germs of all living things." ("Isis Unveiled, " Vol. II., p. 444.) Mistaken is he who accepts the Kabalistic works of to-day, and the interpretations of the Zohar by the Rabbis, for the genuine Kabalistic lore of old!* For no more to-day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the Kabala accessible to Europe and America, contain much more than "ruins and fragments, much distorted remnants still of that primitive system which is the key to all religious systems" (See Kabbala, by Prof. Franck, Preface). The oldest system and the
* The author of the "Qabbalah" makes several attempts to prove conclusively the antiquity of the Zohar. Thus he shows that Moses de Leon could not be the author or the forger of the Zoharic works in the XIIIth century, as he is accused of being, since Ibn Gebirol gave out the same philosophical teaching 225 years before the day of Moses de Leon. No true Kabalist or scholar will ever deny the fact. It is certain that Ibn Gebirol based his doctrines upon the oldest Kabalistic sources, namely, the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," as well as some no longer extant Midrashim, the same, no doubt, as those used by Moses de Leon. But it is just the difference between the two ways of treating the same esoteric subjects, which, while proving the enormous antiquity of the esoteric system, points to a decided ring of Talmudistic and even Christian sectarianism in the compilation and glossaries of the Zoharic system by Rabbi Moses. Ibn Gebirol never quoted from the Scriptures to enforce the teachings (vide I. Myer's Qabbalah, p. 7). Moses de Leon has made of the Zohar that which it has remained to this day, "a running commentary on the . . . Books of the Pentateuch" (ibid.), with a few later additions made by Christian hands. One follows the archaic esoteric philosophy; the other, only that portion which was adapted to the lost Books of Moses restored by Ezra. Thus, while the system, or the trunk on which the primitive original Zohar was engrafted, is of an immense antiquity many of the (later) Zoharic offshoots are strongly coloured by the peculiar views held by Christian Gnostics (Syrian and Chaldean), the friends and co-workers of Moses de Leon who, as shown by Munk, accepted their interpretations.
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Chaldean Kabala were identical. The latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries -- i.e., the Thorah, dogmatic and uncompromising.
The "King's Chamber" in Cheops' Pyramid is thus an Egyptian "Holy of Holies." On the days of the
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Mysteries of Initiation, the candidate, representing the solar god, had to descend into the Sarcophagus, and represent the energizing ray, entering into the fecund womb of Nature. Emerging from it on the following morning, he typified the resurrection of life after the change called Death. In the great MYSTERIES his figurative death lasted two days, when with the Sun he arose on third morning, after a last night of the most cruel trials. While the postulant represented the Sun -- the all-vivifying Orb that "resurrects" every morning but to impart life to all -- the Sarcophagus was symbolic of the female principle. This, in Egypt; its form and shape changed with every country, provided it remained a vessel, a symbolic navis or boat-shaped vehicle, and a container, symbolically, of germs or the germ of life. In India, it is the "golden" Cow through which the candidate for Brahminism has to pass if he desires to be a Brahmin, and to become DWIJA ("reborn a second time"). The crescent-form Argha of the Greeks was the type of the Queen of Heaven -- Diana, or the Moon. She was the great Mother of all Existences, as the Sun was the Father. The Jews, previous to, as well as after their metamorphosis of Jehovah into a male god, worshipped Astoreth, which made Isaiah declare: "Your new moons and feasts my soul hateth," (i. 14); saying which, he was evidently unjust. Astoreth and the New-moon (the crescent argha) festivals, had no worse significance as a form of public worship than had the hidden meaning of the moon in general, which was Kabalistically connected directly with, and sacred to, Jehovah, as is well known; with the sole difference that one was the female and the other the male aspect of the moon, and of the star Venus.
The Sun (the Father), the Moon (the Mother), and Mercury-Thoth (the Son), were the earliest Trinity of the Egyptians, who personified them in Osiris, Isis, and Thoth (Hermes). In [[PISTIS SOPHIA]], the seven great gods, divided into two triads and the highest God (the Sun) are: the lower [[Tridunameis]], whose powers reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad ("the three unseen gods") who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn; (vide §§ 359 and 361 et seq).
This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of nature, the ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other "Queen of Heaven" to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 463 CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM
Chaldean "Nuah, the Universal Mother" (female Noah, considered as one with the ark), and of the female triad, Ana, Belita and Davikina; called, when blended into one, "Sovereign goddess, lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of fecundity." Later, Belita or Damti (the sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldean Necropolis) became Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as standing on the crescent-moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the programme. The navi, or ship-like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the ship of life, such as Noah's ark, the Yoni of the Hindus, and the ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal "Mothers of the gods," and is now found under its Christian symbol in every Church, as the nave (from navis, the ship).* The navis -- the Sidereal vessel -- is fructified by the Spirit of Life -- the male God; or, as the learned Kenealy (in his Apocalypsis) calls it very appropriately -- the Holy Spirit. In Western religious symbology the Crescent was the male, the full moon, the female aspect of that universal Spirit. "The mystic word Alm , which the prophet
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Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Koran, alludes to her as the Alm, the immaculate Virgin of the heavens. And -- the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous -- it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word Almeh -- the Egyptian dancing-girls. The latter are "Virgins" of the same type as the Nautchnis in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the Holy Ones of the Jewish temples (those consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes), whose holy functions in the Israelite fanes were identical with those of the Nautchnis.
Now Eustathius declares that ([IO]) IO means the moon, in the dialect of the Argians; and it was one of the names of the same in Egypt. Says Jablonski, "[[IO]], Ioh, AEgyptiis LUNAM significat neque habent illi in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam, designent praeter IO. " The pillar and Circle (IO), now constituting the first decimal number, and which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetractis,** became later a pre -eminently phallic Number -- amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah.
* Timaeus, the Locrian, speaking of Arka, calls her "the Principle of best things." The word arcane, "hidden," or secret, is derived from Arka . "To no one is the Arcane shown except to the most High" (Codex Nazareus), alluding to nature the female, and Spirit, the male Power. All the Sun-Gods were called Archagetos "born from the Arka, " the divine Virgin-Mother of the Heavens.
** Because composed of ten dots arranged triangularly in four rows. It is the Tetragrammaton of the Western Kabalists.
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"I find, on the Rosetta stone of Uhlemann, the word mouth, also in Seiffarth, viz., the name of the
Moon used as a cycle of Time, hence the lunar month from the hieroglyph with and
as determinatives given, as the Coptic I O H, or I O H. The Hebrew may also be used as I
O H, for the letter yau, or , was used for o and for u, and for v or w. This, before the Massora, of
which the . was used as = o, = u, and = v or w. Now I had worked it out by original search that the great distinctive function of the god-name Jehovah was designative of the influence of the moon as the causative of generation, and as of its exact value as a lunar year in the natural measure of days, as you will fully see, . . . . And here comes this linguistic same word from a source far more ancient; viz., the Coptic, or rather from the old Egyptian in time of the Coptic.". . . . (From a MS.)
This is the more remarkable when Egyptology compares this with the little which it knows about the Theban triad -- composed of Ammon, Mouth, (or Mout) and their son Khonsoo. This triad was, when united, contained in the moon as their common symbol; and when separated, it was Khonsoo who was
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the god, LUNUS, being thus confounded with Thot and Phtah. His mother Mout(h) -- the name signifying Mother, by the bye, not the moon, which was only her Symbol -- is called the "Queen of Heaven"; the "Virgin," etc., etc., as she is an aspect of Isis, Hathor, and other mother goddesses. She was less the wife than the mother of Ammon, whose distinct title is "the husband of his Mother." In a statuette at Boulaq, Cairo, this triad is represented (Number 1981 Serapeum, Greek Period) as a mummy-god holding in his hand three different sceptres, and bearing the lunar disc on his head, the characteristic tress of hair showing the design of representing it as that of an infant god, or "the Sun," in the triad. He was the god of Destinies in Thebes, and appears under two aspects (1) as "Khonsoo, the Lunar god, and Lord of Thebes, Nofir-hotpoo -- 'he who is in absolute repose'; and (2) as Khonsoo Iri-sokhroo, or 'Khonsoo, who executes Destiny': the former preparing the events and conceiving them for those born under his generative influence; the latter putting them into action." (See Maspero's Definitions). Under theogonic permutations Ammon becomes Horus, HOR-AMMON, and Mout(h)-
Isis is seen suckling him in a statuette of the Saitic period. (Abydos.) In his turn, in this transformed triad, Khonsoo becomes Thot-Lunus, "he who operates salvation." His brow is crowned with the head of an ibis decorated with the lunar disc and the diadem called IO-tef.
Now all these symbols are certainly found reflected in (some believe them identical with) the Yave, or Jehovah of the Bible. This will be
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 465 THE "FOUR-FACED" BRAHMA.
made plain to any one who reads "The Source of Measures," or "Hebrew Egyptian Mystery, " and understands the undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs that the esoteric foundations, or the system used in the building of the Great Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of Solomon (whether the latter be mythical or real), Noah's ark, and the ark of the Covenant, are the same. If anything in the world can settle the dispute that the old, as much as the later, Jews (post-
Babylonian), and especially the former, built their theogony and religion on the very same foundation as all Pagans did, it is the work in question.
And now it may be as well to remind the reader of that which was said of I A O, in our work, "Isis Unveiled."
"No other deity affords such a variety of etymologies as Jaho, nor is there any name which can be so variously pronounced. It is only by associating it with the Masoretic points that the later Rabbins succeeded in making Jehovah read 'Adonai' -- or Lord, as Philo Byblus spells it in Greek letters [[IEUO]] -- IEVO. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Jahe (yahra), and the Jews Yaho; which would make it as we have shown, I -- Ah -- O. Diodorus states that 'among the Jews they relate that Moses called the god Iao.' It is on the authority of the Bible itself, therefore, that we maintain that before his initiation by Jethro, his father-in-law, Moses had never known the word Jaho."*
The above receives corroboration in a private letter from a very learned Kabalist. In STANZA IV. and elsewhere it is stated that exoterically Brahma (neuter), so flippantly and so often confused by the
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Orientalists with Brahma -- the male, is sometimes called Kala-hansa (Swan in the eternity), and the esoteric meaning of A -ham-sa, is given. (I -- am -- he, so ham being equal to sah "he," and aham "I" -- a mystic anagram and permutation). It is also the "four-faced" Brahma, the Chatur mukha (the perfect
cube) forming itself within, and from the infinite circle; and again the use of the 1, 3, 5, and = 14, as the esoteric hierarchy of the Dhyan Chohans is explained. On this, the said correspondent comments in this way: --
"Of the 1, 3, 5, and twice 7, intending and very especially 13,514, which on a circle may be read as 31415 (or [[pi ]] value), I think there cannot be a possibility of doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on sacr,** 'Chakra,' or Circle of Vishnu.
"But let me carry your description a step further: -- You say 'The One from
* The student must be aware that Jethro is called the "father-in-law" of Moses; not because Moses was really married to one of his seven daughters. Moses was an Initiate, if he ever existed, and as such an ascetic, a nazar, and could never be married. It is an allegory like everything else. Zipporah (the shining) is one of the personified Occult Sciences given by Revel-Jethro, the Midian priest Initiator, to Moses, his Egyptian pupil. The "well" by which Moses sat down in his flight from the Pharaoh symbolizes the "well of Knowledge."
** In Hebrew the phallic symbol lingham and Yoni.
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the Egg, the six, and the five (See Stanza IV., Book I.) give the numbers 1065, the value of the first born'. . . . . . If it be so, then in 1065 we have the famous Jehovah's name, the
Jve or Jave , or Jupiter, and by change of to or h to n, then or the Latin Jun or Juno, the base of the Chinese riddle, the key measuring numbers of Sni (Sinai) and Jehovah coming down on that mount, which numbers (1,065) are but the use of our ratio of 113 to 355 because 1,065 = 355 x 3 which is circumference to a diameter of 113 x 3 = 339. Thus the first born of Brahma Prajapati (or any Demiurgos) indicates a measuring use of a circular relation taken from the Chakra (or Vishnu) and, as stated above, the Divine manifestation takes the form of life and the first born."
"It is a most singular thing: At the entrance passage to the King's chamber the measurement from the surface of the Great Step* and the Grand Gallery to the top of the said gallery, is by the very careful measures of Piazzi Smyth 339 inches.
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Take A as a centre and with this radius describe a circle; the diameter of that circle will be 339 x 2 = 678, and these numbers are those of the expression and the raven, in the 'Dove and raven' scenes or pictures of the Flood of Noah; (the radius is taken to show division into two parts, which are 1,065 each) for 113 (man) x 6 = 678; and the diameter to a circumference of 1,065 x 2 -- so we have here an indication of cosmic man on this high grade or step, at the entrance of the King's Chamber (the Holy of Holies) -- which is the womb. Now this passage is of such a height that a man to enter it must stoop. But a
man upright is 113, and broken, or stooping, he becomes 133 / 2 = 5. 65 or Jehovah. That is, he personifies** him as entering the Holy of Holies. But by Hebrew Esotericism the chief function of Jehovah was child giving, etc., and that because, by the numbers of his name, he was the measure of the lunar year, which cycle of time, because by its factor of 7 (seven) it ran so co-ordinately with the periods of the quickening, viability, and gestation, was taken as the causative of the generative action and therefore was worshipped and besought."
This discovery connects Jehovah still more with all the other creative and generative gods, solar and lunar, and especially with "King" Soma, the Hindu Deus Lunus, the moon, because of the esoteric influence attributed to this planet in Occultism. There are other corroborations of it, however, in Hebrew tradition itself. Adam is spoken of in
* It is on that step that one arrives on the plane of the level or floor and open entrance to the King's chamber, the Egyptian "Holy of Holies."
** The candidate for initiation always personified the god of the temple he belonged to, as the High Priest personified the god at all times; just as the Pope now personates Peter and even Jesus Christ upon entering the inner altar -- the Christian "Holy of Holies."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 467 THE ETYMOLOGY OF "SACRAMENT."
Maimonides (More Nevochim, "The Guide of the Perplexed" -- truly!) in two aspects; as a man, like all others born of a man and a woman, and -- as the prophet of the Moon; the reason of which is now made apparent, and has to be explained.
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Adam, as the supposed great "Progenitor of the human race," is, as Adam Kadmon, made in the image of God -- a priapic image, therefore. The Hebrew words sacr and n'cabvah are, literally translated, lingham (phallus) and yoni , notwithstanding their translation in the Bible (Genesis i. v. 27.) "male and female." As said there "God creates 'Man in his own image' . . . . . in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them," the androgyne Adam-Kadmon. Now this Kabalistic name is not that of a living man, nor even of a human or divine Being, but of the two sexes or organs of procreation, called in Hebrew with that usual sincerity of language pre-eminently Biblical, sacr and n'cabvah*; these two being, therefore, the image under which the "Lord God" appeared usually to his chosen people. That this is so, is now undeniably proven by almost all the symbologists and Hebrew scholars as well as by the Kabala. Therefore Adam is in one sense Jehovah. This makes plain another general tradition in the East mentioned in Gregorie's "Notes and Observations upon several passages in Scripture" (1684. Vol. 1 pp. 120-21) and quoted by Hargrave Jennings in his Phallicism: "That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should be kept above ground till committed to the middle of the earth by a priest of the most High God." Therefore, "Noah daily prayed in the ark before the BODY OF ADAM," or before the Phallus in the ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of Biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will understand what is meant. Jehovah, from the two words of which his name is
composed, "makes up the original idea of male-female as birth-originator, for the was the membrum virile and Houak was Eve." So . . . "the perfect one, as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth origin, as hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic use of form." ("Source of Measures," 159). Besides the same author shows and demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (a) Arets, earth, Adam, man, and H'Adam are cognate with each other, and are personified in the Bible under one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, god of the generation; and (b) that Jehovah, or Jah, is
*Jehovah says to Moses "the Summation of my name is Sacr, the carrier of the germ" -- phallus. "It is the vehicle of the annunciation, and the sacr has passed down through ages to the sacr-factum of the Roman priest, and the sacr-fice, and sacrament of the English speaking race." (Source of Measures, p. 236) Thence marriage is a sacrament in the Greek and Roman Churches.
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Noah, or Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be , or literally in English, Inch. "
The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed saviour of Humanity, who carries in his ark or argha (the moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the "body of Adam," which body is the image of, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the
"Prophet of the Moon," the Argha or "Holy of Holies" of the (Yodh). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the moon -- i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are once more permutations, as has been shown Kabalistically. Says the author of the "Source of Measures" (p . 271): "There is one fact in regard to Moses and his works too important to be omitted. When he is instructed by the Lord as to his mission, the power name assumed by the Deity is,
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I am that I am, the Hebrew words being: --
a variety reading of . Now, Moses is , and equals 345. Add the values of the new form of the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination. 21 ÷ 2 = 10.5, or, reversed, 501, so that the asher or the that in I am that I am is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 x 3; 501 [[squared]] = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid number, etc., etc.
For a clearer explanation for the benefit of non-Kabalists we put it thus: "I am that I am" is in Hebrew: -
-
Add the numbers of these separate words and you have: --
(which relates to the process of descending in fire on the mount to make man, etc., etc.), and which is explained to be but a check and use of the numbers of the mountains; for: -- on one side we have 10 + 5 + 6 = 21, down the middle 501, and on the other side 6 + 5 + 10 = 21." (From the same author.) ( Vide § XXII., "The Symbolism of the Mystery Name IAO.")
The "Holy of Holies," both Kabalistic and Rabbinical, are thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither has originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half-initiated Levites, the symbol has with them acquired a significance which it hardly has with any other people to this day,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 469 THE OLD AND THE NEW JEHOVAH.
and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingham and Yoni of the modern average Hindu is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the Rabbinical "Holy of Holies," -- but it is no worse; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so-called "Wisdom," applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life, before, during, and after the days of Moses, of the chosen but "stiff-necked" people. That they have had at one
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time the Wisdom-Religion and use of the universal language and its symbols at their disposal and in their possession, is proved by the same esotericism existing to this day in India with regard to the "Holy of Holies." This, as said, was and still is the passage through the "golden" cow in the same stooping position as the one shown in the gallery of the pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew esotericism. The whole difference lies in the Spirit of Interpretation. With the Hindus as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race (Eve giving birth to Cain-Jehovah, as shown in the "Source of Measures"); to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception (as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel's blood -- Habel, the feminine principle) and -- child-bearing; a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam's THIRD son, Seth, with whose son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah-hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve -- to wit, male and female beings.* Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judaean Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Aryan Dwijas. The worship of the "god in the ark" dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabala, edited and re-edited, has become tainted with it.
With the ancient Aryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through
* In the fourth chapter of Genesis, v. 26, it is mis-translated, " . . . And he called his name Enos (man); then began men to call upon the name of the Lord." -- which has no sense in it, since Adam and the others must have done the same.
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the Holy of Holies (now symbolized by the cow), in the beginning through the temple Hiranya gharba (the radiant Egg) -- in itself a symbol of Universal, abstract nature -- meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re-birth of the individual and his regeneration: the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the matrix of mother nature, or the physical creature ready to re-become the original spiritual Being, pre-natal MAN. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man. For the Aryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of spiritual man with material female nature, the physiological being taking pre-eminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial. The Aryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were pre-eminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day -- gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality. They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, with their tribal deity, self-exalted above all others, and a covenant that his "seed shall be as the
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dust of the earth"; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and, as representation, a number and numbers.
Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindu Aryan -- the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth -- religion has ever been, in his words, "an everlasting lode-star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him." The religion of the Hindu detaches him from this earth; therefore, even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the "MASTERS" and "Lords" of European potencies -- the Israelites -- certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them "religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation" -- and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and poetise it, at the expense of all other religions.
But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage entrance and the sarcophagus in the King's chamber meant regeneration -- not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created immortal Hierophants and "Sons of God" -- never mortal men and Sons of lust and flesh -- as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The Aryan Hindu belongs to the oldest races now on earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. One is nearly one
[[Vol. 2, Page 471]] THE CRAFT OF THE RABBINS.
million years old; the other is a small sub-race some 8,000 years old and no more.*
But Phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols; and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the Aryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on Phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves. Philo Judaeus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do . . . commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. They did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly; and it is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading -- Geometry, the fifth divine Science ("fifth" -- because it is the fifth key in the series of the Seven Keys to the Universal esoteric language and symbology) was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and religion were degraded.
We are told that it is just the same with our Brahma-prajapati, with Osiris and all other creative gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindu Lingham is identical with "Jacob's Pillar " -- most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in that the esoteric significance of the Lingham was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Aryan Hierophant and Brahmin, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval
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nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose -- that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself
* Strictly speaking, the Jews are an artificial Aryan race, born in India, and belonging to the Caucasian division. No one who is familiar with the Armenians and the Parsis can fail to recognize in the three the same Aryan, Caucasian type. From the seven primitive types of the Fifth Race there now remain on Earth but three. As Prof. W. H. Flower aptly said in 1885, "I cannot resist the conclusion so often arrived at by various anthropologists -- that the primitive man, whatever he may have been, has in the course of ages diverged into three extreme types, represented by the Caucasian of Europe, the Mongolian of Asia, and the Ethiopian of Africa, and that all existing individuals of the species can be ranged around these types. . . . " (The President's address at the Anthrop. Inst. of Great Britain, etc.) Considering that our Race has reached its Fifth Sub-race, how can it be otherwise?
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in his supposed monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate.* A commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment -- "love each other." Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same "Holy of Holies" -- the Lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol -- the bearer of its own seed and root of all. Viraj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from androgyne Nature, one from Brahma and his female counterpart Vach, the other, from Osiris and Isis -- never from the One infinite God. In the Judaeo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahma, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu's navel, the Central point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile -- all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible: one is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application; the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel (Luke i. 28). In Hinduism -- the "Holy of Holies" is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personae are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human Womb -- Eve, Sarah, etc., etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic god, and his image -- man.
Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute -- Jehovah -- there was the unknown, incognizable Diety, the Kabalistic Ain-Soph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning, no better than the dead-
letter Lingham-** worshippers of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedantin philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers -- the Sadducees, the
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* Whenever such analogies between the Gentiles and the Jews, and later the Christians, were pointed out, it was the invariable custom of the latter to say that it was the work of the Devil who forced the Pagans to imitate the Jews for the purpose of throwing a slur on the religion of the one, true living God. To this Faber says very justly "Some have imagined that the Gentiles were servile copyists of the Israelites, and that each point of similitude was borrowed from the Mosaical Institutes. But this theory will by no means solve the problem: both because we find the very same resemblance in the ceremonies of nations far different from Palestine, as we do in the rites of those who are in its immediate vicinity, and because it seems incredible that all should have borrowed from one which was universally disliked and despised." (Pagan Idol. I., 104.)
** Their consecrated pillars (unhewn stones) erected by Abraham and Jacob were LINGHI.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 473 THE ELOHISTIC AND JEHOVISTIC TEXTS.
most refined as the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the LAW. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular blind -- how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a NUMBER, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the Kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their "pillar of Jacob," their Bethel, oil-anointed phalli, and their "Brazen Serpent," worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their "Covenant" -- the Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrin and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism (p. 67) "We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone. . . . that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah . . . which written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or JHVH (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (in another form U); then if we place the I in the U we have the 'Holy of Holies'; we also have the Lingha and Yoni and Argha of the Hindus, the Isvara and 'supreme Lord'; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni (?) of the Ark of the Covenant."
The Biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David -- even admitting the identity of the old genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of prehistoric darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do so. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism, as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the "Book of God," since it was found by Hilkiah (See "Introduction to the Old Testament," and also Bishop Colenso's "Elohistic and Jehovistic writers"); and that "the Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a SUPPLEMENTARY One." The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the Bible chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed
organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name, or the Yodh (phallus), and He (the
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opening, or
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the Womb) according to Kabalistic authority -- is of a far later date than the Elohim symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingham and Yoni found on every road-side in India.
Just as the IAO of the mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas of some Gnostic sects identical with the god of the Hebrews, who was the same with the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on "heathen" as on the Gnostic "Christian" gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there is a "Horus" seated on the lotus, inscribed [[ABRASAXIAO ]] (Abraxas Iao) -- an address exactly parallel to the so frequent [[EIS ZETS SARAPI]] (Eis zets sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems; and therefore only to be translated by "Abraxas is the One Jehovah" (King's Gnostics, p. 327). But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows -- "the numerical or Kabalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refer to the Persian title of the god 'Mithra,' Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao." Thus, the Sun, in one aspect, the moon or the Lunar genius, in another, that generative deity whom the Gnostics saluted as "Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night-time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of Death."
It is only in his capacity of the genius of the moon, the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth, that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the creator of our globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament.
The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge, "It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books PRETENDING TO INSPIRATION, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH (! !). . . ."
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 475 NATURE, A STONE-COLD MOTHER.
§ XVIII.
ON THE MYTH OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL,"
IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS.
-------
A.
THE EVIL SPIRIT: WHO, AND WHAT?
OUR present quarrel is exclusively with theology. The Church enforces belief in a personal god and a personal devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. And though for the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, Nature is no better than "a comely mother, but stone cold" -- this is true only so far as regards external physical nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature's numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the materialist and the physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard physical nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognise in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation: a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract nature -- the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?
If our modern philosophers -- preceded by the medieval scholars -- have helped themselves to more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, theologians have built their God and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his staff, entirely out of the dramatis personae of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been
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welcome to these, had they not cunningly distorted the original characters, perverted the philosophical meaning, and taking advantage of the ignorance of Christendom -- the result of long ages of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy -- tossed every symbol into the most inextricable confusion. One of their most sinful achievements in this direction, was the transformation of the divine alter ego into the grotesque Satan of their theology.
As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the inner being of nature and man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution -- MAN -- we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian called the Devil "the monkey of God," this could be attributed to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded to the Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda in the Zend Avesta and the Vendidad, and of his Amshaspends, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump-card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succes d'estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.
Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical "Christian" (as they call themselves, "Sectarian" as we call them) Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but to discover in its verses, by mangling the texts and meaning, Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed "Kabalists" proceed to write books and to mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabala.*
* Such a pseudo -Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in France, who, having studied the Zohar and other old remnants of Jewish Wisdom under the "Chevalier" Drach, an ancient Rabbi Kabalist converted to the Romish Church -- wrote with his help half a dozen volumes full of slander and calumnies against every prominent Spiritualist and Kabalist. From 1848 up to 1860 he persecuted unrelentingly the old Count d'Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists in France, a man the scope of whose occult knowledge will never be appreciated correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real beliefs and knowledge under the mask of Spiritism.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 477 THE GENESIS OF THE DEVIL.
May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root
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idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom-God, who had first been regarded as the creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil -- a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail? We need not go out of the way to compare the pagan demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldea with the devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldeo-Judaean mythology: --
The primitive origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the cosmic powers -- the Heavens and the Earth -- in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their Silik-Muludag, "the God amongst all the Gods," the "merciful guardian of men on Earth," was the Son of Hea (or Ea) the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebu. With both peoples -- as in the case of the Hindu gods -- their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As Evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the good (Hibbert Lect. 1887, pp. 101-115). The reading of the Chaldeo-Assyrian tiles has now demonstrated it beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son, and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the Chaldeo-Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been deciphered. The great "Face of the Deep" of Genesis is traced in the Tohu-bohu, "Deep," "Primeval Space," or Chaos of the Babylonians. Wisdom (the Great Unseen God) -
- called in Genesis chap. i. the "Spirit of God" -- lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this sea became the visible waters on the face of the Earth -- the crystalline abode of the great mother, the mother of Ea and all the gods, which became, still later, the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the great struggle of Bel with the Dragon -- the Devil!
Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whomsoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judaeus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the adversary, as also the gods of the gentiles. "Thou shalt not revile the gods," quoth the god of Moses (Exodus xxii. 28), for it is God who "hath divided (them) unto all nations" (Deut. iv. 19); and those who speak evil of
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"Dignities" (gods) are called "filthy dreamers" by Jude (8). For even Michael the Archangel durst not bring against him (the devil) a railing accusation, but said: "The Lord rebuke thee" (ibid 9). Finally the same is repeated in the Talmud.* "Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him daily, and said to him: 'Why dost thou this?' Consider that God himself would not curse me, but merely said: 'The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.' "**
This bit of Talmudic information shows plainly two things: (a) that St. Michael is called "God" in the Talmud, and somebody else "the Lord"; and (b) that Satan is a God, of whom even the "Lord" is in fear. All we read in the Zohar and other Kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this "personage" is simply the personification of the abstract evil, which is the weapon of Karmic law and KARMA. It
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is our human nature and man himself, as it is said that "Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man." It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.
It is a well-known fact -- to learned Symbologists at all events -- that in every great religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge (the second logos), or the first emanation from the mind (Mahat), who is made to strike, so to say, the key-note of that which may be called the correlation of individuality and personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. The Logos it is, who is shown in the mystic symbolism of cosmogony, theogony, and anthropogony, playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being, i.e., that of the purely human personality and the divine impersonality of the so-
called Avatars, or divine incarnations, and of the universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and the Farvarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean philosophy. On the lower rungs of theogony the celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a Farvarshi, or a celestial "Double." It is the same, only a still more mystic, reassertion of the Kabalistic axiom, "Deus est Demon inversus"; the word "demon," however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, standing for the guardian Spirit, an "Angel," not a devil of Satanic descent, as theology will have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual logic and consistency by accepting, as the ferouer of Christ, St. Michael, who was "his Angel Guardian," as proved by St. Thomas,*** while he calls the prototypes of Michael and his synonyms, such as Mercury, for example, devils
** Treat. Kiddusheem, 81. But see the Qabbala by Mr. I. Myer, pp. 92, 94, and the Zohar, quoted in his Volume.
*** In the work of Marangone "Delle grandezze del Archangelo Sancto Mikaele," the author exclaims: "O Star, the greatest of those that follow the Sun who is Christ! . . . [[continued on following page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 479 GOD AND DEVIL, BOTH METATRONS.
The Church accepts positively the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other god or mortal has. Writes de Mirville: "Here we have the two heroes of the Old Testament, the Verbum (?), or the second Jehovah, and his face ('Presence,' as the Protestants translate) forming both but one, and yet being two, a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean ferouers, and learnt that the ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once image, face, and the guardian of the Soul which finally assimilates the ferouer." (Memoires a l'Academie, Vol. v., p. 516.) This is almost correct.
Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word metatron being divided into [[meta, thronon]], means near the throne. It means quite the reverse, as meta means "beyond" and not "near." This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the quis ut Deus, is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.
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They maintain, furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and Christian theology there does not exist a "higher celestial personality, after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel or the Seraphim, Michael ." According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is "the archisatrap of the sacred militia, the guardian of the planets, the King of the Stars, the slayer of Satan and the most powerful Rector." In the mystic astronomy of these gentlemen, he is "the conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the sidereal throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the solar fires"; and, defender of the Christ-Sun, he approaches so near his Master, "that he seems to become one with him . . . . Owing to this fusion with the WORD ( Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely of the duality, and saw no Michael but only his Master," writes the Abbe Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords to them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.
Thus the same titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are called Metatron, "both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they speak one in the other" (sic) as, according to the Zohar, the term signifies equally "the Master and the Ambassador." Both are the Angel of the Face, because, as we are informed, if, on the one hand, the "Word" is called "the face (or the Presence) and the image of the substance of God," on the other, "when
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] O living image of Divinity! O great thaumaturgist of the old Testament! O invisible Vicar of Christ within his Church! . . ." etc., etc. The work is in great honour in the Latin Church.
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speaking of the Saviour to the Israelites, Isaiah (?) tells them that "the angel of his presence saved them in their affliction" -- "so he was their Saviour."* Elsewhere he (Michael) is called very plainly "the Prince of the Faces of the Lord, the glory of the Lord." Both (Jehovah and Michael) are "the guides of Israel** . . . chiefs of the armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the souls and even Seraphs."***
The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle theologians and casuists mean by the term Ferouer,**** a word borrowed by some French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard XIX. of the Vendidad it is said (verse 14), "Invoke, O Zarathustra! my Farvarshi, who am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most solid, the most intelligent, . . . . and whose soul is the Holy Word" (Mathra Spenta). The French Orientalists translate Farvarshi by "Ferouer."
Now what is a Ferouer, or Farvarshi? In some Mazdean works (e.g., Ormazd Ahriman, §§ 112, 113), it is plainly implied that Farvarshi is the inner, immortal man (or that Ego which reincarnates); that it
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existed before its physical body and survives all such it happens to be clothed in. "Not only man was endowed with the Farvarshi, but gods too, and the sky, fire, waters, and plants." (Introduction to the Vendidad, by J. Darmesteter). This shows as plainly as can be shown that the ferouer is the "spiritual counterpart" of whether god, animal, plant, or even element, i.e., the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathustra to invoke his Farvarshi and not himself (Ahura-Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster's own Atman (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. This is quite clear.
Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their god and angels, and the deity and its aspects, or the gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as gods or planets) DEVILS, they yet make of the same Mercury the ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius (De Idol., II., 373)
*** "La Face et le Representant du Verbe," p. 18, de Mirville.
**** That which is called in the Vendidad "Farvarshi," the immortal part of an individual, that which outlives man -- the Higher Ego, say the Occultists, or the divine Double.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 481 FRAUDULENT TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.
proves that Michael is the Mercury of the pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that "according to great theologians Mercury and the Sun are one," (?) and no wonder, they think, since "Mercury being so near the Wisdom of the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him."
This "pagan" view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown in the ORIGINAL Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless). So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter -- "the gods have come down to us in the likeness of men," -- verse 12 (xiv.) adds: "And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes (or Mercury), because he was the leader of the WORD (Verbum)," and not "the chief speaker," as erroneously translated in the authorised, and repeated even in the revised, English Bible. Michael is the angel in the Vision, the Son of God, "who was like unto a Son of Man." It is the Hermes-Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis-Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Michael leontoid [[ophiomorphos]] of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion head, like his father Ildabaoth. (See King's Gnostics.)
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Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church consents tacitly, many of her writers avowing it publicly. And, unable to deny the flagrant "borrowing" of their Church, who "spoilt" the symbols of her seniors, as the Jews had "spoilt" the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and as seriously. Thus the writers who were hitherto timid enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, "a legendary plagiarism perpetrated by man," are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause: "to a prehistorical plagiarism, of a superhuman origin."
If the reader would know how, he must kindly turn to the same fifth volume of de Mirville's work. Please note that this author was the official and recognised defender of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. On page 518 we read: --
"We have pointed out several demi-gods, and also very historical heroes of the pagans, who were predestined from the moment of their birth, to ape while dishonouring it, the nativity of the hero, who was quite God, before whom the whole earth had to bow; we traced them being born as he was, from an immaculate mother; we saw them strangling serpents in their cradles, fighting against demons, performing miracles, dying as martyrs, descending to the nether world and rising again from the dead. And we have bitterly deplored that timid and shy Christians should feel compelled to explain all such identities on the ground of
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coincidence of myth and symbol. They forgot apparently these words of the Saviour: 'ALL THAT CAME BEFORE ME ARE THIEVES AND ROBBERS,' a word which explains all without any absurd negation and which I commented in these words 'The Evangel is a sublime drama, parodied and played before its appointed time by ruffians.' "
The "ruffians" (les droles), are of course demons whose manager is Satan. Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of the difficulty! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant de Mirville, followed the happy suggestion in his "Monumental Christianity," and so did Dr. Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a systematic and collective plagiarism, which went on for several centuries on the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, "All that ever came before me, etc.," is a verbatim repetition of words written in the "Book of Enoch" lxxxix. In the Introduction to Archbishop Lawrence's translation of it from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the "Evolution of Christianity," remarks: --
"In revising the proof-sheets of the Book of Enoch . . . . . the parable of the sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch, lxxxix., in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing . . . the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable -- 'All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers' -- language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch."
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It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versa. Jude (14-15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his 10,000 saints, and naming specifically the prophet, acknowledges the source. This "parallelism between prophet and apostle, have placed beyond controversy that, in the eyes of the author of an Epistle accepted as divine revelation, the Book of Enoch was the inspired production of an antediluvian patriarch . . . " and further " . . . the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of N.T. Scripture, . . . clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This Evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 483 VEDAS, ONCE UNIVERSAL.
of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great Master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian Patriarch." (INT. xxxv.)
"Antediluvian," truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no more the original prediction of the events to come, but, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a prehistoric religion. . . . . "In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of Kapila and other (inspired sages) . . . imparts to the world true wisdom as Enoch did. In the Treta age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch (the Chakravartin or the 'Everlasting King' of Enoch*) and protects the three worlds (or races). In the Dwapara age, in the person of Veda-Vyasa, he divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Sata) of branches." Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Aryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto-Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off-
shoots of the never dying tree of wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judaeo-Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present age, Vishnu, or the "Everlasting King" will appear as Kalki, and re-establish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal. "The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time (the sixth race) shall be as the seeds of other human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age of purity"; i.e., it shall be the seventh race, the race of "Buddhas," the "Sons of God," born of immaculate parents.
-------
B.
THE GODS OF LIGHT PROCEED FROM THE GODS OF DARKNESS.
Thus it is pretty well established that Christ, the Logos, or the God in Space and the Saviour on Earth,
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is but one of the echoes of the same antediluvian and sorely misunderstood Wisdom. The history begins by the descent on Earth of the "Gods" who incarnate in mankind, and this is the FALL. Whether Brahma hurled down on Earth in the allegory by Bhagavant, or Jupiter by Kronos, all are the symbols of the human races. Once landed on, and having touched this planet of dense matter, no snow-
white wings of the highest angel can remain immaculate, or the Avatar (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such Avatar is
* Saith Uriel (chap. xxvi. v. 3), in the "Book of Enoch" "all those who have received mercy shall for ever bless God the everlasting King," who will reign over them.
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the fall of a God into generation. Nowhere is the metaphysical truth more clear, when explained esoterically, or more hidden from the average comprehension of those who instead of appreciating the sublimity of the idea can only degrade, than in the Upanishads, the esoteric glossaries of the Vedas. The Rig-Veda, as Guignault characterized it, "is the most sublime conception of the great highways of Humanity." The Vedas are, and will remain for ever, in the esotericism of the Vedanta and the Upanishads, "the mirror of the eternal Wisdom."
For over sixteen centuries the new masks, forced on the faces of the old gods, have screened them from public curiosity, but they have finally proved a misfit. Yet the metaphorical FALL, and as metaphorical atonement and crucifixion, led Western Humanity through roads knee-deep in blood. Worse than all, they led it to believe in the dogma of the evil spirit distinct from the spirit of all good, whereas the former lives in all matter and pre-eminently in man. Finally it created the God-slandering dogma of Hell and eternal perdition; it spread a thick film between the higher intuitions of man and divine verities; and, most pernicious result of all, it made people remain ignorant of the fact that there were no fiends, no dark demons in the Universe before man's own appearance on this, and probably on other earths. Henceforth the people were led to accept, as the problematical consolation for this world's sorrows, the thought of original sin.
The philosophy of that law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate, inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self-guidance, pertains to psychology and cannot be touched on now. To show the feeling in higher Intelligences, to analyse and give a natural reason for it, would necessitate, moreover, an endless philosophical explanation for which there is no room here. Perhaps, the best synthesis of this feeling is found in three lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. Says the "Fallen One": --
"Here we may reign secure; and in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell!
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven . . . ."
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Better be man, the crown of terrestrial production and king over its opus operatum, than be lost among the will-less spiritual Hosts in Heaven.
We have said elsewhere that the dogma of the first Fall rested on a few verses in Revelation; these verses being now shown a plagiarism from Enoch by some scholars. These grew into endless theories and speculations, which gradually acquired the importance of dogma and inspired tradition. Every one wanted to explain the verse about the seven-headed dragon with his ten horns and seven crowns, whose tail
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 485 THE SONS OF ETERNITY.
"drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth," and whose place, with that of his angels, "was found no more in heaven." What the seven heads of the Dragon (cycle) mean, and its five wicked kings also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III. of this Volume.
From Newton to Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard to these obscure verses. . . . . "The star that falls, is the heresiarch Theodosius" . . . . explains Bossuet. "The clouds of smoke, are the heresies of the Montanists. . . . . The third part of the stars, are the martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity. . . . ."
Bossuet ought to have known, however, that the events described in Revelation were not original, and may, as shown, be found in other and pagan traditions. There were no scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far later in China. But Christian theology had to be protected and saved.
This was only natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from destruction the lucubrations of Christian theologians?
The princeps aeris hujus, the "prince of the air" of St. Paul, is not the devil, but the effects of the astral light, as Eliphas Levi correctly explains. The Devil is not "the God of this period," as he says, for it is the deity of every age and period, since man appeared on earth, and matter, in its countless forms and states, had to fight for its evanescent existence against other disintegrating Forces.
The "Dragon" is simply the symbol of the cycle and of the "Sons of Manvantaric Eternity," who had descended on earth during a certain epoch of its formative period. The "clouds of smoke" are a geological phenomenon. The "third part of the stars of heaven" cast down to the earth -- refers to the divine Monads, (the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology) that circumambulate our globe; i.e., the human Egos destined to perform the whole cycle of incarnations. This sentence, qui circumambulat terram, however, is again referred to the DEVIL in theology, the mythical father of Evil being said to "fall like lightning." Unfortunately for this interpretation, the "Son of Man," or Christ, is expected, on the personal testimony of Jesus, to descend on earth likewise, "As the lightning cometh out of the East,"* just in the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen "as lightning to fall from heaven."** All these metaphors and figures of speech, pre-eminently Oriental in their character, must have their origin searched for in the East. In all the ancient cosmogonies light comes from darkness. In
principle of all things." Hence Pymander, the "Thought divine," issues as light from DARKNESS. Behemoth* is the principle of Darkness, or Satan, in Roman Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him that "Behemoth is the chief (principle) of the ways of God" (xl. 19) -- "Principium viarum Domini Behemoth!"
Consistency does not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of divine Revelation, so-called -- not as interpreted by theologians, at any rate.
The Egyptians and the Chaldeans referred the birth of their divine Dynasties to that period when creative Earth was in her last final throes, in giving birth to her prehistoric mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her continents. Her face was covered with "deep Darkness and in that (Secondary) Chaos was the principle of all things" that developed on the globe later on. And our geologists have ascertained that there was such a terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.** As to the tradition itself, every country and nation had it, each under its respective national form.
It is not alone Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had their Typhon, Python, Loki and its "falling" Demon, but China, also. The Celestials have a whole literature upon the subject. In King, it is said that in consequence of a rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit who said he was Ti himself, seven choirs of celestial spirits were exiled upon earth, which "brought a change in all nature, heaven itself bending down and uniting with earth."
And in the "Y-King," one reads: "The flying Dragon, superb and rebellious, suffers now, and his pride is punished; he thought he would reign in heaven, he reigns only on the earth."
Again, the Tchoon-Tsieoo says allegorically: "one night the stars ceased shining in darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the earth, where they are now hidden." These stars are the Monads.
Chinese cosmogonies have their "Lord of the Flame" and their "Celestial Virgin," with little "Spirits to help and minister to her; and big Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other gods." But all this does not prove that the said allegories are presentments or prophetic writings which all refer to Christian theology.
* The Protestant Bible defines Behemoth innocently -- "The elephant as some think" (See marginal note in Job xl. 19) in the authorised versions.
** Astronomy, however, knows nothing of stars that have disappeared unless from visibility, never from existence, since the Science of Astronomy became known. Temporary stars are only variable stars, and it is believed even that the new stars of Kepler and Tycho Brahe may still be seen.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 487 THE SHADOWS OF THE SHADOWS.
esoteric meaning in the Bible -- in both Testaments -- was the assertion of the same idea as in our Archaic teachings -- to wit, that the "Fall of the Angels" referred simply to the incarnation of angels "who had broken through the Seven Circles" -- is found in the Zohar. Now the Kabala of Simeon Ben Iochai is the soul and essence of its allegory, as the later Christian Kabala is the "dark cloaked" Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa MSS.):
"The wisdom of the Kabala rests in the science of the equilibrium and Harmony."
"Forces that manifest without having been first equilibrized perish in space" ("equilibrized" meaning differentiated).
"Thus perished the first Kings (the Divine Dynasties) of the ancient world, the self-produced Princes of giants. They fell like rootless trees, and were seen no more: for they were the Shadow of the Shadow"; to wit, the chhaya of the Shadowy Pitris. ( Vide about the "Kings of Edom.")
"But those that came after them, who shooting down like falling stars were enshrined in the shadows -- prevailed and to this day": Dhyanis, who by incarnating in those "empty shadows," inaugurated the era of mankind.
Every sentence in the ancient cosmogonies, unfolds to him who can read between the lines the identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.
The first lesson taught in Esoteric philosophy is, that the incognizable Cause does not put forth evolution, whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits periodically different aspects of itself to the perception of finite Minds. Now the collective Mind -- the Universal -- composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite in manifested Time, is still finite when contrasted with the unborn and undecaying Space in its supreme essential aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore there are inferior Beings among those Hosts, but there never were any devils or "disobedient Angels," for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law. The Asuras who incarnated (call them by any other name), followed in this a law as implacable as any
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other. They had manifested prior to the Pitris, and as time (in Space) proceeds in Cycles, their turn had come -- hence the numerous allegories (Vide "Demon est Deus inversus," Part II., Vol. I.). The name of Asura was first given by the Brahmans indiscriminately to those who opposed their mummeries and sacrifices, as the great Asura called "Asurendra" did. It is to those ages, probably, that the origin of the idea of the demon, as opposer and adversary, has to be traced.
The Hebrew Elohim, called in the translations "God," and who create "light," are identical with the Aryan Asuras. They are also
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referred to as the "Sons of Darkness" as a philosophical and logical contrast to light immutable and eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being co-eternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested shadow of AHURA-MAZDA (Asura-mazda), himself issued from Zeruana Akerne "boundless (circle of) Time" or the Unknown Cause. "Its glory," they say of the latter, "is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see." Its primal emanation is eternal light, which, from having been previously concealed in DARKNESS was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the "King of Life." He is the "first-born" in BOUNDLESS TIME, but, like his own antitype (pre-existing Spiritual idea), has lived within darkness from all eternity. The six Amshaspends (seven with himself, chief of all), the primitive Spiritual Angels and Men are collectively his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspends create the world in six days or periods also, and rest on the Seventh; whereas that Seventh is the first period or "day," in esoteric philosophy, (Primary creation in the Aryan cosmogony). It is that intermediate AEon which is the Prologue to creation, and which stands on the borderland between the uncreated eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first aspect of the eternal immutable Quiescence. In Genesis, on which no metaphysical energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to veil the esoteric Truth, "Creation" begins at the third stage of manifestation. "God" or the Elohim are the "Seven Regents" of Pymander. They are identical with all the other Creators.
But even in Genesis that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the "darkness" that was on the face of the deep. The Alahim are shown to "create" -- that is to say, to build or to produce the two or "double heaven" (not Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many words, that they separated the upper manifested (angelic) heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) eternal and immutable AEons from those periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven from Earth, the unknown from the KNOWN -- to the profane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in Pymander, which says that: "THOUGHT, the divine, which is LIGHT and LIFE (Zeruana Akerne) produced through its WORD, or first aspect," the other, operating THOUGHT, which being the god of Spirit and Fire, constructed seven Regents enclosing within their circle the world of Senses, named "fatal destiny." The latter refers to Karma; the "seven circles" are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven invisible Spirits, in the angelic spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets,* the
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* Another proof, if any were needed, that the ancient Initiates knew of more than seven planets is to be found in the Vishnu Purana, Book II., ch. xii., where, describing [[continued on following page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 489 THE ONE PASSIVE DEITY.
seven Rishis of the great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Adityas by Roth: "they are neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor dawn, but the eternal sustainers of this luminous life which exists as it were behind all these phenomena."
It is they -- the "Seven Hosts" -- who, having "considered in their Father (divine Thought) the plan of the operator," as says Pyrnander, desired to operate (or build the world with its creatures) likewise; for, having been born "within the sphere of operation" -- the manifesting Universe -- such is the Manvantaric LAW. And now comes the second portion of the passage, or rather of two passages merged into one to conceal the full meaning. Those who were born within the sphere of operation were "the brothers who loved him well." The latter -- the "him" -- were the primordial angels: the Asuras, the Ahriman, the Elohim -- or "Sons of God," of whom Satan was one -- all those spiritual beings who were called the "Angels of Darkness," because that darkness is absolute light, a fact now neglected if not entirely forgotten in theology. Nevertheless, the spirituality of those much abused "Sons of Light" which is Darkness, must be evidently as great in comparison with that of the Angels next in order, as the ethereality of the latter would be, when contrasted with the density of the human body. The former are the "First-born"; therefore so near to the confines of pure quiescent Spirit as to be merely the "PRIVATIONS" -- in the Aristotelian sense -- the ferouers or the ideal types of those who followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, were said in process of time to have refused to create, as commanded by "God" -- otherwise, TO HAVE REBELLED.
Perchance, this is justified on that principle of the Scientific theory which teaches us about light and sound and the effect of two waves of equal length meeting. "If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces absolute silence."
Explaining some of the "heresies" of his day, Justin Martyr shows the identity of all the world religions at their starting points. The first beginning opens invariably with the unknown and PASSIVE deity, from which emanates a certain active power or virtue, the Mystery that is sometimes called WISDOM, sometimes the SON, very often God, Angel, Lord, and LOGOS.* The latter is sometimes applied to the very first emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first androgyne or double ray produced at the beginning by the unseen. Philo depicts this wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation
[[Continued from preceding page]] the chariots attached to Dhruva (the pole star), Parasara speaks of "the chariots of the NINE planets," which are attached by aerial cords.
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* Justin: "Cum. Trypho," p. 284.
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had a beginning, for it proceeded from Oulom* (Aion, time), the highest of the AEons when emitted from the Father, it had remained with him before all creations, for it is part of him.** Therefore, Philo Judaeus calls Adam Kadmon "mind" (the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic system). "The mind, let it be named Adam.***
As the old Magian books explain it, the whole event becomes clear. A thing can only exist through its opposite -- Hegel teaches us, and only a little philosophy and spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians accounted for the origin of evil in their exoteric teachings in this way. "Light can produce nothing but light, and can never be the origin of evil"; how then was the evil produced, since there was nothing co-equal or like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a GREAT ONE (the "Great Asura," Ahriman, Lucifer, etc., etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.
This is a little nearer to the truth, but still wide of the mark. There was no "EVIL thought" that originated the opposing Power, but simply THOUGHT per se; something which, being cogitative, and containing design and purpose, is therefore finite, and must thus find itself naturally in opposition to pure quiescence, the as natural state of absolute Spirituality and Perfection. It was simply the law of Evolution that asserted itself; the progress of mental unfolding, differentiated from spirit, involved and entangled already with matter, into which it is irresistibly drawn. Ideas, in their very nature and essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary, are opposed to absolute THOUGHT, that unknowable ALL of whose mysterious operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that "it has no kinship of nature with Evolution" (Principles of Psychology, **** 474) -- which it certainly has not.
The Zohar gives it very suggestively. When the "Holy One" (the Logos) desired to create man, he called the highest host of Angels and said to them what he wanted, but they doubted the wisdom of this desire and answered: "Man will not continue one night in his glory" -- for
** Sanchoniathon calls time the oldest AEon, Protogonos, the "first-born."
*** Philo Judaeus: "Cain and his Birth," p. xvii.
**** It is suggestive of that spirit of paradoxical negation so conspicuous in our day, that while the evolution hypothesis has won its rights of citizenship in science as taught by Darwin and Haeckel, yet
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both the eternity of the Universe and the pre-existence of a universal consciousness, are rejected by the modern psychologists. "Should the Idealist be right, the doctrine of evolution is a dream," says Mr. Herbert Spencer. (See foot note, pp. 1 and 2, Book II.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 491 THE ZOHAR ON THE FALLEN ONES.
which they were burnt (annihilated?), by the "Holy" Lord. Then he called another, lower Host, and said the same. And they contradicted the "Holy One": "What is the good of Man?" they argued. Still Elohim created man, and when man sinned there came the hosts of Uzza and Azael, and twitted God: "Here is the Son of Man that thou hast made," they said. "Behold, he sinned!" Then the Holy One replied: "If you had been among them (men) you would have been worse than they." And he threw them from their exalted position in Heaven even down on the Earth; and "they were changed (into men) and sinned after the women of the earth"; (Zohar, 9, b.). This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis of these "Sons of God" (chap. vi.) having been punished for it. The only reference to it in the Bible is in Jude (6). "And the angels which kept not their first estate but left their habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." And this means simply that the "Angels," doomed to incarnation, are in the chains of flesh and matter, under the darkness of ignorance, till the "Great Day," which will come as always after the seventh round, after the expiration of the "Week," on the SEVENTH SABBATH, or in the post-Manvantaric Nirvana.
How truly esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is "PYMANDER the Thought Divine" of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious confessions made by de St. Marc, in his Preface and letter to the Bishop of Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic and Egyptian into a mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how PYMANDER has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc's translation, traces are found of the real PYMANDER -- the "Universal Thought" or "MIND." This is the verbatim translation from the old French translation, the original being given in the foot-
note* in its quaint old French: --
"Seven men (principles) were generated in Man." "The nature of the harmony of the Seven of the Father and of the Spirit. Nature . . . .
* "SECTION 16 (chap. i., Mercure Trismegiste -- PIMANDRE . . . . " "Oh, ma pensee, que s'ensuit il? car je desire grandement ce propos. Pimandre dict, ceci est un mystere cele, jusques a ce jour d'hui. Car nature, soit mestant avec l'home, a produit le miracle tres merveilleux, aiant celluy qui ie t'ay dict, la nature de l'harmonie des sept du pere, et de l'esprit. Nature ne s'arresta pas la, mais incontinent a produict sept homes, selon les natures des sept gouverneurs en puissance des deux sexes et esleuez. . . . La generation de ces sept s'est donnee en ceste maniere . . . ."
And a gap is made in the translation, which can be filled partially by resorting to the Latin text of Apuleius. The commentator, the Bishop, says: "Nature produced in him (man) seven men" (seven
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principles).
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produced seven men in accordance with the seven natures of the Seven Spirits" "having in them, potentially, the two sexes."
Metaphysically, the Father and the Son are the "Universal Mind" and the "periodical Universe"; the "Angel" and the "Man." It is the SON and the FATHER at one and the same time; in Pymander, the active IDEA and the passive THOUGHT that generates it; the radical key-note in Nature which gives birth to the seven notes -- the septenary scale of the creative Forces, and to the seven prismatic aspects of colour, all born from the one white ray, or LIGHT -- itself generated in DARKNESS.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 18 c
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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[[This page continued from previous section]]
C.
THE MANY MEANINGS OF THE "WAR IN HEAVEN."
The Secret Doctrine points out, as a self-evident fact, that Mankind, collectively and individually, is, with all manifested nature, the vehicle (a) of the breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentiation; and (b) of the countless "breaths" proceeding from that One BREATH in its secondary and further differentiations, as Nature with its many mankinds proceeds downwards toward the planes that are ever increasing in materiality. The primary Breath informs the higher Hierarchies; the secondary -- the lower, on the constantly descending planes.
Now there are many passages in the Bible which prove on their face, exoterically, that this belief was at one time Universal; and the most convincing are the two chapters Ezekiel xxviii. and Isaiah xiv. Christian theologians are welcome to interpret both as referring to the great War before Creation, the Epos of Satan's rebellion, etc., if they so choose, but the absurdity of the idea is too apparent. Ezekiel addresses his lamentations and reproofs to the King of Tyre; Isaiah -- to King Ahaz, who indulged in the worship of idols, as did the rest of the nation, with the exception of a few Initiates (the Prophets, so called), who tried to arrest it on its way to exotericism, or idolatry, which is the same thing. Let the student judge.
In Ezekiel xxviii. it is said, "Son of Man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, thus saith the Lord God (as we understand it, the "god" KARMA): Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said I am a God . . . . and yet thou art a man . . . . behold I shall bring strangers upon thee . . . . and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom . . . . and they shall bring thee down to the pit . . . ." or Earth-
life.
The origin of the "prince of Tyrus" is to be traced to, and sought in
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the "divine Dynasties" of the iniquitous Atlanteans, the Great Sorcerers (See last Comments, on Stanza XII., verses 47-49). There is no metaphor in the words of Ezekiel, but actual history, this time. For the voice in the prophet, the voice of the "Lord," his own Spirit, which spake unto him, says: -- "Because
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 18 c
thou hast said, 'I am a God, I sit in the seat of God(s) -- (divine Dynasties), in the midst of the seas,' yet thou art a man. . . . . Behold thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee: with thy wisdom . . . thou hast increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches. Behold therefore . . . strangers shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom . . . they shall bring thee down . . . and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas." (Verses 3-8.) All such imprecations are not prophecy, but simply reminders of the fate of the Atlanteans, the "Giants on Earth."
What can be the meaning of this last sentence if it is not a narrative of the fate of the Atlanteans? Verse 17 saying, "thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty," may refer to the "Heavenly Man" in Pymander, or to the Fallen Angels, who are accused of having fallen through pride on account of the great beauty and wisdom which became their lot. There is no metaphor here, except in the preconceived ideas of our theologians, perhaps. These verses relate to the Past and belong more to the Knowledge acquired at the mysteries of Initiation than to retrospective clairvoyance! Says the voice, again: --
"Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God (in the Satya Yuga) every precious stone was thy covering . . . . the workmanship of thy tabrets and thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day thou was created. . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . . thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire . . . thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee out of the mountain of God and destroy thee. . . . "
The "Mountain of God" means the "Mountain of the Gods" or Meru, whose representative in the Fourth Race was Mount Atlas, the last form of one of the divine Titans, so high in those days that the ancients believed that the heavens rested on its top. Did not Atlas assist the giants in their war against the gods? (Hyginus). Another version shows the fable as arising from the fondness of Atlas, son of Iapetus and Clymene, for astronomy, and from his dwelling for that reason on the highest mountain peaks. The truth is that Atlas, "the mountain of the gods," and also the hero of that name, are the esoteric symbols of the Fourth Race, and his seven daughters, the Atlantides, are the symbols of its Seven Sub-races. Mount Atlas, according to all the legends, was three times as high as it is now; having sunk at two different times. It is of a volcanic origin, and therefore the voice
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within Ezekiel says: "I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee," etc. (v. 18). Surely it does not mean, as seems to be the case from the translated texts, that this fire was to be brought from the midst of the Prince of Tyrus, or his people, but from Mount Atlas, symbolising the proud race, learned in magic and high in arts and civilization, whose last remnant was destroyed almost at the foot of the range of those once gigantic mountains.
Truly, "thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more"; as the very name of the race and its fate is now annihilated from man's memory. Bear in mind, that almost every ancient King and priest was an initiate; that from toward the close of the Fourth Race there had been a feud between the Initiates of the Right and those of the Left Path; finally, that the garden of Eden is referred to by other
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personages than the Jews of the Adamic race, since even Pharaoh is compared to the fairest tree of Eden by this same Ezekiel, who shows "all the trees of Eden, the choicest and best of Lebanon, . . . comforted in the nether parts of the earth . . . ," for "they also went down into hell with him" (Pharaoh)* unto the nether parts, which are in fact the bottom of the ocean, whose floor gaped wide to devour the lands of the Atlanteans and themselves. If one bears all this in mind and compares the various accounts, then one will find out that the whole of chapters xxviii. and xxxi. of Ezekiel relate neither to Babylon, Assyria, nor yet Egypt, since none of these have been so destroyed, but simply fell into ruins on the surface, not beneath the earth -- but indeed to Atlantis and most of its nations. And he will see that the "garden of Eden" of the Initiates was no myth, but a locality now submerged. Light will dawn upon him, and he will appreciate such sentences as these at their true esoteric value: "Thou hast been in Eden; . . . thou wast upon the holy mountain of God" -- for every nation had and many still have holy mountains: some, Himalayan Peaks, others, Parnassus, and Sinai. They were all places of initiation and the abodes of the chiefs of the communities of ancient and even modern adepts. And again: "Behold, the Assyrian (why not Atlantean, Initiate?) was a cedar in Lebanon; . . . his height was exalted above all the trees; . . . . the cedars in the garden of God could not hide him, . . . so that all the trees of Eden . . . . envied him" (Ezekiel xxxi. 3-9).
Throughout all Asia Minor, the Initiates were called the "trees of Righteousness," and the cedars of Lebanon, as also were some kings of Israel. So were the great adepts in India, but only the adepts of the
* The only Pharaoh whom the Bible shows going down into the Red Sea was the king who pursued the Israelites, and who remained unnamed, for very good reasons, perhaps. The story was surely made up from the Atlantean legend.
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left hand. When Vishnu Purana narrates that "the world was overrun with trees," while the Prachetasas -
- who "passed 10,000 years of austerity in the vast ocean" -- were absorbed in their devotions, the allegory relates to the Atlanteans and the adepts of the early Fifth Race -- the Aryans. Other "trees (adept Sorcerers) spread, and overshadowed the unprotected earth; and the people perished . . . unable to labour for ten thousand years." Then the sages, the Rishis of the Aryan race, called Prachetasas, are shown "coming forth from the deep,"* and destroying by the wind and flame issuing from their mouths, the iniquitous "trees" and the whole vegetable kingdom; until Soma (the moon), the sovereign of the vegetable world, pacifies them by making alliance with the adepts of the Right Path, to whom he offers as bride Marisha, "the offspring of the trees."** This means that which is given in the Stanzas and Commentaries, and what is also given in Part II. of Vol. I., "The Sacred Island." It hints at the great struggle between the "Sons of God" and the Sons of the Dark Wisdom -- our forefathers; or the Atlantean and the Aryan Adepts.
The whole History of that period is allegorized in the Ramayana, which is the mystic narrative in epic form of the struggle between Rama -- the first king of the divine dynasty of the early Aryans -- and
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Ravana, the symbolical personation of the Atlantean (Lanka) race. The former were the incarnations of the Solar Gods; the latter, of the lunar Devas. This was the great battle between Good and Evil, between white and black magic, for the supremacy of the divine forces, or of the lower terrestrial or cosmic powers. If the student would understand better the last statement, let him turn to the Anugita episode of the Mahabharata, chapter v., where the Brahmana tells his wife, "I have perceived by means of the Self the seat abiding in the Self -- (the seat) where dwells the Brahman free from the pairs of opposites and the moon, together with the fire (or the sun), upholding (all) beings (as), the mover of the intellectual principle." The moon is the deity of the mind (Manas) but only on the lower plane. "Manas is dual -- lunar in the lower, solar in its upper portion," says a commentary. That is to say, it is attracted in its higher aspect towards Buddhi, and in its
** This is pure allegory. The waters are a symbol of wisdom and of occult learning. Hermes represented the sacred Science under the symbol of fire ; the Northern Initiates, under that of water. The latter is the production of Nara, the "Spirit of God," or rather Paramatman, the "Supreme Soul," says Kulluka Bhatta, Narayana, meaning "he who abides in the deep" or plunged in the Waters of Wisdom -- "water being the body of Nara" (Vayu). Hence arises the statement that for 10,000 years they remained in austerity "in the vast Ocean"; and are shown emerging from it. Ea, the God of Wisdom, is the "Sublime Fish," and Dagon or Oannes is the Chaldean man-fish, who emerges from the waters to teach wisdom.
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lower descends into, and listens to the voice of its animal soul full of selfish and sensual desires; and herein is contained the mystery of an adept's as of a profane man's life, as also that of the post-mortem separation of the divine from the animal man. The Ramayana -- every line of which has to be read esoterically -- discloses in magnificent symbolism and allegory the tribulations of both man and soul. "Within the body, in the midst of all these life-winds (? principles), which move about in the body, and swallow up one another,* blazes the Vaishvana fire** sevenfold, of which 'I' am the goal," says the Brahmana.***
But the chief "Soul" is Manas or mind; hence, Soma, the moon, is shown as making an alliance with the solar portion in it, personified as the Prachetasas. But of the seven keys that open the seven aspects of the Ramayana, as of every other Scripture, this is only one -- the metaphysical.
The symbol of the "Tree" standing for various Initiates was almost universal. Jesus is called "the tree of Life," as also all the adepts of the good Law, while those of the left Path are referred to as the "withering trees." John the Baptist speaks of "the axe" which "is laid to the root of the trees" (Matth. iii. 10); and the King of Assyria's armies are called trees (Isaiah x. 19).
The true meaning of the Garden of Eden was sufficiently given in "Isis Unveiled. "
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The writer has more than once heard surprise expressed that Isis should contain so few of the doctrines now taught. This is quite erroneous. For the allusions to such teachings are plentiful, even if the teachings themselves were still withheld. The time had not arrived then, as the hour has not struck now to say all. "No Atlanteans, or the Fourth Race which preceded our Fifth Race, are mentioned in 'Isis Unveiled,' " a critic on "Esoteric Buddhism" wrote one day. I, who wrote Isis Unveiled, maintain that the Atlanteans are mentioned as our predecessors, namely, in Volume I., p. 133, when speaking of the Book of Job. For what can be plainer than this: "In the original text, instead of 'dead things,' it is written dead Rephaim, giants, or mighty primitive men, from whom 'Evolution' may one day trace our present race. " It is invited to do so now, now that this hint is explained quite openly; but Evolutionists are as sure to
* This is explained by the able translator of Anugita in a foot-note (p. 258) in these words: "The sense appears to be this; the course of worldly life is due to the operations of the life-winds which are attached to the SELF, and lead to its manifestations as individual souls.
**" Vaisvanara (or Vaishvanara) is a word often used to denote the Self" -- explains Nilakantha. *** Translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A., Bombay.
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decline nowadays as they did ten years ago. Science and theology are against us: therefore we question both, and have to do so in self-defence. On the strength of hazy metaphors scattered throughout the prophets, and in St. John's Revelation, a grand but re-edited version of the Book of Enoch, on these insecure grounds Christian theology built its dogmatic Epos of the War in Heaven. It did more: it used the symbolical visions, intelligible only to the Initiates, as pillars upon which to support the whole bulky edifice of its religion; and now the pillars have been found very weak reeds, and the cunning structure is foundering. The entire Christian scheme rests upon these Jakin and Boaz -- the two contrary forces of good and evil, Christ and Satan the [[agathai kai kakai dunameis]]. Take away from Christianity its main prop of the Fallen Angels, and the Eden Bower vanishes with its Adam and Eve into thin air; and Christ, in the exclusive character of the One God and Saviour, and the victim of Atonement for the Sin of animal-man, becomes forthwith a useless, meaningless myth.
In an old number of the Revue Archaeologique for the year 1845 (p. 41), a French writer, M. Maury, remarks: -- "This universal strife between good and bad spirits seems to be only the reproduction of another more ancient and more terrible strife, that, according to an ancient myth, took place before the creation of the universe, between the faithful and the rebellious legions."
Once more, it is a simple question of priority. Had John's Revelation been written during the Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its being simply another version of the Book of Enoch and the Dragon legends of pagan antiquity -- the grandeur and the beauty of the imagery might have biased the critics' opinion in favour of the Christian interpretation of that first war, whose battle field was starry
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Heaven, and the first slaughterers -- the Angels. As the matter stands now, however, one has to trace Revelation, event by event, to other and far older visions. For the better comprehension of the Apocalyptic allegories and of the esoteric epos we ask the reader to turn to Revelation, and to read chapter xii., from verse 1 to verse 7.
This has several meanings, most of which have been found out with regard to the astronomical and numerical keys of this universal myth. That which may be given now, is a fragment, a few hints as to its secret meaning, as embodying the record of a real war, the struggle between the Initiates of the two schools. Many and various are the still existing allegories built on that same foundation stone. The true narrative, that which gives the full esoteric meaning, is in the Secret books, but the writer has had no access to these.
In the exoteric works, however, the episode of the Taraka war, and some esoteric commentaries, may offer a clue perhaps. In every Purana
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the event is described with more or less variations, which show its allegorical character.
In the Mythology of the earliest Vedic Aryans as in the later Puranic narratives, mention is made of Budha, the "Wise"; one "learned in the Secret Wisdom," and who is the planet Mercury in his euhemerization. The Hindu Classical Dictionary credits Budha with being the author of a hymn in the Rig Veda. Therefore, he can by no means be "a later fiction of the Brahmins," but is a very old personation indeed.
It is by inquiring into his genealogy, or theogony, rather, that the following facts are disclosed. As a myth, he is the son of Tara, the wife of Brihaspati the "gold coloured," and of "Soma" the (male) Moon, who, Paris-like, carries this new Helen of the Hindu sidereal Kingdom away from her husband, which causes a great strife and war in Swarga (Heaven). The episode brings on a battle between the gods and the Asuras: King Soma, finds allies in Usanas (Venus), the leader of the Danavas; and the gods are led by Indra and Rudra, who side with Brihaspati. The latter is helped by Sankara (Siva), who, having had for his guru Brihaspati's father, Angiras, befriends his son. Indra is here the Indian prototype of Michael, the Archistrategus and the slayer of the "Dragon's" angels -- since one of his names is Jishnu "leader of the (celestial) Host." Both fight, as some Titans did against other Titans in defence of revengeful gods, one -- of Jupiter tonans (in India, Brihaspati is the planet Jupiter, which is a curious coincidence); the other, in support of the ever-thundering Rudra Sankara. During this war, he is deserted by his body-guard, the storm-gods (Maruts). The story is very suggestive in some of its details.
Let us examine some of them, and seek to discover their meaning.
The presiding genius, or "regent" of the planet Jupiter is Brihaspati, the wronged husband. He is the instructor or spiritual guru of the gods, who are the representatives of the procreative powers. In the Rig Veda, he is called Brahmanaspati, a name meaning "the deity in whom the action of the
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worshipped upon the gods is personified." Hence Brahmanaspati represents the materialization of the divine grace, so to say, by means of ritual and ceremonies, or the exoteric worship.
"TARA"* -- his wife -- is on the other hand the personification of the powers of one initiated into Gupta Vidya (secret knowledge), as will be shown.
SOMA is the moon astronomically; but in mystical phraseology, it is also the name of the sacred beverage drunk by the Brahmins and the Initiates during their mysteries and sacrificial rites. The "Soma" plant is the asclepias acida, which yields a juice from which that mystic beverage,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 499 ALLEGORIES ON THE "WAR IN HEAVEN."
the Soma drink, is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the Agnihotri (the fire priests) of the great mysteries knew all its powers. But the real property of the true Soma was (and is) to make a new man of the Initiate, after he is reborn, namely once that he begins to live in his astral body (See "The Elixir of Life"*); for, his spiritual nature overcoming the physical, he would soon snap it off and part even from that etherealized form.**
Soma was never given in days of old to the non-initiated Brahman -- the simple Grihasta, or priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati -- "guru of the gods" though he was -- still represented the dead-
letter form of worship. It is Tara his wife -- the symbol of one who, though wedded to dogmatic worship, longs for true wisdom -- who is shown as initiated into his mysteries by King Soma, the giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made in the allegory to carry her away. The result of this is the birth of Budha -- esoteric Wisdom -- (Mercury, or Hermes in Greece and Egypt). He is represented as "so beautiful," that even the husband, though well aware that Budha is not the progeny of his dead-letter worship -- claims the "new-born" as his Son, the fruit of his ritualistic and meaningless forms.*** Such is, in brief, one of the meanings of the allegory.
War in Heaven refers to several events of that kind on various and different planes of being. The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical fact pertaining to cosmogony. Mr. John Bentley thought that with the Hindus war in Heaven is only a figure referring to their calculations of time periods (see Bentley's Hindu Astronomy).****
** The partaker of Soma finds himself both linked to his external body, and yet away from it in his spiritual form. The latter, freed from the former, soars for the time being in the ethereal higher regions, becoming virtually "as one of the gods," and yet preserving in his physical brain the memory of what
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he sees and learns. Plainly speaking, Soma is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge forbidden by the jealous Elohim to Adam and Eve or Yah-ve, "lest Man should become as one of us."
*** We see the same in the modern exoteric religions.
**** "Historical Views of Hindu Astronomy." Quoting from the work in reference to Aryachatta, who is said to give a near approach to the true relation among the various values for the computations of the value of [[pi ]], the author of the "Source of Measures" reproduces a curious statement. Mr. Bentley, it is said, "was greatly familiar with the Hindu astronomical and mathematical knowledge . . . this statement of his then may be taken as authentic: the same remarkable trait, among so many Eastern and ancient nations of sedulously concealing the arcana of this kind of knowledge, is a marked one among the Hindus. That which was given out to be popularly taught and to be exposed to public inspection, was but the approximate of a more exact but hidden knowledge. And this very formulation of Mr. Bentley will strangely exemplify the assertion; and explained, will show that it (the Hindu exoteric astronomy and sciences) was derived from a system exact beyond the European one, in which Mr. Bentley himself, of [[footnote continued on following page]]
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This served as a prototype, he thinks, for the Western nations to build their war of the Titans upon. The author is not quite wrong, but neither is he quite right. If the sidereal prototype refers indeed to a pre -
manvantaric period, and rests entirely on the Knowledge claimed by the Aryan Initiates of the whole programme and progress of cosmogony,* the war of the Titans is but a legendary and deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himalayan Kailasa (heaven) instead of in the depths of Cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of the terrible strife between the "Sons of God" and the "Sons of the Shadow" of the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events, blended together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the war waged by the Asuras against the gods, that every subsequent national tradition on the subject has been built.
Esoterically, the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and lower gods, who are eternally at war with the great deities -- are the gods of the Secret Wisdom. In the oldest portions of the Rig Veda, they are the spiritual and the divine, the term Asura being used for the Supreme Spirit and being the same as the great Ahura of the Zoroastrians. (See Darmesteter's VENDIDAD). There was a time when the gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.
In the Aitareya Brahmana, the breath (asu) of Brahma-Prajapati became alive, and from that breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the war, the Asuras are called the enemies of the gods, hence -- "A-
suras," the initial "A" being a negative prefix -- or "no-gods" -- the "gods" being referred to as "Suras." This then connects the Asuras and their "Hosts," enumerated further on, with the "Fallen Angels" of the Christian Churches, a hierarchy of spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations -- from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman. They are the sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of every new Maha Kalpa, or Manvantara; in the same rank as the Angels who had remained "faithful." These were the allies of Soma (the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or ceremonial
[[Continued from previous page]] course, trusted as far in advance of the Hindu Knowledge, at any time, in any generation."
Which is Mr. Bentley's misfortune, and does not take away from the glory of the ancient Hindu astronomers, who were all Initiates.
* The Secret Doctrine teaches that every event of universal importance, such as geological cataclysms at the end of one race and the beginning of a new one, involving a great change each time in mankind, spiritual, moral and physical -- is pre-cogitated and preconcerted, so to say, in the sidereal regions of our planetary system. Astrology is built wholly upon this mystic and intimate connection between the heavenly bodies and mankind; and it is one of the great secrets of Initiation and Occult mysteries.
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worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time into opposing powers or demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their rebellion against hypocrisy, sham-worship, and the dead-letter form.
Now what is the real character of all those who fought along with them? They are (1) the Usanas, or the "host" of the planet Venus, become now in Roman Catholicism -- Lucifer, the genius of the "morning star" (see Isaiah xiv., 12), the tsaba, or army of "Satan." (2) The Daityas and Danavas are the Titans, the demons and giants whom we find in the Bible (Gen. vi.) -- the progeny of the "Sons of God" and the "Daughters of Men." Their generic name shows their alleged character, and discloses at the same time the secret animus of the Brahmins: for they are the Krati-dwishas -- the "enemies of the sacrifices" or exoteric shams. These are the "hosts" that fought against Brihaspati, the representative of exoteric popular and national religions; and Indra -- the god of the visible heaven, the firmament, who, in the early Veda, is the highest god of Cosmic heaven, the fit habitation for an extra-Cosmic and personal God, higher than whom no exoteric worship can ever soar.
(3) Then come the Nagas,* the Sarpa (serpents or Seraphs). These, again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In Mythology they are semi-divine beings with a human face and the tail of a Dragon. They are therefore, undeniably, the Jewish seraphim (from Serapis and Sarpa, Serpent); the plural being saraph, "burning, fiery" (See Isaiah, vi. 23). Christian and Jewish angelology distinguishes between the Seraphim and the Cherubim or Cherubs, who come second in order; esoterically, and Kabalistically, they are identical; the cherubim being simply the name for the images or likenesses of any of the divisions of the celestial hosts. Now, as said before, the Dragons and Nagas were the names given to the Initiates-hermits, on account of their great Wisdom and Spirituality and their living in caves. Thus, when Ezekiel applies the adjective of Cherub to the King of Tyre, and tells him that by his wisdom and his understanding there is no secret that can be hidden from him (v. 3, 4, xxviii.), he shows to an Occultist that it is a "prophet," perhaps, still a follower of exoteric worship, who fulminates against an Initiate of another school and not against an imaginary Lucifer, a fallen
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cherub from the stars, and then from the garden of Eden. Thus the so-called "war" is, in one of its many meanings, also an allegorical record of the strife between the two classes of adepts -- of the right and of the left path. There were three classes of Rishis in India, who were
* The Nagas are described by the Orientalists as a mysterious people whose landmarks are found abundantly in India to this day, and who lived in Naga dwipa one of the Seven continents or divisions of Bharatavarsha (old India), the town of Nagpur being one of the most ancient cities in the country.
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the earliest adepts known; the royal, or Rajarshis, kings and princes, who adopted the ascetic life; the Devarshis, divine, or the sons of Dharma or Yoga; and Brahmarshis, descendants of those Rishis who were the founders of gotras of Brahmans, or caste-races. Now, leaving the mythical and astronomical keys for one moment aside, the secret teachings show many Atlanteans who belonged to these divisions; and there were strifes and wars between them, de facto and de jure. Narada, one of the greatest Rishis, was a Devarishi ; and he is shown in constant and everlasting feud with Brahma, Daksha, and other gods and sages. Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this universally accepted legend, its human phase is based on real and historical events, disfigured into a theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical purposes. As above so below. Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the celestial bodies in the heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was carried out below, on earth. Thus, space, in its abstract sense, was called "the realm of divine knowledge," and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab Soo, the habitat (or Father, i.e., the source) of knowledge, because it is in space that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Universe.*
In the same manner and on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the heavens, a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and called "the Abyss of Learning"; twelve centres on it in the shape of twelve small islands representing the Zodiacal signs -- two of which remained for ages the "mystery signs"** and were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and masters of wisdom. This "sea of knowledge" or learning*** remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo, or Gobi desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a
* Not less suggestive are the qualities attributed to Rudra Siva, the great Yogi, the forefather of all the Adepts -- in Esotericism one of the greatest Kings of the Divine Dynasties. Called "the Earliest" and the "Last," he is the patron of the Third, Fourth, and the Fifth Root-Races. For, in his earliest character, he is the ascetic Dig-ambara, "clothed with the Elements," Trilochana, "the three-eyed"; Pancha-
anana, "the five-faced," an allusion to the past four and the present fifth race, for, though five -faced, he is only "four-armed," as the fifth race is still alive. He is the "God of Time," Saturn-Kronos, as his damaru (drum), in the shape of an hour-glass, shows; and if he is accused of having cut off Brahma's fifth head, and left him with only four, it is again an allusion to a certain degree in initiation, and also to the Races.
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** G. Seiffarth's idea that the signs of the Zodiac were in ancient times only ten is erroneous. Ten only were known to the profane; the initiates, however, knew them all, from the time of the separation of mankind into sexes, whence arose the separation of Virgo-Scorpio into two; which, owing to a secret sign added and the Libra invented by the Greeks, instead of the secret name which was not given, made 12. ( Vide Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 456.)
*** The above is, perhaps, a key to the Dalai-Lama's symbolical name -- the "Ocean" lama, meaning the Wisdom Ocean. Abbe Huc speaks of it.
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local cataclysm, which swept the waters south and west and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the watery abyss -- which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the "great mother" (the terrestrial post-type of the "great mother chaos" in heaven), the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the man-Fish of the Babylonians -- for ages, then, the "Abyss" or Chaos was the abode of wisdom and not of evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun-god, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon, a "war" which ended in the defeat of the latter, has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as an historical one. It is a page torn out of the History of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and DEATH -- for the profane masses. It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain pre-historic period; one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the birth and evolution of the sacerdotal castes, have finally led the world into all these exoteric religions, invented to satisfy the depraved tastes of the "hoi polloi" and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp and the materialization of the ever-immaterial and Unknowable Principle.
This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of which lingers in the remembrances of all the literary and Sanskrit-speaking portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody on, and the desecration of the Sacred Mysteries and their science. The rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a smaller scale. Finally, even the four "Adams " (symbolizing under other names the four preceding races) were forgotten; and passing from one generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, got at last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions, as the Tzelem, "the Shadow-Adam" (the Chhayas of our doctrine); the "model" Adam, the copy of the first, and the "male and female" of the exoteric genesis (chap. i.); the third, the "earthly Adam" before the Fall, an androgyne; and the Fourth -- the Adam after his fall, i.e., separated into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the garden of Eden, or the forefather of our race -- the fifth -- is an ingenious compound of the above four. As stated in Zohar (iii., fol. 4, col. 14, Cremona Ed.) Adam, the FIRST man, is not found
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now on earth, he "is not found in all, below." Because, "where does the lower earth come from? From the chain of the Earth, and heaven above," i.e., from the superior globes, those which precede and are above our Earth. "And there came out from it (the chain) creatures of all kinds. Some of them in (solid) skins, some in shells (Klippoth) . . . some in red shells, some in black, some in white, and some of other colours . . . " (See Qabbalah).
As in the Chaldean Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some treatises on the Kabala speak of creatures with two faces, some with four, and some with one face: for "the highest Adam did not come down in all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives," but is a Mystery.
So is the Dragon a mystery. Truly, says Rabbi Simeon Ben-Iochai, that to understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the "Companions" (students, or chelas), but only to "the little ones," i.e., the perfect Initiates.* "The work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is only the little ones who understand the parable on the work in the Principium by the mystery of the serpent of the Great Sea."** And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their "Christ" was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who "shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein"; and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of what relates to the "little ones" in the Gospels, related to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the Talmud as "the little one."
That "Mystery of the Serpent" was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the great Sea, "the sea of life" having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphrah Dzeniouta speaks of primeval chaos and the evolution of the Universe after a destruction (pralaya ), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent: -- "Extending hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head twisting on its neck, it is enraged and angry. . . It watches and conceals itself. Every thousand Days it is manifested." (I., § 16).
* Such was the name given in ancient Judea to the Initiates, called also the "Innocents" and the "Infants," i.e., once more reborn. This key opens a vista into one of the New Testament mysteries; the slaughter by Herod of the 40,000 "Innocents." There is a legend to this effect, and the event which took place almost a century B.C., shows the origin of the tradition blended at the same time with that of Krishna and his uncle Kansa. In the case of the N. T., Herod stands for Alexander Janneus (of Lyda), whose persecution and murder of hundreds and thousands of Initiates led to the adoption of the Bible story.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 505 THE SACREDNESS OF THE SERPENT.
A commentary on the Puranas says: "Ananta-Sesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is supposed to sleep during the intervals of the Days of Brahma. The seven heads of Sesha support the Universe. . . . "
So the Spirit of God "sleeps," is "breathing" (meracha' pheth') over the Chaos of undifferentiated matter, before each new "Creation." (Siphrah Dzeniouta). Now one "Day" of Brahma is composed, as already explained, of one thousand Mahayugas; and as each "Night" or period of rest is equal in duration to this "day," it is easy to see to what this sentence in Siphrah Dzeniouta refers, viz.: -- that the serpent manifests "once in a thousand days." Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated writer of the Siphrah is leading us, when he says: "Its head is broken in the waters of the great sea, as it is written: 'Thou dividest the sea by thy strength, thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters' " (lxxiv. 13). It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical life, the "sea of sorrow," if read with one key; it hints at the successive destruction of the seven spheres of a chain of worlds in the great sea of space, when read with another key: for every sidereal globe or sphere, every world, star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism "the Dragon's head." But however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor was the Serpent either -- in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical, cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological, i.e., phallic -- the Serpent was always regarded as a divine symbol. When it is said "The (Cosmic) Serpent which runs with 370 leaps" (Siphrah Dzeniouta, § 33) it means the cyclic periods of the great Tropical year (25,868 years), divided in the esoteric calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is divided into 365 days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as the Conqueror of Satan, the Dragon, it is because in the Talmud this fighting personage is represented as the Prince of Waters, who had seven subordinate Spirits under him -- a good reason why the Latin Church made him the patron Saint of every promontory in Europe. In the Kabala (Siph. Dzen.) the creative Force "makes sketches and spiral lines of his creation in the shape of a Serpent." It "holds its tail in its mouth," because it is the symbol of endless eternity and of cyclic periods. Its meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must end.
Thus the reader may now see for himself what are the several meanings of the "War in Heaven," and of the "great dragon." The most solemn and dreaded of church dogmas, the alpha and omega of Christian faith, and the pillar of its FALL and ATONEMENT, dwindles down to a pagan symbol, in the many allegories about those prehistoric struggles.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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§ XIX.
IS PLEROMA SATAN'S LAIR?
THE subject is not yet exhausted, and has to be examined from still other aspects.
Whether Milton's grandiose description of the three Days' Battle of the Angels of Light against those of Darkness justifies the suspicion that he must have heard of the corresponding Eastern tradition -- it is impossible to say. Nevertheless, if not himself in connection with some Mystic, then it must have been through some one who had obtained access to the secret works of the Vatican. Among these there is a tradition of the "Beni Shamash" -- the "children of the Sun" -- concerning the Eastern allegory, with far more minute details in its triple version, than one can get either from the Book of Enoch, or the far more recent Revelation of St. John about the "Old Dragon" and his various Slayers, as just shown.
It seems inexplicable to find, to this day, authors belonging to Mystical Societies who yet continue in their preconceived doubts as to the "alleged" antiquity of the "Book of Enoch." Thus, while the author of the "Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches" is inclined to see in Enoch an Initiate converted to Christianity (! !) (vide p. 16), the English compiler of Eliphas Levi's works -- "The Mysteries of Magic" -- is also of a like opinion. He remarks that: "Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no modern scholarship attributes any more remote antiquity to the latter work (the 'Book of Enoch') than the fourth century B.C." (Biograph. and Critical Essay, p. xxxviii.). Modern scholarship has been guilty of worse errors than this one. It seems but yesterday that the greatest literary critics in Europe denied the very authenticity of that work, together with the Orphic Hymns, and even the Book of Hermes or Thot, until whole verses from the latter were discovered on Egyptian monuments and tombs of the earliest dynasties. The opinion of Archbishop Laurence is quoted elsewhere.
The "Old Dragon" and Satan, now become singly and collectively the symbol of, and the theological term for, the "Fallen Angel," is not so described either in the original Kabala (the Chaldean "Book of Numbers") or in the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of modern Kabalists, namely Eliphas Levi, describes Satan in the following glowing terms: -- "It is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God; brave enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored
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himself in full divine light; strong enough to reign in darkness amidst agony, and to have built himself a throne on his inextinguishable pyre. It is the Satan of the Republican and heretical Milton. . . . . the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy of pure Spirits (! ! ) . . . . "(Histoire de la Magie, 16-17) This description -- one which reconciles so cunningly theological dogma and the Kabalistic allegory, and even contrives to include a political compliment in its phraseology -- is, when read in the right spirit, quite correct.
Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever-living symbol -- nay apotheosis -- of self-sacrifice for the intellectual independence of humanity; this ever active Energy protesting against Static Inertia -- the principle to which Self-assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of Knowledge odious. It is -- as Eliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony -- "this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who, slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor -- it is he who has been finally transformed into a serpent -- the red Dragon." But Eliphas Levi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic authorities; one may add, too jesuitical, to confess that this devil was mankind, and never had any existence on earth outside of that mankind.*
In this, Christian theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, was only true to its own time-honoured policy. It had to isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every pagan deity into a devil. Every bright sun-god of antiquity -- a glorious deity by day, and its own opponent and adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the germs of night and day -- has now been turned into the antithetical shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow, all the Sun and the Moon Gods, were cursed, and thus the one God chosen out of the many, and Satan, were both anthropomorphised. But theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analysing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony
* What devil could be possessed of more cunning, craft and cruelty than the "Whitechapel murderer" "Jack the Ripper" of 1888, whose unparalleled blood-thirsty and cool wickedness led him to slaughter and mutilate in cold blood seven unfortunate and otherwise innocent women! One has but to read the daily papers to find in those wife and child-beating, drunken brutes (husbands and fathers!), a small percentage of whom is daily brought before the courts, the complete personifications of the devils of Christian Hell!
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of the gods; and proves that the God of the Israelites was such a tribal God, and no more, even though the Christian Church, following the lead of the "chosen" people, is pleased to enforce the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder, nevertheless, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only "a god among other Gods," (lxxxii. Psalm). The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, "I am the Almighty
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God," yet adds, "I will establish my covenant to be a God unto thee" (Abraham), and unto his seed after him (Gen. xvii. 7) -- not unto Aryan Europeans.
But then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of Nazareth to be set off against a dark background, to gain in radiance by the contrast; and a darker one the Church could hardly invent. Lacking the Old Testament symbology, ignorant of the real connotation of the name of Jehovah -- the rabbinical secret substitute for the ineffable and unpronounceable name -- the Church mistook the cunningly fabricated shadow for the reality, the anthropomorphized generative symbol for the one Secondless Reality, the ever unknowable cause of all. As a logical sequence the Church, for purposes of duality, had to invent an anthropomorphic Devil -- created, as taught by her, by God himself. Satan has now turned out to be the monster fabricated by the "Jehovah-Frankenstein," -- his father's curse and a thorn in the divine side -- a monster, than whom no earthly Frankenstein could have fabricated a more ridiculous bogey.
The author of "New Aspects of Life" describes the Jewish God very correctly from the Kabalistic stand-point as "the Spirit of the Earth, which had revealed itself to the Jew as Jehovah" (p . 209). "It was that Spirit again who, after the death of Jesus, assumed his form and personated him as the risen Christ" -- the doctrine of Cerinthius and several Gnostic sects with slight variation, as one can see. But the author's explanations and deductions are remarkable: "None knew . . . better than Moses . . . and so well as he how great was the power of those (gods of Egypt) with whose priests he had contended," he says . . . "the gods of which Jehovah is claimed to be the God" (by the Jews only). "What were these gods, these Achar of which Jehovah, the Achad, is claimed to be the God . . . by overcoming them?" the author asks; to which our Occultism answers: "those whom the Church now calls the Fallen Angels and collectively Satan, the Dragon, overcome, if we have to accept her dictum, by Michael and the Host, that Michael being simply Jehovah himself, one of the subordinate Spirits at best." Therefore, the author is again right in saying: "The Greeks believed in the existence of . . . daimons. But . . . they were anticipated by the Hebrews, who held that
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 509 JEHOVAH, A PERSONATING SPIRIT.
there was a class of personating spirits which they designated demons, 'personators.' Admitting with Jehovah, who expressly asserts it, the existence of other gods, which were personators of the One God, were these other gods simply a higher class of personating spirits, which had acquired and exercised greater powers? And is not personation the Key to the mystery of the Spirit state? But once granting this position, how are we to know that Jehovah was not a personating Spirit, a Spirit which arrogated to itself that it was, and thus became, the personator of the one unknown and unknowable God? Nay, how do we know that the Spirit calling itself Jehovah, in arrogating to itself his attributes did not thus cause its own designation to be imputed to the One who is in reality as nameless as incognizable?" (pp . 144-145.)
Then the author shows "that the Spirit Jehovah is a personator" on its own admission. It acknowledged to Moses "that it had appeared to the patriarchs as the God Shaddai" . . . . and "the god Helion " . . . . With the same breath it assumed the name of Jehovah; and it is on the faith of the assertion of this personator that the names El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai, have been read and interpreted in
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juxtaposition with Jehovah as "the Lord God Almighty." Then when the name Jehovah became ineffable . . . . the designation Adonai, "Lord" was substituted for it, and" . . . . it was owing to this substitution that the 'Lord' passed from the Jewish to the Christian 'Word' and 'World' as a designation of God" (p . 146). And how are we to know, the author may add, that Jehovah was not many spirits personating even that seemingly one -- Jod or Jod-He?
But if the Christian Church was the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma, it was because, as shown in Isis, the Devil -- the powerful enemy of God (? ! !) had to become the corner stone of the pillar of the Church. For, as a Theosophist, M. Jules Baissac, truly observes in his "Satan ou le Diable" (p. 9): "Il fallait eviter de paraitre autoriser le dogme du double principe en faisant de ce Satan createur une puissance reelle, et pour expliquer le mal originel, on profere contre Manes l'hypothese d'une permission de l'unique tout Puissant."* The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the personator of the lower god of Abraham and Jacob ought to have been made entirely distinct from the mystic "Father" of Jesus, or -- the "Fallen" Angels should have been left unslandered by further fictions.
Every god of the Gentiles is connected with, and closely related to,
* After the polymorphic Pantheism of some Gnostics came the esoteric dualism of Manes, who was accused of personifying Evil and creating of the Devil a God -- rival of God himself. We do not see that the Christian Church has so much improved on that exoteric idea of the Manicheans, for she calls God her King of Light, and Satan, the King of Darkness, to this day.
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Jehovah -- the Elohim ; for they are all One Host, whose units differ only in name in the esoteric teachings. Between the "Obedient" and the "Fallen" Angels there is no difference whatever, except in their respective functions, or rather in the inertia of some, and the activity of others among those "Dhyan Chohans" or Elohim who were "commissioned to create," i.e., to fabricate the manifested world out of the eternal material.
The Kabbalists say that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah placed upside down, for "Satan is not a black god but the negation of the white deity," or the light of Truth. God is light and Satan is the necessary darkness or shadow to set it off, without which pure light would be invisible and incomprehensible.* "For the initiates," says Eliphas Levi, "the devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil." They (the Initiates) represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan -- or Nature: whence the horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian "goat of the Witches' Sabbath." With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten that the goat was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape-goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on earth -- the Fall into generation. Only the Jews have long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non-initiated) ridiculous hero, selected from the drama of life in the great mysteries
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enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians never knew it.
Eliphas Levi seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and metaphors, but succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes written by pious Roman Catholic demonologists under the approbation and auspices of Rome, in this nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman Catholic, the devil or Satan is a reality; the drama enacted in the sidereal light according to the seer of Patmos -- who desired, perhaps, to improve upon the narrative in the "Book of Enoch" -- is as real, and as historical a fact as any other allegory and symbolical event in the Bible. But the Initiates give an explanation
* To quote in this relation Mr. Laing in his admirable work "Modern Science and Modern Thought" (p . 222, 3rd Ed.): "From this dilemma (existence of evil in the world) there is no escape, unless we give up altogether the idea of an anthropomorphic deity, and adopt frankly the Scientific idea of a First Cause, inscrutable and past finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace, but of whose real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect, or faintly discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and evil a necessary condition of existence." Were Science to know "the real essence," instead of knowing nothing of it, the faint suspicion would turn into the certitude of the existence of such a law, and the knowledge that this law is connected with Karma.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 511 AKASA, THE "MYSTERIUM MAGNUM."
which differs from that given by Eliphas Levi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome.
Thus, the true and uncompromising Kabalists admit that, for all purposes of Science and philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that the great magic agent called by the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin -- the Martinists -- astral light, by the mediaeval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists AEther, the reflection of Akasa -- is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics have succeeded in transforming the universal soul and Pleroma, the vehicle of Light and the receptacle of all the forms, a force spread throughout the whole Universe, with its direct and indirect effects, into Satan and his works, is no news to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above-mentioned profane even the secrets hinted at by Eliphas Levi without adequate explanation; for the latter's policy of veiled revelations could only lead to further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism, a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences of Eliphas Levi, as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the Alchemists?
"Lucifer, the Astral Light . . . . is an intermediate force existing in all creation, it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic intoxication which has rendered his generation a slave to this fatal light . . . every sexual passion that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that light which seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death, Folly. Hallucinations, visions, ecstasies are all forms of a very dangerous
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excitation due to this interior phosphorus (?). Thus light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the intelligent use of which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the contrary, dissolves and annihilates. Thus man is called upon to assume a sovereign empire over that (astral) light and conquer thereby his immortality, and is threatened at the same time with being intoxicated, absorbed, and eternally destroyed by it. This light, therefore, inasmuch as it is devouring, revengeful, and fatal, would thus really be hell-
fire, the serpent of the legend; the tormented errors of which it is full, the tears and the gnashing of teeth of the abortive beings it devours, the phantom of life that escapes them, and seems to mock and insult their agony, all this would be the devil or Satan indeed." (Histoire de la Magie, p. 197).
There is no wrong statement in all this; nothing save a superabundance of ill-applied metaphors, as in the application of Adam -- a myth -- to the illustration of the astral effects. Akasa -- the astral light* -- can be defined in a few words; it is the universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, the "Mysterium Magnum" from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it
*Akasa is not the Ether of Science, as some Orientalists translate it.
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fills all the infinite Space; is Space itself, in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh principles.* But as the finite in the Infinite, as regards manifestation, this light must have its shadowy side -- as already remarked. And as the infinite can never be manifested, hence the finite world has to be satisfied with the shadow alone, which its actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and force to activity. Hence, while it is the universal Cause in its unmanifested unity and infinity, the Astral light becomes, with regard to Mankind, simply the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It is not its bright denizens --- whether they are called Spirits of Light or Darkness -- that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the unavoidable action and reaction in the great magic agent. It is mankind which has become the "Serpent of Genesis," and thus causes daily and hourly the Fall and sin of the "Celestial Virgin" -- which thus becomes the Mother of gods and devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving, beneficent deity to all those who stir her Soul and heart, instead of attracting to themselves her shadowy manifested essence, called by Eliphas Levi -- "the fatal light" which kills and destroys. Humanity, in its units, can overpower and master its effects; but only by the holiness of their lives and by producing good causes. It has power only on the manifested lower principles -- the shadow of the Unknown and Incognizable Deity in Space. But in antiquity and reality, Lucifer, or Luciferus , is the name of the angelic Entity presiding over the light of truth as over the light of the day. In the great Valentinian gospel Pistis Sophia (§ 361) it is taught that of the three Powers emanating from the Holy names of the Three [[Tridunameis]], that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost according to these gnostics -- the most cultured of all), resides in the planet Venus or Lucifer.
Thus to the profane, the Astral Light may be God and Devil at once --
* Says Johannes Tritheim, the Abbot of Spanheim, the greatest astrologer and Kabalist of his day: -- "The art of divine magic consists in the ability to perceive the essence of things in the light of nature (astral light), and by using the soul-powers of the spirit to produce material things from the unseen universe, and in such operations the Above and the Below must be brought together and made to act harmoniously. The spirit of Nature (astral light) is a unity, creating and forming everything, and acting through the instrumentality of man it may produce wonderful things. Such are accomplished, if you learn to know yourself. You will know it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, and accomplish it by mixing your spirit with the essence that comes out of yourself. If you wish to succeed in such a work you must know how to separate Spirit and Life in Nature, and, moreover, to separate the astral soul in yourself and to make it tangible, and then the substance of the soul will appear visibly and tangibly rendered objective by the power of the spirit." -- (Quoted in Dr. Hartman's "Paracelsus.")
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 513 MIND, THE QUICKENING SPIRIT.
Demon est Deus inversus: that is to say, through every point of Infinite Space thrill the magnetic and electrical currents of animate Nature, the life-giving and death-giving waves, for death on earth becomes life on another plane. Lucifer is divine and terrestrial light, the "Holy Ghost" and "Satan," at one and the same time, visible Space being truly filled with the differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested effects of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the Karma of humanity, both a personal and impersonal entity: personal, because it is the mystic name given by St. Martin to the Host of divine Creators, guides and rulers of this planet; impersonal, as the Cause and effect of universal Life and Death.
The Fall was the result of man's knowledge, for his "eyes were opened." Indeed, he was taught Wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the "Fallen Angel," for the latter had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self-consciousness. In each of us that golden thread of continuous life -- periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in Devachan -- is from the beginning of our appearance upon this earth. It is the Sutratma, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal monadship, on which our earthly lives or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads -- according to the beautiful expression of Vedantic philosophy.
And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the "Lord of Phosphorus" (brimstone was a theological improvement), and Lucifer, or "Light-Bearer," is in us: it is our Mind -- our tempter and Redeemer, our intelligent liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this principle -- the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine mind -- we would be surely no better than animals. The first man Adam was made only a living soul (nephesh), the last Adam was made a quickening Spirit*: -- says Paul, his words referring to the building or Creation of man. Without this quickening spirit, or human Mind or soul, there would be no difference between man and beast; as there is none, in fact, between animals with respect to their actions. The tiger and the donkey, the hawk and the dove, are each one as pure and as innocent as the other, because irresponsible. Each follows its instinct, the tiger and the hawk killing
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with the same unconcern as the donkey eats a thistle, or the dove pecks at a grain of corn. If the Fall had the significance given to it by theology; if that
* The real original text of I Corinthians, rendered Kabalistically and esoterically would read (in Chap. xv., verses 44 and 45): "It is sown a soul body (not 'natural' body), it is raised a spirit body." St. Paul was an Initiate, and his words have quite a different meaning when read esoterically. The body "is sown in weakness (passivity); it is raised in power" (43) -- or in spirituality and intellect.
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fall occurred as a result of an act never intended by nature, -- a sin, how about the animals? If we are told that they procreate their species in consequence of that same "original sin," for which God cursed the earth -- hence everything living on it -- we will put another question. We are told by theology, as by Science, that the animal was on earth far earlier than man? We ask the former: How did it procreate its species, before the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, of the Good and the Evil, had been plucked off? As said: "The Christians -- far less clear-sighted than the great Mystic and Liberator whose name they have assumed, whose doctrines they have misunderstood and travestied, and whose memory they have blackened by their deeds -- took the Jewish Jehovah as he was, and of course strove vainly to reconcile the Gospel of Light and Liberty with the Deity of Darkness and Submission." ( "War in Heaven.") *
But, it is sufficiently proven now that all the soi-disant evil Spirits who are credited with having made war on the gods, are identical as personalities; moreover, that all the ancient religions taught the same tenet save the final conclusion, which latter differs from the Christian. The seven primeval gods had all a dual state, one essential, the other accidental. In their essential state they were all the "Builders" or Fashioners, the Preservers and the rulers of this world, and in the accidental state, clothing themselves in visible corporeality, they descended on the earth and reigned on it as Kings and Instructors of the lower Hosts, who had incarnated once more upon it as men.
* By Godolphin Mitford, later in life, Murad Ali Bey. Born in India, the son of a Missionary, G. Mitford was converted to Islam, and died a Mahomedan in 1884. He was a most extraordinary Mystic, of a great learning and remarkable intelligence. But he left the Right Path and forthwith fell under Karmic retribution. As well shown by the author of the article quoted "The followers of the defeated Elohim, first massacred by the victorious Jews (the Jehovites), and then persuaded by the victorious Christians and Mohamedans, continued nevertheless. . . Some of these scattered sects have lost even the tradition of the true rationale of their belief -- to worship in secrecy and mystery the Principle of Fire, Light, and Liberty. Why do the Sabean Bedouins (avowedly Monotheists when dwelling in the Mohamedan cities) in the solitude of the desert night yet invoke the starry 'Host of Heaven'? Why do the Yezidis, the 'Devil Worshippers,' worship the 'Muluk-Taoos' -- The 'Lord Peacock' -- the emblem of pride and of hundred-eyed intelligence (and of Initiation also), which was expelled from heaven
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with Satan, according to an old Oriental tradition? Why do the Gholaites and their kindred Mesopotamo-Iranian Mohamedan Sects believe in the 'Noor Illahee' -- the Light of the Elohim -- transmitted in anastasis through a hundred Prophet Leaders? It is because they have continued in ignorant superstition the traditional religion of the 'Light Deities whom Jahveh overthrew' (is said to have overthrown rather); for by overthrowing them he would have overthrown himself. The'Muluk-
Taoos' -- is Maluk -- 'Ruler' as is shown in the foot-note. It is only a new form of Moloch, Melek, Molech, MaIayak, and Malachim " -- Messengers, Angels, etc.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 515 THE LOGOS AND SATAN ARE ONE.
Thus, esoteric philosophy shows that man is truly the manifested deity in both its aspects -- good and evil, but theology cannot admit this philosophical truth. Teaching the dogma of the Fallen Angels in its dead-letter meaning, and having made of Satan the corner-stone and pillar of the dogma of redemption -- to do so would be suicidal. Having once shown the rebellious angels distinct from God and the Logos in their personalities, the admission that the downfall of the disobedient Spirits meant simply their fall into generation and matter, would be equivalent to saying that God and Satan were identical. For since the LOGOS (or God) is the aggregate of that once divine Host accused of having fallen, it would follow that the Logos and Satan are one.
Yet such was the real philosophical view of the now disfigured tenet in antiquity. The Verbum, or the "Son," was shown in a dual aspect by the Pagan Gnostics -- in fact, he was a duality in full unity. Hence, the endless and various national versions. The Greeks had Jupiter, the son of Chronos, the Father, who hurls him down into the depths of Kosmos. The Aryans had Brahma (in later theology) precipitated by Siva into the Abyss of Darkness, etc., etc. But the fall of all these Logoi and Demiurgi from their primitive exalted position, had in all cases one and the same esoteric signification in it; the curse -- in its philosophical meaning -- of being incarnated on this earth; an unavoidable rung on the ladder of cosmic evolution, a highly philosophical and fitting Karmic law, without which the presence of Evil on Earth would have to remain for ever a closed mystery to the understanding of true philosophy. To say, as the author of the Esprits Tombes des Paiens (p. 347) does, that since "Christianity is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil ([[ponerou ]]), and of good [[Iagathou]]; on two forces, in short, [[Iagathau kai kakai dunomeis]]: hence, if we suppress the punishment of the evil forces, the protecting mission of the good Powers will have neither value nor sense" -- is to utter the most unphilosophical absurdity. If it fits in with, and explains Christian dogma, it obscures the facts and truths of the primitive wisdom of the ages. The cautious hints of Paul have all the true esoteric meaning, and it took centuries of scholastic casuistry to give them the present false colouring in their interpretation. The verbum and Lucifer are one in their dual aspect; and the "Prince of the Air" (princeps aeris hujus) is not the "God of that period," but an everlasting principle. If the latter was said to be ever circling around the world -- qui circumambulat terram -- the great Apostle referred simply to the never-ceasing cycles of human incarnations, in which evil will ever predominate unto the day when Humanity is redeemed by the true divine Enlightenment which gives the correct perception of things.
It is easy to disfigure vague expressions written in dead and long-作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:23
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forgotten languages, and palm them off as truths and revealed facts on the ignorant masses. The identity of thought and meaning is the one thing that strikes the student in all the religions which mention the tradition of the fallen Spirits, and in those great religions there is not one that fails to mention and describe it in one or another form. Thus, Hoang-Ty, the great Spirit, sees his Sons, who had acquired active wisdom, falling into the valley of Pain. Their leader, the FLYING DRAGON, having drunk of the forbidden ambrosia, fell to the Earth with his Host (Kings). In the Zend Avesta, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), surrounding himself with fire (the "Flames" -- vide supra) seeks to conquer the Heavens,* when Ahura Mazda, descending from the solid Heaven he inhabits, to the help of the Heavens that revolve (in time and space, the manifested worlds of cycles including those of incarnation), and the Amshaspends, "the seven bright Sravah," accompanied by their stars, fight Ahriman, and the vanquished Devas fall to the Earth along with him. (Acad. des Inscrip., Vol. xxxix., p. 690; see Vendidad, Farg. xix., iii.) In the Vendidad the Daevas are called "evil-doing," and shown to rush away "into the depths of the world of hell," or matter. (47.) This is an allegory showing the Devas compelled to incarnate, once that they have separated themselves from their parent essence, or, in other words, after the unit had become a multiple, after differentiation and manifestation.
Typhon the Egyptian, Python, the Titans, the Suras and the Asuras, all belong to the same legend of Spirits peopling the Earth. They are not "demons commissioned to create and organize this visible universe," but fashioners (the "architects") of the worlds, and the progenitors of man. They are the Fallen angels, metaphorically -- "the true mirrors of the Eternal Wisdom."
What is the absolute and complete truth as well as the esoteric meaning about this universal myth? The whole essence of truth cannot be transmitted from mouth to ear. Nor can any pen describe it, not even that of the recording Angel, unless man finds the answer in the sanctuary of his own heart, in the innermost depths of his divine intuitions. It is the great SEVENTH MYSTERY of Creation, the first and the last; and those who read St. John's Apocalypse may find its shadow lurking under the seventh seal. . . . It can be represented only in its apparent, objective form, like the eternal riddle of the Sphinx. If the latter threw herself into the sea and perished, it is not because OEdipus had unriddled the secret of the ages, but because, by anthropomorphizing the ever-spiritual and the subjective, he had
* So does every Yogi and even Christian: one must take the Kingdom of heaven by violence -- we are taught. Why should such a desire make of any one a devil?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 517 BARESMA, THE DIVINE TWIG.
dishonoured the great truth for ever. Therefore, we can give it only from its philosophical and intellectual planes, unlocked with three keys respectively -- for the last four keys of the seven that throw wide open the portals to the mysteries of Nature are in the hands of the highest Initiates, and
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cannot be divulged to the masses at large -- not in this, our century, at any rate.
The dead letter is everywhere the same. The dualism in the Mazdean religion, was born from exoteric interpretation. The holy "Airyaman," "the bestower of weal," invoked in the prayer called Airyama-
ishyo, is the divine aspect of Ahriman, "the deadly, the Dae of the Daevas" (Farg. xx., 43), and Angra Mainyu is the dark material aspect of the former. "Keep us from the Hater, O Mazda and Armaita Spenta" (Vendidad Sadah), has, as a prayer and invocation, an identical meaning with "Lead us not into temptation," and is addressed by man to the terrible Spirit of duality in man himself. For (Ahura) Mazda is the spiritual, divine, and purified man, and Armaita Spenta, the Spirit of the Earth or materiality, is the same as Ahriman or Angra Mainyu in one sense.
The whole of the Magian or Mazdean literature -- or what remains of it -- is magical, occult, hence allegorical and symbolical -- even its "mystery of the law" (see the Gatha in Yasna XLIV.). Now the Mobed and the Parsi keep their eye on the Baresma during the sacrifice, the divine twig off Ormazd's "tree" having been transformed into a bunch of metallic rods; and wonder why neither the Amesha-
Spentas, nor "the high and beautiful golden Haomas, nor even their Vohu-Mano (good thoughts), nor their Rata (sacrificial offering)," help them much. Let them meditate on the "tree of Wisdom," and study, assimilating one by one, the fruits thereof. The way to the tree of eternal life, the white Homa, the Gaokerena, is through one end of the earth to the other; and Haoma is in heaven as it is on earth. But to become once more a priest of it, and a healer, man must heal himself before he can heal others.
This proves once more that the so-called "myths," in order to be at least approximately dealt with in any degree of justice, have to be closely examined from all their aspects. In truth, every one of the seven Keys has to be used in its right place, and never mixed with the others, if we would unveil the entire cycle of mysteries. In our day of dreary soul-killing materialism, the ancient priest Initiates have become, in the opinion of our learned generations, the synonyms of clever impostors, kindling the fires of superstition in order to obtain an easier sway over the minds of men. This is an unfounded calumny, generated by scepticism and uncharitable thoughts. No one believed more in Gods -- or, we may call them, the Spiritual and now invisible Powers, or Spirits,
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the noumena of the phenomena -- than they did; and they believed just because they knew. If, initiated into the Mysteries of Nature, they were forced to withhold their knowledge from the profane, who would have surely abused it, such secrecy was undeniably less dangerous than the policy of their usurpers and successors. The former taught only that which they well knew. The latter, teaching what they do not know, have invented, as a secure haven for their ignorance, a jealous and cruel Deity, who forbids man to pry into his mysteries under the penalty of damnation. As well they may, for his mysteries can at best be only hinted at in polite ears, never described. Turn to King's Gnostics, "Description of the Plates" (Plate H), and see for yourself what was the primitive Ark of the Covenant, according to the author, who says: "There is a Rabbinical tradition that the cherubin placed over it were represented as male and female, in the act of copulation, in order to express the grand doctrine of the Essence of Form and Matter, the two principles of all things. When the Chaldeans broke into the sanctuary and beheld this most astounding emblem, they naturally enough exclaimed, 'Is this your
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God, of whom you boast that He is such a lover of purity?' " (p. 441.)
King thinks that this tradition "savours too much of Alexandrian philosophy to demand any credit," to which we demur. The shape and form of the wings of the two cherubim standing on the right and left sides of the Ark, these wings meeting over the "Holy of Holies," are an emblem quite eloquent in itself, besides the "holy" Jod within the ark! The Mystery of Agathadaemon, whose legend states, "I am Chnumis, Sun of the Universe, 700," can alone solve the mystery of Jesus, the number of whose name is 888." It is not the key of St. Peter, or the Church dogma, but the narthex -- the wand of the candidate for initiation -- that has to be wrenched from the grasp of the long-silent Sphinx of the ages. Meanwhile ----
The augurs, who, upon meeting each other, have to thrust their tongues into their cheeks to suppress a fit of laughter, may be more numerous in our own age than they ever were in the day of Sylla.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 519 THE "FATHER OF MORTALS."
§ XX.
PROMETHEUS, THE TITAN.
HIS ORIGIN IN ANCIENT INDIA.
IN our modern day there does not exist the slightest doubt in the minds of the best European symbologists that the name Prometheus possessed the greatest and most mysterious significance in antiquity. While giving the history of Deukalion, whom the Boeotians regarded as the ancestor of the human races, and who was the Son of Prometheus, according to the significant legend, the author of the Mythologie de la Grece Antique remarks: "Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw Hephaestus moulding the first woman (Pandora) and endowing her with life, so Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of which he fashions the body of the first man whom he will endow with the soul-spark" (Apollodorus, I., 7, 1). After the Flood of Deukalion, Zeus, it was taught, had commanded Prometheus and Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters of the deluge (Ovid, Metam. 1, 81. Etym. M. v . [[Prometheus]]); and in the day of Pausanias the slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in Phocea (Paus. x, 4, 4). "On several archaic monuments one still sees Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena's help" (Myth. Grece Ant. 246).
The same authors remind the world of another equally mysterious personage, though one less generally known than Prometheus, whose legend offers remarkable analogies with that of the Titan. The name of this second ancestor and generator is Phoroneus, the hero of an ancient poem, now unfortunately no longer extant -- the Phoronidae. His legend was localized in Argolis, where a perpetual flame was preserved on his altar as a reminder that he was the bringer of fire upon earth (Pausanias, 11, 19, 5; Cf. 20, 3.) A benefactor of men as Prometheus was, he had made them participators of every bliss on earth. Plato (Timaeus, p. 22), and Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. 1, p. 380) say that Phoroneus was the first man, or "the father of mortals." His genealogy, which assigns to him as his father Inachos, the river, reminds one of that of Prometheus, which makes that Titan the son of the Oceanid Clymene. But the mother of Phoroneus was the nymph Melia; a significant descent which distinguishes him from Prometheus.
Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the ash-tree, whence,
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according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze* (Opera et Dies, 142-145); and which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Aryan mythology. This ash is the Yggdrasil of the Norse antiquity, which the Norns sprinkle daily with the waters from the fountain of Urd, that it may not wither. It remains verdant till the last days of the Golden Age. Then the Norns -- the three sisters who gaze respectively into the Past, the Present, and the Future -- make known the decree of Fate (Karma, Orlog), but men are conscious only of the Present. But when Gultweig comes (the golden ore) "the bewitching enchantress who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more beautiful, and fills the souls of gods and men with unapproachable longing, then the Norns . . . enter into being, and the blessed peace of childhood's dreams passes away, and Sin comes into existence with all its evil consequences . . ." and KARMA (See "Asgard and the Gods," p. 10-12). The thrice purified Gold is -- Manas, the Conscious Soul.
With the Greeks, the "ash-tree" represented the same idea. Its luxuriant boughs are the sidereal heaven, golden by day and studded with stars by night -- the fruits of Melia and Yggdrasil, under whose protecting shadow humanity lived during the Golden Age without desire as without any fear . . . . "That tree had a fruit, or an inflamed bough, which was lightning," Decharme guesses.
And here steps in the killing materialism of the age; that peculiar twist in the modern mind, which, like a Northern blast, bends all on its way, and freezes every intuition, allowing it no hand in the physical speculations of the day. After having seen in Prometheus no better than fire by friction, the learned author of the "Mythologie de la Grece Antique" perceives in this "fruit" a trifle more than an allusion to terrestrial fire and its discovery. It is no longer fire, owing to the fall of lightning setting some dry fuel in a blaze, and thus revealing all its priceless benefits to Palaeolithic men; -- but something more mysterious this time, though still as earthly. . . . "A divine bird, nestled in the boughs of the celestial ash-tree, stole that bough (or the fruit) and carried it down on the earth in its bill. Now the Greek word [[Phoroneus]] is the rigid equivalent of the Sanskrit word bhuranyu ('the rapid') an epithet of Agni, considered as the carrier of the divine spark. Phoroneus, son of Melia or of the celestial ash, thus corresponds to a conception far more ancient, probably, than that one which transformed the pramantha (of the old Aryan Hindus) into the Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the
* According to the Occult teaching, three yugas passed away during the time of the Third Root-Race, i.e., the Satya, the Treta, and the Dvapara yuga, answering to the golden age of its early innocence: to the silver -- when it reached its maturity: and to the Bronze age, when, separating into sexes, they became the mighty demi-gods of old.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 521 THE POETRY OF MODERN ORIENTALISTS.
(personified) bird, that brings the heavenly lightning to the Earth. Traditions relating to the birth and origin of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus the father of the Argians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt (or lightning), as in the legends of Hephaestus or Prometheus, was the origin of the human race" (266).
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This still affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and the allegory. It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been unriddled, and the modern mythologists and Orientalists see in it no longer what their fathers saw on the authority of the whole of classical antiquity. They only find therein something far more appropriate to the spirit of the age, namely, a phallic element. But the name of Phoroneus, as well as that of Prometheus, bears not one, nor even two, but a series of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the seven celestial fires; to Agni Abhimanin, his three sons, and their forty-five sons, constituting the forty-nine fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the terrestrial mode of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindu Aryan mind never soar above such purely sensual conceptions? that mind which is declared by Prof. Max Muller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined on the whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an inkling of the truth.
We are told that one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational thought, to explain the name of Prometheus as the old Greeks did. The latter, it seems, "basing themselves on the false analogy of [[prometheus ]] with the verb [[Promanthanein]], saw in him the type of the 'foreseeing' man, to whom, for the sake of symmetry, a brother was added -- Epimetheus, or 'he who takes counsel after the event.' " But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the real meaning of the two names better than those who invented them.
The legend is based upon an event of universal importance. It was built "to commemorate a great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the imagination of the first witnesses to it, and its remembrance has never since faded out from popular memory." What is it? Laying aside every poetical fiction, all those dreams of the golden age, let us imagine -- argue the modern scholars -- in all its gross realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking picture of which was traced for us after AEschylus by Lucretius, and the exact truth of which is now confirmed by science; and then one may understand better that a new life really began for man, on that day when he saw the first spark produced by the friction of two pieces of wood, or from the veins of a flint. How could man help feeling gratitude to that mysterious and marvellous being which they were henceforth enabled to create at their will, and which was no sooner born, than it grew and expanded, developing with singular power. "This terrestrial flame,
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was it not analogous in nature to that one which they received from above, or that other which frightened them in the thunderbolt?"
"Was it not derived from the same source? And if its origin was in heaven, it must have been brought down some day on earth. If so, who was the powerful being, the beneficent being, god or man, who had conquered it? Such are the questions which the curiosity of the Aryans offered in the early days of their existence, and which found their answer in the myth of Prometheus"; (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 258).
The philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above reflections, and points them out.
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The miserable state of Humanity described by AEschylus and Prometheus was no more wretched then, in the early days of the Aryans, than it is now. That "state" was limited to the savage tribes; and the now-existing savages are not a whit more happy or unhappy than their forefathers were a million years ago.
It is an accepted fact in Science that "rude implements, exactly resembling those in use among existing savages," are found in river-gravels and caves geologically "implying an enormous antiquity." So great is that resemblance that, as the author of "The Modern Zoroastrian" tells us: "If the collection in the Colonial Exhibition of stone celts and arrow-heads used now by the Bushmen of South Africa were placed side by side with one from the British Museum of similar objects from Kent's Cavern or the Caves of Dordogne, no one but an expert could distinguish between them" (p . 145). And if there are Bushmen existing now, in our age of the highest civilization, who are no higher intellectually than the race of men which inhabited Devonshire and Southern France during the Palaeolithic age, why could not the latter have lived simultaneously with, and have been the contemporary of, other races as highly civilized for their day as we are for ours? That the sum of knowledge increases daily in mankind, "but that intellectual capacity does not increase with it," is shown when the intellect, if not the physical knowledge, of the Euclids, Pythagorases, Paninis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys and Haeckels. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Craniologist, worked out in 1868 (Trans. of the Royal Society of London), with regard to the internal capacity of the skull -- its volume being taken as the standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities -- Dr. Pfaff finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest rank of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus "perceptibly smaller than that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches"; which shows that it is the quality and not the quantity of the brain that is the cause of intellectual capacity. The
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 523 THE BOON GIVEN BY PROMETHEUS.
average index of skulls among various races having been now recognized to be "one of the most characteristic marks of difference between different races," the following comparison is suggestive: "The index of breadth among the Scandinavians (is) at 75: among the English at 76; among Holsteiners at 77; in Bresgau at 80; Schiller's skull shows an index of breadth even of 82 . . . the Madurese also 82!" Finally, the same comparison between the oldest skulls known and the European, brings to light the startling fact "that most of these old skulls, belonging to the stone period, are above rather than below the average of the brain of the now living man in volume." Calculating the measures for the height, breadth, and length in inches from the average measurements of several skulls, the following sums are obtained: --
1. Old Northern skulls of the stone age . . . . 18.877 ins.
2. Average of 48 skulls of the same period from England . . . . 18.858 "
3. Average of 7 skulls of the same period from Wales . . . . 18.649 "
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4. Average of 36 skulls of the stone age from France . . . . 18.220 "
The average of the now living Europeans is 18.579 inches; of Hottentots, 17.795 inches!
Which figures show plainly "that the size of the brain of the oldest populations known to us is not such as to place them on a lower level than that of the now living inhabitants of the Earth" ("The Age and Origin of Man"). Besides which, they show the "missing link" vanishing into thin air. Of these, however, more anon: we must return to our direct subject.
The race which Jupiter so ardently desired "to quench, and plant a new one in its stead" (AEsch.* 241), suffered mental, not physical misery. The first boon Prometheus gave to mortals, as he tells the "Chorus," was to hinder them "from foreseeing death" (256); he "saved the mortal race from sinking blasted down to Hades' gloom" (244); and then only, "besides" that, he gave them fire (260). This shows plainly the dual character, at any rate of the Promethean myth, if Orientalists will not accept the existence of the seven keys taught in Occultism. This relates to the first opening of man's spiritual perceptions, not to his first seeing or discovering fire. For fire was never "discovered," but existed on earth since its beginning. It existed in the seismic activity of the early ages, volcanic eruptions being as frequent and constant in those periods as fog is in England now. And if we are told that men appeared so late on Earth that nearly all the volcanoes, with the exception of a few, were already extinct, and that geological disturbances had made room for a more settled state of things, we answer: Let a new race of men -- whether evolved from angel or gorilla -- appear now on any uninhabited
spot of the globe, with the exception perhaps of the Sahara, and a thousand to one it would not be a year or two old before discovering fire, through the fall of lightning setting in flames grass or something else. This assumption, that primitive man lived ages on earth before he was made acquainted with fire, is one of the most painfully illogical of all. But old AEschylus was an initiate, and knew well what he was giving out.*
No occultist acquainted with symbology and the fact that Wisdom came to us from the East, will deny for a moment that the myth of Prometheus has reached Europe from Aryavarta. Nor is he likely to deny that in one sense Prometheus represents fire by friction . Therefore, he admires the sagacity of M. F. Baudry, who shows in his Les Mythes du feu et breuvage celeste (Revue germanique, 1861 p. 356)** one of the aspects of Prometheus and his origin from India. He shows the reader the supposed primitive process to obtain fire, still in use to-day in India to light the sacrificial flame. This is what he says: --
"This process, such as it is minutely described in the Vedic Sutras, consists in rapidly
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turning a stick in a socket made in the centre of a piece of wood. The friction develops intense heat and ends by setting on fire the particles of wood in contact. The motion of the stick is not a continuous rotation, but a series of motions in contrary senses, by means of a cord fixed to the stick in its middle: the operator holds one of the ends in each hand and pulls them alternately. . . . The full process is designated in Sanskrit by the verb manthami, mathnani; which means 'to rub, agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,' and is especially applied to rotatory friction, as proved by its derivation from mandala, which signifies a circle. . . . The pieces of wood serving for the production of fire have each their name in Sanskrit. The stick which turns is called pramantha; the discus which receives it is called arani and aranî two aranis' designating the ensemble of the instrument" (p . 358 et seq.).***
It remains to be seen what the Brahmins will say to this. But supposing Prometheus has been conceived in one of the aspects of his
* The modern attempt of some Greek scholars (poor and pseudo scholars, they would have appeared in the day of the old Greek writers!) to explain the real meaning of the ideas of AEschylus, which, being an ignorant ancient Greek, he could not express so well himself, is absurdly ludicrous!
** See also his Memoires de la Societe de la Linguistique following the "Fire Myths," ( Vol. I, p. 337, et seq.)
*** There is the upper and nether piece of timber used to produce this sacred fire by attrition at sacrifices, and it is the aranî which contains the socket. This is proven by an allegory in the Vayu Purana and others, which tell us that Nemi, the son of Ikshwaku, had left no successor, and that the Rishis, fearing to leave the earth without a ruler, introduced the king's body into the socket of an aranî -- like an upper aranî -- and produced from it a prince named Janaka. "It was by reason of the peculiar way in which he was engendered that he was called Janaka." (But see Goldstucker's Sanskrit Dictionary at the word Arani.) Devaki, Krishna's mother, in prayer addressed to her, is called "the aranî whose attrition engenders fire."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 525 GREEK IDEAS MISUNDERSTOOD.
myth as the producer of fire by means of pramantha, or as an animate and divine pramantha, would this imply that the symbolism had no other than the phallic meaning attributed to it by the modern symbologists? Decharme, at any rate, seems to have a correct glimmering of the truth; for he unconsciously corroborates by his remarks all that the Occult sciences teach with regard to the Manasa Devas, who have endowed man with the consciousness of his immortal soul: that consciousness which hinders man "from foreseeing death," and makes him know he is immortal.* "How has Prometheus got into the possession of the (divine) spark?" he asks. "Fire having its abode in heaven, it is there he must have gone to find it before he could carry it down to men, and, to approach the gods, he must have been a god himself." The Greeks held that he was of the divine race; the
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Hindus, that he was a Deva. Hence "with the Greeks he was the son of the Titan lapetos," [[Iapetonides]] (Theog. 528) . . . . "But celestial fire belonged in the beginning to the gods alone; it was a treasure they reserved for themselves . . . over which they jealously watched . . . 'The prudent son of Iapetus,' says Hesiod, 'deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow' (Theog. 565) . . . Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made from heaven. . . " "Now according to Greek ideas," (identical in this with those of the Occultists) "this possession forced from Jupiter, this human trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be followed by an expiation. . . . Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that race of Titans who had rebelled** against the gods, and whom the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus; like them, he is the genius of Evil, doomed to cruel suffering, etc., etc."
That which is revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one-sided view taken of this grandest of all the myths. The most intuitional among modern writers cannot or will not rise in their conceptions above the level of the Earth and Cosmic phenomena. It is not denied that the moral idea in the myth, as presented in the Theogony of Hesiod, plays a certain part in the primitive Greek conception. The Titan is more than a thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation of humanity -- active, industrious, intelligent, but at the same time ambitious, which aims at equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity punished in the person of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With the latter, Prometheus is not a
* The monad of the animal is as immortal as that of man, yet the brute knows nothing of this; it lives an animal life of sensation just as the first human would have lived, when attaining physical development in the Third Race, had it not been for the Agnishwatta and the Manasa Pitris.
** The fallen angels, therefore; the Asuras of the Indian Pantheon.
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criminal, save in the eyes of the gods. In his relation with the Earth, he is, on the contrary, a god himself, a friend of mankind ([[philanthropos ]]), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in AEschylus. But with all other nations Prometheus is -- what? The fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church would have it? Not at all. He is simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded effects of lightning. He is the "evil fire" (mal feu) and the symbol of the divine reproductive male organ. "Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to explain is then simply a (Cosmic) genius of fire" (p. 261). It is the former idea (the phallic) which was pre-eminently Aryan, if we believe Ad. Kuhn (in his Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks) and Baudry. For --
"The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the arani, the Aryas must have ascribed (?) the same origin to celestial fire, and they must* have imagined (?) that a god armed with pramantha, or a divine pramantha, exercised in the bosom of the clouds a violent friction, which gave birth to lightning and thunderbolts. . . . . This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch's
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testimony (Philosoph. Plant., iii. 3), the Stoics thought that thunder was the result of the struggle of storm-clouds and lightning -- a conflagration due to friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the action of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if not the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction? . . . . . . Everything leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the dispersion of the Aryans, it was believed that the pramantha lighted fire in the storm cloud as well as in the aranis." (Revue Germanique, p. 368.)
Thus, suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for discovered truths. Defenders of the Bible dead-letter could never help the writers of missionary tracts more effectually, than do materialistic Symbologists in thus taking for granted that the ancient Aryans based their religious conceptions on no higher thought than the physiological.
But it is not so, and the very spirit of Vedic philosophy is against such an interpretation. And if, as Decharme himself confesses, "this idea of the creative power of fire is explained at once by the ancient assimilation of the human soul to a celestial spark," as shown by the imagery often made use of in the Vedas when speaking of Arani, it would mean something higher than simply a gross sexual conception. A hymn to Agni in the Veda is cited as example: -- "Here is the pramantha, the generator is ready. Bring the mistress of the race (the female Arani). Let us produce Agni by attrition, according
* The italics are ours; they show how assumptions are raised to laws in our day.
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to ancient custom" -- which means no worse than an abstract idea expressed in the tongue of mortals. The "female Arani," the mistress of the race, is Aditi, the mother of the gods, or Shekinah, eternal light -- in the world of Spirit, the "Great Deep" and CHAOS; or primordial Substance in its first remove from the UNKNOWN, in the manifested Kosmos. If, ages later, the same epithet is applied to Devaki, the mother of Krishna, or the incarnated LOGOS; and if the symbol, owing to the gradual and irrepressible spread of exoteric religions, may already be regarded as having a sexual significance, this in no way mars the original purity of the image. The subjective had been transformed into the objective; Spirit had fallen into matter. The universal kosmic polarity of Spirit-Substance had become, in human thought, the mystic, but still sexual union of Spirit and Matter, and had thus acquired an anthropomorphic colouring which it had never had in the beginning. Between the Vedas and the Puranas there is an abyss of which both are the poles, like the seventh (atmic) and the first or lowest principle (the physical body) in the Septenary constitution of man. The primitive, purely spiritual language of the Vedas, conceived many decades of millenniums earlier, had found its purely human expression for the purpose of describing events taking place 5,000 years ago, the date of Krishna's death (from which day the Kali Yuga, or Black-Age, began for mankind).
As Aditi is called Surarani (the matrix or "mother" of the sura gods), so Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, is called in Mahabharata Pandavarani -- which term is already physiologized. But Devaki, the antetype of the Roman Catholic Madonna, is a later anthropomorphized form of Aditi. The latter is
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the goddess mother, the "Deva-matri" of Seven Sons (the six and the seven Adityas of early Vedic times); the mother of Krishna, Devaki, has six embryos conveyed into her womb by Jagaddhatri (the "nurse of the world"), the seventh (Krishna, the Logos,) being transferred to that Rohini. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the mother of seven children, of five sons and two daughters, (a later transformation of sex) in Matthew's Gospel (xiii. 55-56). No one of the worshippers of the Roman Catholic Virgin would object to reciting in her honour the prayer addressed by the gods to Devaki. Let the reader judge.
"Thou art that Prakriti (essence), infinite and subtile, which bore Brahma in its womb. Thou eternal being, comprising in thy substance the essence of all created things, wast identical with creation; thou wast the parent of the triform sacrifice, becoming the germ of all. . . . Thou art sacrifice, whence all fruit proceeds; thou art the arani whose attrition engenders fire" . . . . ("Womb of Light," "holy Vessel," are the epithets of the Virgin). "As Aditi, thou art the parent of the gods. . . . Thou art Jyotsna (the morning twilight)." The Virgin
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is often addressed as the "morning Star" and the "star of Salvation" -- the light whence day is begotten. "Thou art Samnati (humility, a daughter of Daksha), the mother of Wisdom; thou art Niti, the parent of harmony (Naya); thou art modesty, the progenitrix of affection (Prasraya or vinaya); thou art desire, of whom love is born. . . . Thou art the mother of knowledge (Avabodha); patience (Dhriti), the parent of fortitude (Dhairya) . . . . etc., etc."
Thus arani is shown here as the Roman Catholic "vase of election" and no worse. As to its primitive meaning, it was purely metaphysical. No unclean thought traversed these conceptions in the ancient mind. Even in the Zohar -- far less metaphysical than any other symbolism -- the idea is an abstraction and nothing more. Thus, when the Zohar (iii., 290) says: "All that which exists, all that which has been formed by the ancient, whose name is holy, can only exist through a male and female principle," it means no more than this: "The divine Spirit of Life is ever coalescing with matter." It is the WILL of the Deity that acts; and the idea is purely Schopenhauerian. "When Atteekah Kaddosha, the ancient and the concealed of the concealed, desired to form all things, it formed all things like male and female. This wisdom cornprises ALL when it goeth forth." Hence Chochmah (male wisdom) and Binah (female consciousness or Intellect) are said to create all between the two -- the active and the passive principles. As the eye of the expert jeweller discerns under the rough and uncouth oyster shell the pure immaculate pearl, enshrined within its bosom, his hand dealing with the former but to get at its contents, so the eye of the true philosopher reads between the lines of the Puranas the sublime Vedic truths, and corrects the form with the help of the Vedantic wisdom. Our Orientalists, however, never perceive the pearl under the thick coating of the shell, and -- act accordingly.
From all that has been said in this section, one sees clearly that, between the Serpent of Eden and the Devil of Christianity, there is an abyss. Alone the sledge hammer of ancient philosophy can kill this dogma.
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§ XXI.
ENOICHION-HENOCH.
THE history of the evolution of the Satanic myth would not be complete if we omitted to notice the character of the mysterious and Cosmopolitan Enoch, variously called Enos, Hanoch, and finally Enoichion by the Greeks. It is from his Book that the first notions of the Fallen Angels were taken by the early Christian writers.
The "Book of Enoch" is declared apocryphal. But what is an Apocrypha? The very etymology of the term shows that it is simply a secret book, i.e., one that belonged to the catalogue of temple libraries under the guardianship of the Hierophants and initiated priests, and was never meant for the profane. Apocrypha comes from the verb Crypto, [[krupto]], "to hide." For ages the Enoichion (the Book of the SEER) was preserved in the "city of letters" and secret works -- the ancient Kirjath-Sepher, later on, Debir (see Joshua xv., 15).
Some of the writers interested in the subject -- especially Masons -- have tried to identify Enoch with Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, and even with the Latin Mercury. As individuals, all these are distinct one from the other; professionally -- if one may use this word, now so limited in its sense -- they belong one and all to the same category of sacred writers, of Initiators and Recorders of Occult and ancient Wisdom. Those who in the Kuran (see Surat XIX.) are generically termed the Edris, or the "Learned" (the Initiated), bore in Egypt the name of "Thoth," the inventor of arts, sciences, writing or letters, of music and astronomy. Among the Jews the Edris became "Enoch," who, according to Bar-
Hebraeus, "was the first inventor of writing," books, arts, and sciences, the first who reduced to a system the progress of the planets. In Greece he was called Orpheus, and thus changed his name with every nation. The number Seven being attached to, and connected with, each of those primitive Initiators,* as well as the number 365, of the days in the year, astronomically, it identifies the mission, character, and the sacred office of all those men, but certainly not their personalities. Enoch is the seventh Patriarch; Orpheus is the possessor of the phorminx, the 7-stringed lyre, which is the seven-
fold mystery of initiation. Thoth, with the seven-rayed Solar Discus on his head, travels in the Solar boat, the 365 degrees, jumping out every fourth (leap) year for one day. Finally, Thoth-Lunus is the septenary
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god of the seven days, or the week. Esoterically and spiritually, Enoichion means the "Seer of the Open Eye."
The story about Enoch, told by Josephus, namely, that he had concealed under the pillars of Mercury or Seth his precious rolls or books, is the same as that told of Hermes, "the father of Wisdom," who concealed his books of Wisdom under a pillar, and then, finding the two pillars of stone, found the science written thereon. Yet Josephus, notwithstanding his constant efforts in the direction of Israel's unmerited glorification, and though he does attribute that science (of Wisdom) to the Jewish Enoch -- writes history. He shows those pillars as still existing during his own time. He tells us that they were built by Seth; and so they may have been, only neither by the Patriarch of that name, the fabled son of Adam, nor by the Egyptian god of Wisdom -- Teth, Set, Thoth, Tat, Sat (the later Sat-an), or Hermes, who are all one, -- but by the "sons of the Serpent-god," or "Sons of the Dragon," the name under which the Hierophants of Egypt and Babylon were known before the Deluge, as were their forefathers, the Atlanteans.
What Josephus tells us, therefore, must be allegorically true, with the exception of the application made of it. According to his version the two famous pillars were entirely covered with hieroglyphics, which, after the discovery, were copied and reproduced in the most secret corners of the inner temples of Egypt, and have thus become the source of its Wisdom and exceptional learning. These two "pillars," however, are the prototypes of the two "tables of stones" hewn by Moses at the command of the "Lord." Hence, in saying that all the great adepts and mystics of antiquity -- like Orpheus, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Plato -- got the elements of their theology from those hieroglyphics, he is right in one sense, and wrong in another; for he errs in accuracy. The Secret Doctrine teaches us that the arts, sciences, theology, and especially the philosophy of every nation which preceded the last universally known, but not universal Deluge, had been recorded ideographically from the primitive oral records of the Fourth Race, and that these were the inheritance of the latter from the early Third Root-Race before the allegorical Fall. Hence, also, the Egyptian pillars, the tablets, and even the "white Oriental porphyry stone" of the Masonic legend -- which Enoch, fearing that the real and precious secrets would be lost, concealed before the Deluge in the bowels of the Earth -- were simply the more or less symbolical and allegorical copies from the primitive Records. The "Book of Enoch" is one of such copies and is a Chaldean, now very incomplete compendium. As already said, Enoichion means in Greek the "inner eye," or the Seer; in Hebrew, and with the help of Masoretic points it means the
initiator and instructor, . It is a generic title; besides which his legend is
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that of several other prophets, Jewish and heathen, with changes of made-up details, the root-form being the same. Elijah is also taken up into Heaven alive; and the astrologer, at the court of Isdubar, the Chaldean Hea-bani, is likewise raised to heaven by the god Hea, who was his patron, as Jehovah
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was of Elijah (whose name means in Hebrew "God-Jah," Jehovah, ), and again of Elihu, which has the same meaning. This kind of easy death, or euthanasia, has an esoteric meaning. It symbolises the death of any adept who has reached the power and degree, as also the purification, which enable him to die only in the physical body and still live and lead a conscious life in his astral body. The variations on this theme are endless, but the secret meaning is ever the same. The Pauline expression (Hebrews xi. 5) "that he should not see death" -- ut non videret mortem -- has thus an esoteric meaning, but nothing supernatural in it. The mangled interpretation given of some Biblical hints to the effect that Enoch, "whose years will equal those of the world," (of the Solar year, 365 days,) will share with Christ and the prophet Elijah the honours and bliss of the last advent and of the destruction of Antichrist -- signify, esoterically, that some of the great adepts will return in the Seventh Race, when all Error will be made away with, and the advent of TRUTH will be heralded by those Sishta, the holy "Sons of Light."
The Latin church is not always logical, nor prudent either. She declares the "Book of Enoch" an apocrypha, and has gone so far as to claim, through Cardinal Cajetan and other luminaries of the Church, the rejection from the Canon of even the Book of Jude, who, though an inspired apostle, quotes from and thus sanctifies the Book of Enoch, which is alleged to be an apocryphal work. Fortunately, some of the dogmatics perceived the peril in time. Had they accepted Cajetan's resolution, they would have been forced to reject likewise the fourth Gospel; as St. John borrows literally from Enoch, and places in the mouth of Jesus, a whole sentence! ( Vide supra, § XVIII., sub-sect. A, about the sheep and the robbers.)
Ludolph, the "father of Ethiopic literature," commissioned to investigate the various Enochian MSS. presented by Pereisc, the traveller, to the Mazarine Library, declared that "no book of Enoch could exist among the Abyssinians"! Further researches and discoveries worsted his too dogmatic assertion, as all know. Bruce and Ruppel found and brought that same work from Abyssinia some years later, and Bishop Laurence translated it. But Bruce despised it, and scoffed at its contents; as did all the rest of the Scientists. He declared it "a Gnostic work," in which "the age of giants who devour " men -- is given . . . hence it is another "Apocalypsis." Giants! another fairy-tale.
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Such, however, was not the opinion of all the best critics. Dr. Hanneberg places the Book of Enoch along with the Third Book of the Maccabees, at the head of the list of those whose authority stands the nearest to that of the canonical works.
Verily, "where doctors disagree . . ."
As usual, however, they were all right and all wrong. To accept Enoch as a Biblical character, a single living man, is like accepting Adam as the first one. Enoch was a generic title, applied to, and borne by, scores of individuals, at all times and ages, and in every race and nation. This may be easily inferred from the fact that the ancient Talmudists and the teachers of Midrashim are not agreed generally in their views about Hanokh, the Son of Yered. . . . Some say Enoch was a great Saint, beloved by God,
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and taken alive to heaven (i.e., one who reached Mukti or Nirvana, on earth, as Buddha did and others still do); and others maintain that he was a sorcerer, a wicked magician. This shows only that Enoch, or its equivalent, was a term, even during the days of the later Talmudists, which meant "Seer," "Adept in the Secret Wisdom," etc., without any specification as to the character of the title-bearer. When Josephus, speaking of Elijah and Enoch (Antiquities, ix., 2), remarks that "it is written in the sacred books they (Elijah and Enoch) disappeared, but so that nobody knew that they died," it means simply that they had died in their personalities, as Yogis die to this day in India, or even some Christian monks to the world. They disappear from the sight of men and die -- on the terrestrial plane -- even for themselves. A seemingly figurative way of speaking, yet literally true.
"Hanokh transmitted the science of (astronomical) calculation and of computing the seasons to Noah," says the Midrash Pirkah R. Eliezar (cap. viii.), referring to Henoch that which others did to Hermes Trismegistus, because the two are identical in their esoteric meaning. "Hanokh" in this case, and his "Wisdom," belong to the cycle of the Fourth Atlantean Race,* and Noah to that of the Fifth.** In this case both represent the Root-Races, the present one and the one that preceded it. In another sense, Enoch disappeared, "he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him," the allegory referring to the disappearance of the Sacred and Secret knowledge from among men; for "God" (or Java Aleim -- the high hierophants, the heads of the colleges of initiated priests***) took him; in other words, the Enochs or the Enoichions, the Seers and their knowledge and wisdom, became strictly
* Says the Zohar, "Hanokh had a book which was one with the book of the generations of Adam; this is the Mystery of Wisdom."
** Noah is heir to the Wisdom of Enoch; in other words, the Fifth is heir to the Fourth Race.
*** Vide Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 575, et seq.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 533 WHAT ENOCH IS, ESOTERICALLY.
confined to the Secret Colleges of the Prophets, with the Jews, and to the temples with the Gentiles.
Interpreted with the help of merely the symbolical key, Enoch is the type of the dual nature of man -- spiritual and physical. Hence he occupies the centre of the astronomical cross (given by Eliphas Levi from a secret work), which is a six-pointed star, "the Adonai." In the upper triangle is the Eagle; in the left lower triangle stands the lion; in the right, the bull: while between the bull and the lion, over them and under the eagle, is the face of Enoch or man. ( Vide illustrated diagram in Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 452). Now the figures on the upper triangle represent the Four Races, leaving out the first -- the Chhayas or Shadows -- and the "Son of Man," Enos or Enoch, is in the centre, because he stands between the two (the Fourth and the Fifth) Races, as he represents the Secret Wisdom of both. These are the four animals of Ezekiel and of the Revelation. The same double triangle which in Isis, Vol. II, (p. 453), faces the Hindu Adanari, is by far the best. For there, only the three (for us) historical races are symbolized: the third, the androgynous, by Ada-nari; the fourth, symbolized by the strong,
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powerful lion; and the fifth -- the Aryan -- by that which is its most sacred symbol to this day, the bull (and the cow).
A man of great erudition -- a French savant -- M. de Sacy, finds several most singular statements in the Book of Enoch, "worthy of the most serious examination," he says. For instance, "the author (Enoch) makes the solar year consist of 364 days, and seems to know periods of three, of five, and of eight years, followed by four supplementary days, which, in his system, appear to be those of the equinoxes and solstices."* . . . . To which he adds, later on, "I see but one means to palliate them (these 'absurdities'), it is to suppose that the author expounds some fanciful system which may have existed BEFORE THE ORDER OF NATURE HAD BEEN ALTERED AT THE PERIOD OF THE UNIVERSAL DELUGE."
Precisely so; and the Secret Doctrine teaches that that "order of nature" has been thus altered, and the series of the Earth's humanities too. For, as the angel Uriel tells Enoch: "Behold, I have showed thee all things, O Enoch; and all things have I revealed to thee. Thou seest the Sun, the Moon, and those which conduct the stars in Heaven, which cause all their operations, seasons, and arrivals to return. In the days of sinners THE YEARS SHALL BE SHORTENED . . . . the moon shall change its laws, etc." (chap. lxxix). In those days also, years before the great Deluge that carried away the Atlanteans and changed the face of the whole earth -- because "the earth (on its axis) became inclined" --
* See Danielo's criticisms upon De Sacy, in the Annales de Philosophic, p. 393.
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nature, geologically, astronomically, and cosmically in general, could not have been the same, just because the Earth had inclined. See chap. 1xiv. (Sect. xi.) . . . . "And Noah cried with a bitter voice 'Hear me, hear me, hear me'; three times. And he said 'The earth labours and is violently inclined; surely, I shall perish with it.' "
This, by the way, looks like one of those many "inconsistencies," if the Bible is read literally. For, to say the least, this is a very strange fear in one who had "found grace in the eyes of the Lord" and been told to build an ark! But here we find the venerable Patriarch expressing as much fear as if, instead of a "friend" of God, he had been one of the Giants doomed by the wrathful deity. The earth has already inclined, and the deluge of waters has become simply a question of time, and yet Noah seems to know nothing of his intended salvation.
A decree had come indeed; the decree of nature and the Law of Evolution, that the earth should change its race, and that the Fourth Race should be destroyed to make room for a better one. The Manvantara had reached its turning point of three and a half Rounds, and gigantic physical Humanity had reached the acme of gross materiality. Hence the apocalyptic verse that speaks of a commandment gone forth that they may be destroyed, "that their end may be" (of the race); for they knew truly "every secret of the angels, every oppressive and secret power of the Satans, and every power of those who commit
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sorcery, as well as of those who make molten images in the whole earth."
And now a natural question. Who could have informed the apocryphal author of this powerful vision (to whatever age he may be assigned before the day of Galileo) that the Earth could occasionally incline her axis? Whence has he derived such astronomical and geological knowledge if the Secret Wisdom, of which the ancient Rishis and Pythagoras had drunk, is but a fancy, an invention of the later ages? Has Enoch read prophetically perchance in Frederick Klee's work on the Deluge (p. 79) these lines: "The position of the terrestrial globe with reference to the Sun has evidently been, in primitive times, different from what it is now; and this difference must have been caused by a displacement of the axis of rotation of the Earth."?
This reminds one of that other unscientific statement made by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, namely, that the Sun has not always risen where it arises now, and that in former times the ecliptic had cut the equator at right angles.*
There are many such "dark sayings" throughout Puranas, Bible and Mythology; and to the occultist they divulge two facts: (a) that the ancients knew as well, and better, perhaps, than the moderns
* Astronomie Ancienne, Bailly, Vol. I., p. 203, and Vol. II., p. 216.
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do, astronomy, geognosy and cosmography in general; and (b) that the globe and its behaviour have altered more than once since the primitive state of things. Thus, on the blind faith of his "ignorant" religion, which taught that Phaeton, in his desire to learn the hidden truth, made the Sun deviate from its usual course -- Xenophantes asserts somewhere that, "the Sun turned toward another country"; which is a parallel, however slightly more scientific, if as bold, of Joshua stopping the course of the Sun altogether. Yet it may explain the teaching of the Northern mythology (in Jeruskoven) that, before the actual order of things, the Sun arose in the South, and its placing the Frigid Zone in the East, whereas now it is in the North.
The Book of Enoch, in short, is a resume, a compound of the main features of the History of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races; a very few prophecies from the present age of the world; a long retrospective, introspective and prophetic summary of universal and quite historical events -- geological, ethnological, astronomical, and psychic -- with a touch of theogony out of the antediluvian records. The Book of this mysterious personage is referred to and quoted copiously in the Pistis Sophia, and also in the Zohar and its most ancient Midrashim. Origen and Clement of Alexandria held it in the highest esteem. To say, therefore, that it is a post-Christian forgery is to utter an absurdity and to become guilty of an anachronism, since Origen, among others, lived in the second century of the Christian era, yet he mentions it as an ancient and venerable work. The secret and sacred name and its potency are well and clearly though allegorically described in the old volume. From the XVIIIth to the Lth chapter, the Visions of Enoch are all descriptive of the Mysteries of Initiation, one of which is the
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Burning Valley of the "Fallen Angels."
Perhaps St. Augustine was quite right in saying that the Church rejected the BOOK OF ENOCH out of her canon owing to its too great antiquity, ob nimiam antiquitatem.* There was no room for the events noticed in it within the limit of the 4004 years B.C. assigned to the world from its "creation"!
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§ XXII.
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MYSTERY-NAMES IAO AND JEHOVAH, WITH THEIR RELATION TO THE CROSS AND CIRCLE.
WHEN the Abbe Louis Constant -- known as Eliphas Levi -- said in his Histoire de la Magie that the "Sepher Jezirah, the Zohar, and the Apocalypse (of St. John) are the master-pieces of the Occult Sciences," he ought, if he wanted to be correct and clear, to have added, "in Europe." It is quite true that these works contain "more significance than words"; and that "its expression is poetical, while in numbers it is exact." Unfortunately, before any one can appreciate the poetry of the expressions, or the exactness of the numbers, he will have to learn the real significance and meaning of the terms and symbols used. And man will never learn this so long as he remains ignorant of the fundamental principle of the Secret Doctrine, whether in Oriental Esotericism, or in the Kabalistical symbology: -- the key, or value, in all their aspects, of the "God"-names, "Angel"-names, and "Patriarchal" names in the Bible -- their mathematical or geometrical value, and their relations to manifested nature.
Therefore, if, on the one hand, the Zohar "astonishes (the mystic) by the profundity of its views and the great simplicity of its images," on the other hand, that work misleads the student by such expressions as those used with respect to AIN-SOPH and Jehovah, notwithstanding the assurance that "the book is careful to explain that the human form with which it clothes God is but an image of the word, and that God should not be expressed by any thought, or any form." It is well known that Origen, Clemens, and the Rabbis confessed, with regard to the Kabala and the Bible, to their being veiled and secret Books; but few know that the esotericism of the Kabalistic books in their present re-
edited form is simply another and still more cunning veil thrown upon the primitive symbolism of these secret volumes.
The idea of representing the hidden deity by the circumference of a Circle, and the Creative Power (male and female, or the Androgynous WORD), by the diameter across it, is one of the oldest symbols. It is upon this conception that every great Cosmogony was built. With the old Aryans, the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans, it was complete, as it embraced the idea of the eternal and immovable Divine Thought in its absoluteness, separated entirely from the incipient stage of (the so-called)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 537 THE JEWS ALONE THE HEIRLOOM OF JEHOVAH.
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creation; and comprised psychological and even Spiritual evolution, and its mechanical work, or cosmogonical construction. With the Hebrews, however, though the former conception is to be distinctly found in the Zohar, and the Sepher Jezirah -- or what remains of the latter -- that which has been embodied subsequently in the Pentateuch proper, and especially in Genesis, is simply this secondary stage, to wit, the mechanical law of creation, or rather of construction; while theogony is hardly, if at all, outlined.
It is only in the first six chapters of Genesis, in the rejected Book of Enoch, and the misunderstood and mistranslated poem of Job, that true echoes of the archaic doctrine may now be found. The key to it is lost, even among the most learned Rabbis, whose predecessors in the early period of the middle ages have preferred, in their national exclusiveness and pride, and especially in their profound hatred of Christianity, to cast it into the deep sea of oblivion, rather than to share their knowledge with their relentless and fierce persecutors. Jehovah was their own tribal property, inseparable from, and unfit to play a part in, any other but the Mosaic Law. Violently torn out of his original frame, which he fitted and which fitted him, the "lord god of Abraham and Jacob" could hardly be crammed without damage and breakage into the new Christian Canon. Being the weakest, the Judeans could not help the desecration; but they kept the secret of the origin of their Adam Kadmon, or male-female Jehovah; and the new tabernacle proved a complete misfit for the old god: they were, indeed, avenged!
The statement that Jehovah was the tribal god of the Jews and no higher, will be denied like many other things. Yet the theologians are not in a position to tell us, in that case, the meaning of verses 8 and 9 in Deuteronomy, chapter xxxii. These verses say quite plainly: "When the MOST HIGH (not the "Lord," or "Jehovah" either) divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the Sons of Adam he set the bounds . . . according to the number of the children of Israel. . . . The Lord's (Jehovah's) portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance." This settles the question. So impudent were the modern translators of Bibles and Scriptures and so damaging are these verses, that, following in the steps traced for them by their worthy Church Fathers, each translator rendered these verses in his own way. While the above-cited quotation is taken verbatim from the authorized English version, in the French Bible (of the Protestant Biblical Society of Paris, according to the version revised in 1824 by J. E. Ostervald) one finds the "Most High" translated by Souverain (a Sovereign!!), the "sons of Adam" rendered by "the children of men," and the "Lord" changed into the "Eternal." For impudent sleight-of-hand, the French Protestant Church seems thus to have surpassed even English ecclesiasticism.
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Nevertheless, one thing is patent: the "Lord's ("Jehovah's") portion" is his "chosen people" and none else, for, Jacob alone is the lot of his inheritance. What, then, have other nations, who call themselves Aryans, to do with this Semitic deity, the tribal god of Israel? Astronomically, the "Most High" is the Sun, and the "Lord" is one of his seven planets, whether it be Iao, the genius of the moon, or Ilda-
Baoth-Jehovah, that of Saturn, according to Origen and the Egyptian Gnostics.* Let the "Angel Gabriel," the "Lord" of Iran, watch over his people; and Michael-Jehovah, over his Hebrews. These are not the gods of other nations, nor were they ever those of Jesus. As each Persian Dev is chained to his planet (see Origen's Copy of the Chart), so each Hindu Deva (a "Lord") has its allotted portion, a
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world, a planet, a nation or a race. Plurality of worlds implies plurality of gods. We believe in the former, and may recognize, but will never worship, the latter. ( Vide Part III., "On Chains of Worlds and their Plurality.")
It has been repeatedly stated in this work that every religious and philosophical symbol had seven meanings attached to it, each pertaining to its legitimate plane of thought, i.e., either purely metaphysical or astronomical; psychic or physiological, etc., etc. These seven meanings and their applications are hard enough to learn when taken by themselves; but the interpretation and the right comprehension of them become tenfold more puzzling, when, instead of being correlated, or made to flow consecutively out of and to follow each other, each, or any one of these meanings is accepted as the one and sole explanation of the whole symbolical idea. An instance may be given, as it admirably illustrates the statement. Here are two interpretations given by two learned Kabalists and scholars, of one and the same verse in Exodus, xxxiii, 18-23. Moses beseeches the Lord to show him his "glory." Evidently it is not the crude dead letter phraseology as found in the Bible that is to be accepted. There are seven meanings in the Kabala, of which we may give two as interpreted by the said two scholars. One of them quotes, while explaining: "Thou canst not see my face . . . I will put thee in the cleft of the rock . . . cover thee with my hand while I pass by. And then I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my a'hoor, my back; . . " and tells us in a gloss, "That is, I will show you 'My back,' i.e., my visible universe, my lower manifestations, but, as a man still in the flesh, thou canst not
* With the Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth (Hermes), who was chief of the Seven (Vide "Book of the Dead"). Their names are given by Origen, as Adonai (of the Sun) Iao (of the Moon), Eloi (Jupiter), Sabao (Mars), Orai (Venus), Astapkoi (Mercury), and, finally, Ildabaoth (Saturn).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 539 A GROTESQUE VERSE EXPLAINED.
see my invisible nature. So proceeds the Qabbalah." This is correct, and is the cosmo-metaphysical explanation. And now speaks the other Kabalist, giving the numerical meaning. As it involves a good many suggestive ideas, and is far more fully given, we may allow it more space. This synopsis is from an unpublished MS., and explains more fully what was given in § XVII, "The Holy of Holies," page 467.
The numbers of the name Moses are those of "I AM THAT I AM," so that the names Moses and Jehovah are at one in numerical harmony.
The word Moses is and the sum of the values of its letters is 345; Jehovah -- the genius par excellence of the lunar year -- assumes the value of 543, or the reverse of 345. . . . In the third chapter of Exodus, in the 13th and 14th verses, it is said: And Moses said . . . Behold when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? and God said unto Moses -- "I am that I am."
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The Hebrew words for this expression are ahiye asher ahiye, and in the value of the sums of their letters stand thus:--
. . . This being his (God's) name, the sum of the values composing it are 21, 501, 21 are 543, or simply a use of the simple digit numbers in the name of Moses . . . but now so ordered that the name of 345 is reversed, and reads 543. . . . So that when Moses asks "Let me see Thy face or glory," the other rightly and truly replies "Thou canst not see my face" . . . but thou shalt see me behind -- (the true sense, though not the precise words); because the comer and the behind of 543 is the face of 345 -- "for check and to keep a strict use of a set of numbers to develop certain grand results, for the object of which they are specifically employed." "In other uses," adds the learned Kabalist, "of the number they saw each other face to face. It is strange that if we add 345 to 543 we have 888, which was the gnostic Kabalistic value of the name Christ, who was Jehoshua or Joshua. And so also the division of the 24 hours of the day gives three eights as quotient. . . . The chief end of all this system of number checks was to preserve in perpetuity the exact value of the Lunar year in the natural measure of days."
This is the astronomical and numerical meaning in the secret theogony of sidereo-cosmical gods invented by the Chaldeo-Hebrews,
and two meanings out of seven. The other five would astonish the Christians still more.
The series of OEdipuses who have endeavoured to interpret the riddle of the Sphinx, is long indeed. For many ages she has been devouring the brightest and the noblest intellects of Christendom; but now the Sphinx is conquered. In the great intellectual struggle which has ended in the complete victory of the OEdipuses of Symbolism, it is not the Sphinx, however, who, burning with the shame of defeat, has had to bury herself in the sea, but verily the many-sided symbol, named Jehovah, whom Christians -- the civilized nations -- have accepted for their God. The latter has collapsed under the too close analysis, and is -- drowned. Symbologists have discovered with dismay that their adopted deity was only a mask for many other gods, an Euhemerized extinct planet, at best, the genius of the Moon and Saturn with the Jews, of the Sun and Jupiter, with early Christians; that the Trinity was, in truth, only an astronomical triad -- unless they accepted the more abstract and metaphysical meanings given to it by the Gentiles -- composed of the Sun (the Father), and the two planets Mercury (the Son) and Venus (the Holy Ghost, Sophia, the Spirit of Wisdom, Love and Truth, and Lucifer, as Christ, the bright and morning Star; vide "Revelation," ch. xxii., 15). Because, if the Father is the Sun (the elder Brother in the Eastern inner philosophy), the nearest planet to it is Mercury (Hermes, Budha, Thot), the name of
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whose mother on Earth was Maia; the planet which receives seven times more light than any other: which fact led the Gnostics to call their Christos, and the Kabalists their Hermes (in the astronomical meaning), the "seven-fold light" (vide at end of this §). Finally, this God was Bel; the Sun being "Bel," with the Gauls, "Helios" with the Greeks, "Baal," with the Phoenicians; "El" in Chaldean, hence "EL-
ohim," "Emanu-EL," El, "god," in Hebrew. But even the Kabalistic god has vanished in the rabbinical workmanship, and one has now to turn to the innermost metaphysical sense of the Zohar to find in it anything like Ain-Soph, the nameless deity and the Absolute, so authoritatively and loudly claimed by the Christians. But it is certainly not to be found in the Mosaic books, by those who try to read without a Key to them. Ever since it was lost Jews and Christians have tried their best to blend these two conceptions, but in vain. They have only succeeded in finally robbing even the Universal Deity of ITS majestic character and primitive meaning.
This is what was said in "Isis Unveiled": --
It would seem, therefore, but natural to make a difference between the mystery-god [[Iao]], adopted from the highest antiquity by all who participated in the esoteric knowledge of the priests, and his phonetic counterparts, whom we find treated with so little reverence by the Ophites and other Gnostics.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 541 THE ANTIQUITY OF THE CROSS.
In the Ophite gems of King ("Gnostics") we find the name of IAO repeated, and often confounded with that of Jevo, while the latter simply represents one of the genii antagonistic to Abraxas. But the name IAO neither originated with, nor was it the sole property of the Jews. Even if it had pleased Moses to bestow the name upon the tutelary "Spirit," the alleged protector and national deity of the "chosen people of Israel," there is yet no possible reason why other nationalities should receive Him as the Highest and One-living God. But we deny the assumption altogether. Besides, there is the fact that Jaho or Iao was a "Mystery name" from the beginning, for and never came into use before King David. Anterior to his time, few or no proper names were compounded with Iah or Jah. It looks rather as though David, being a sojourner among the Tyrians and Philistines (2 Samuel), brought thence the name of Jehovah. He made Zadok high priest, from whom came the Zadokites or Sadducees. He lived and ruled
first at Hebron , Habir-on or Kabeir-town, where the rites of the four (mystery-
gods) were celebrated. Neither David nor Solomon recognized either Moses or the law of Moses. They aspired to build a temple to , like the structures erected by Hiram to Hercules and Venus, Adon and Astarte.
Says Furst: "The very ancient name of God, Yaho, written in the Greek law, appears, apart from its derivation, to have been an old mystic name of the Supreme deity of the Shemites. Hence it was told to Moses when he was initiated at Hor-eb -- the cave -- under the direction of Jethro, the Kenite (or Cainite) priest of Midian. In an old religion of the Chaldeans, whose remains are to be found among the Neo-Platonists, the highest
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divinity, enthroned above the seven heavens, representing the Spiritual Light-Principle . . . . and also conceived of as Demiurgus,* was called [[Iao]]( ), who was, like the Hebrew Yaha, mysterious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated to the Initiated. The Phoenicians had a Supreme God, whose name was trilateral and secret, and he was [[Iao]]."** (Isis Unveiled), Vol. II., p. 298.)
The Cross, say the Kabalists, repeating the lesson of the Occultists, is one of the most ancient -- nay, perhaps, the most ancient of symbols. This is demonstrated at the very beginning of the Proem (Vol. I.). The Eastern Initiates show it coeval with the circle of Deific infinitude and the first differentiation of the Essence, the union of spirit and matter. This was rejected, and the astronomical allegory alone was accepted and made to fit into cunningly imagined terrestrial events.
Let us demonstrate this statement. In astronomy, as said, Mercury is the son of Coelus and Lux -- of the sky and light, or the Sun; in mythology he is the progeny of Jupiter and Maia. He is the "messenger" of his Father Jupiter, the Messiah of the Sun; in Greek, his name "Hermes," means, among other things, the "Interpreter" -- the "Word" by mouth; the LOGOS, or VERBUM. Now, Mercury, besides being born on Mount Cyllene among shepherds, is the patron of the
* By very few though, for the creators of the material universe were always considered as subordinate gods to the Most High Deity.
** Lydus I., c. Ledrenus, I. c.
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latter. A psychopompic genius, he conducted the souls of the dead to Hades and brought them back, an office attributed to Jesus, after his death and resurrection. The symbols of Hermes-Mercury (Dii Termini) were placed along and at the turning points of highways (as crosses are now placed in Italy) and they were cruciform.* Every seventh day the priests anointed these termini with oil, and once a year hung them with garlands, hence they were the anointed. Mercury, when speaking through his oracles said, "I am he whom you call the Son of the Father (Jupiter) and Maia. Leaving the King of Heaven (the Sun) I come to help you, mortals." Mercury heals the blind and restores sight, mental and physical.** He was often represented as three-headed and called "Tricephalos," "Triplex," as one with the Sun and Venus. Finally, Mercury, as Cornutus*** shows, was sometimes figured under a cubic form, without arms, because "the power of speech and eloquence can prevail without the assistance of arms or feet." It is this cubic form which connects the termini directly with the cross, and the eloquence or the power of speech of Mercury, which made the crafty Eusebius say "Hermes is the emblem of the Word which creates and interprets all," for it is the creative word; and he shows Porphyry teaching that the speech of Hermes, (now interpreted "Word of God" (!) in Pymander) a creative speech ( Verbum), is the seminal principle scattered throughout the Universe.**** In Alchemy "Mercury" is the radical Moyst, primitive or elementary water, containing the seed of the Universe, fecundated by the solar fires. To express this fecundating principle, a phallus was often added to the
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cross (the male and female, or the vertical and the horizontal united) by the Egyptians ( Vide Egyptian Museums). The cruciform termini also represented this dual idea, which was found in Egypt in the cubic Hermes. The author of "Source of Measures" tells us why. (But see the last page of § XVI., about the Gnostic Priapus).
As shown by him, the cube unfolded becomes in display a cross of the tau, or the Egyptian, form; or again, "the circle attached to the tau gives the ansated cross" of the old Pharaohs. They had known this from their priests and their "Kings Initiates" for ages, and also what was meant by "the attachment of a man to the cross," which idea "was made to co-ordinate with that of the origin of human life, and hence the phallic form." Only the latter came into action aeons and ages after the idea of the carpenter and artificer of the Gods,
*Montfaucon, Antiquities. See plates in Vol. I., plate 77. The disciples of Hermes go after their death to his planet, Mercury -- their Kingdom of Heaven.
** Cornutus.
*** Lydus de Mensibus, iv.
**** Preparat, Evang. I. iii. ch. 2.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 543 A PERSONAL, IS A FINITE GOD.
Visvakarma, crucifying the "Sun-Initiate" on the cruciform lathe. As the same author writes: "the attachment of a man to the cross . . . was made use of in this very form of display by the Hindus"; but, made "to co-ordinate" with the idea of the new rebirth of man by spiritual, not physical regeneration. The candidate for initiation was attached to the tau or astronomical cross with a far grander and nobler idea than that of the origin of mere terrestrial life.
On the other hand, the Semites seem to have had no other or higher purpose in life than that of procreating their species. Thus, geometrically, and according to the reading of the Bible by means of the numerical method, the author of the "Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery" is quite correct. Their (the Jewish) entire system --
"Seems to have been anciently regarded as one resting in nature, and one which was adopted by nature, or God, as the basis of law of the exertion practically of creative power -- i.e., it was the creative design, of which creation was practically the application. This seems to be established by the fact that, under the system set forth, measures of planetary times serve coordinately as measures of the size of planets, and of the peculiarity of their shapes -- i.e., in the extension of their equatorial and polar diameters" . . . etc., etc. (p. 3). . . . "This system seems to underlie the whole Biblical
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structure (that of creative design), as a foundation for its ritualism and for its display of the works of the Deity in the way of architecture, by use of the sacred unit of measure in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah, the Tabernacle, and the Temple of Solomon."
Thus, on the very showing of the defenders of this system the Jewish Deity is proved to be, at best, only the manifested duad, never the One absolute ALL. Geometrically demonstrated, he is a NUMBER; symbolically, an euhemerized Priapus; and this can hardly satisfy a mankind thirsting after the demonstration of real spiritual truths, and the possession of a god with a divine, not anthropomorphic, nature. It is strange that the most learned of modem Kabalists can see in the cross and circle nothing but a symbol of the manifested creative and androgyne deity in its relation to, and interference with, this phenomenal world.* One author believes that "man (read the Jew and Rabbi) obtained knowledge of the practical measure . . . . by which nature was thought to adjust the planets in size to harmonize with the notation of their movements" . . . . and adds: "it seems he did obtain it, and esteemed its possession as the means of his realization of the Deity -- that is, he approached so nearly to a conception of a Being having a mind like his own, only infinitely more powerful, as to be able to realize a law of creation
* See the Zohar and the two Qabbalahs (by Messrs. I. Myer and Mathers), with interpretations, if the reader would satisfy himself of this.
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established by that Being, which must have existed prior to any creation (Kabalistically called the Word) " ( "Source of Measures," p. 5).
This may have satisfied the practical Semite mind, but the Eastern Occultist has to decline the offer of such a God; indeed, a Deity, a Being, "having a mind like that of man, only infinitely more powerful," is no God that has any room beyond the cycle of creation. He has nought to do with the ideal conception of the eternal universe. He is, at best, one of the creative subordinate powers, the Totality of which is called the "Sephiroth," the "Heavenly Man," and Adam Kadmon, the second logos of the Platonists.
This very same idea is clearly found at the bottom of the ablest definitions of the Kabala and its mysteries, e.g., by John A. Parker, as quoted in the same work: --
"The key of the Kabala is thought to be the geometrical relation of the area of the circle inscribed in the square, or, of the cube to the sphere, giving rise to the relation of diameter to circumference of a circle with the numerical value of this relation expressed in integrals. The relation of diameter to circumference, being a supreme one connected with the god-names of Elohim and Jehovah (which terms are expressions numerically of these relations respectively, the first being of circumference, the latter of diameter), embraces all. Two expressions of circumference to diameter in integrals are used in the
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Bible: (1) The perfect, and (2) the imperfect. One of the relations between these is such that (2) subtracted from (1) will leave a unit of a diameter value in terms, or in the denomination of the circumference value of the perfect circle, or a unit straight line having a perfect circular value, or a factor of circular value" (p. 22).
Such calculations can lead one no further than to unriddle the mysteries of the third stage of Evolution, or the "third creation of Brahma." The initiated Hindus know how to "square the circle" far better than any European. But of this more anon. The fact is that the Western Mystics commence their speculation only at that stage when the universe "falls into matter," as the occultists say. Throughout the whole series of Kabalistic books we have not met with one sentence that would hint in the remotest way at the psychological and spiritual, as well as at the mechanical and physiological secrets of "creation." Shall we, then, regard the evolution of the Universe as simply a prototype, on a gigantic scale, of the act of procreation? as "divine" Phallicism, and rhapsodize on it as the evilly-inspired author of a late work of this name has done? The writer does not think so. And she feels justified in saying so, since the most careful reading of the Old Testament -- esoterically, as well as exoterically -- seems to have carried the most enthusiastic enquirers no further than a certainty on mathematical grounds that from the first to the last chapter of the Pentateuch every scene, every character or event are shown connected, directly or indirectly, with the origin of birth in its crudest and most
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 545 A PLAGIARISM BY PASCAL.
brutal form. Thus, however interesting and ingenious the rabbinical methods, the writer, in common with other Eastern Occultists, must prefer those of the Pagans.
It is not, then, in the Bible that we have to search for the origin of the Cross and Circle, but beyond the Flood. Therefore, returning to Eliphas Levi and the Zohar, we answer for the Eastern Occultists and say that, applying practice to principle, they agree entirely with Pascal, who says that "God is a circle, the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere," whereas the Kabalists say the reverse, and maintain it solely out of their desire to veil their doctrine. By the way, the definition of Deity by the Circle is not Pascal's at all, as E. Levi thought. It was borrowed by the French philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus or Cardinal Cusa's Latin work, De Docta Ignorantia, in which he makes use of it. It is, moreover, disfigured by Pascal, who replaces the words "Cosmic Circle," which stand symbolically in the original inscription, by the word Theos. With the ancients both words were synonymous.
-------
A.
CROSS AND CIRCLE.
Something of the divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed, in the minds of the ancient philosophers, to the shape of the circle. The old world, consistent in its symbolism with its pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward
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VEIL alike -- by a circle. This merging of the two into a unity, and the name theos given indifferently to both, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific and philosophical. Plato's etymological definition of the word theos has been shown elsewhere. He derives it from the verb [[theein]] (see Cratylus), "to move," as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies which he connects with deity. According to the Esoteric philosophy, this Deity is during its "nights" and its "days" (i.e., cycles of rest or activity) "the eternal perpetual motion," "the EVER-BECOMING, as well as the ever universally present, and the ever Existing." The latter is the root-abstraction, the former -- the only possible conception in human mind, if it disconnects this deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual, never-
ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through aeons of duration into its original status -- ABSOLUTE UNITY.
It was only the minor gods, who were made to carry the symbolical attributes of the higher ones. Thus, the god Shoo, the personification of Ra, who appears as "the great Cat of the Basin of Persea, in An"
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(See "Book of the Dead," Ritual XVII, 45-47), was often represented in the Egyptian monuments seated, and holding a cross, symbol of the four quarters, or the Elements, attached to a Circle.
In that very learned work, "The Natural Genesis," by Mr. Gerald Massey, on pp. 408-455 (Vol. I.), under the heading, "Typology of the Cross," there is more information to be had on the cross and circle than in any other work we know of. He who would fain have proofs of the antiquity of the Cross is referred to these two volumes. The author shows that "the circle and the cross are inseparable. . . . The crux ansata unites the circle and cross of the four corners. From this origin they came to be interchangeable at times. For example, the Chakra, or Disk of Vishnu, is a circle. The names denote the circling, wheeling round, periodicity, the wheel of time. This the god uses as a weapon to hurl at the enemy. In like manner, Thor throws his weapon, the Fylfot, a form of the four-footed cross (Swastica) and a type of the four quarters. Thus the cross is equivalent to the circle of the year. . . . The wheel emblem unites the cross and circle in one, as does the hieroglyphic cake and the Ankh-te
."
Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the Initiates. For Raoul-Rochette
shows (ibid) "the sign , occurring as the reverse of a Phoenician coin, with a Ram as the obverse. . . . .The same sign, sometimes called Venus' Looking-Glass, because it typified reproduction, was employed to mark the hind-quarters of valuable brood mares of Corinthian and other beautiful breeds of horses" (Raoul-Rochette, loc. cit. De La Croix Ansee, Mem. de l'Academie des Sciences, pl. 2, Nos. 8, 9, also 16, 2, p. 320, quoted in "Nat. Gen."), which proves that so far back as those early days the cross had already become the symbol of human procreation, and that oblivion of the divine origin of Cross and Circle had been forgotten.
Another form of the cross is given from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (vol. xviii., p. 393, pl. 4): --
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"At each of the four corners is placed a quarter arc of an oviform curve, and when the four are put together they form an oval; thus the figure combines the cross with the circle round in four parts, corresponding to the four corners of the cross. The four segments answer to the four feet of the Swastica cross and the Fylfot of Thor. The four-
leaved lotus flower of Buddha, is likewise figured at the centre of this cross, the lotus being an Egyptian and Hindu type of the four quarters. The four quarter arcs, if joined together, would form an ellipse, and the ellipse is also figured on each arm of the cross. This ellipse therefore denotes the path of the earth . . . . Sir J. Y. Simpson copied the
following specimen , which is here presented, as the cross of the two equinoxes and the two solstices placed within the figure of the earth's path.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 547 VARIATIONS OF THE SYMBOLISM.
The same ovoid or boat-shaped figure appears at times in the Hindu drawings with seven steps at each end as a form or a mode of Meru."
This is the astronomical aspect of the double glyph. There are six more aspects, however, and an attempt may be made to interpret a few of these. The subject is so vast that it would require in itself alone many volumes.
But the most curious of these Egyptian symbols of Cross and Circle, spoken of in the above cited work, is one which receives its full explanation and final colour from Aryan symbols of the same nature. Says the author: --
"The four-armed Cross is simply the cross of the four quarters, but the cross sign is not always simple.* This is a type that was developed from an identifiable beginning, which was adapted to the expression of various ideas afterwards. The most sacred cross of Egypt that was carried in the hands of the gods, the Pharaohs, and the mummied dead, is
the Ankh the sign of life, the living, an oath, the covenant . . . The top of this is the
hieroglyphic Ru set upright on the Tau-Cross. The Ru is the door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet. This denotes the birth-place in the northern quarter of the heavens, from which the Sun is reborn. Hence the Ru of the Ankh sign is the feminine type of the birth-place, representing the north. It was in the NORTHERN QUARTER that the GODDESS OF THE SEVEN STARS, called the "Mother of the Revolutions," gave birth to time in the earliest cycle of the year. The first sign of this primordial circle and
cycle made in heaven is the earliest shape of the Ankh-cross , a mere loop which contains both a circle and the cross in one image. This loop or noose is carried in front of the oldest genitrix, Typhon of the great Bear, as her Ark, the ideograph of a period, an ending, a time, shown to mean one revolution.
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"This then represents the circle made in the northern heaven by the Great Bear, which constituted the earliest year of time, from which we infer that the loop or Ru of the North represents that quarter, the birth-place of time when figured as the Ru of the Ankh symbol. Indeed this can be proved. The noose is an Ark or Rak type of reckoning. The
Ru of the Ankh-cross was continued in the Cypriote and the Coptic Ro, P.** The
Ro, was carried into the Greek cross , which is formed of the Ro and Chi or R-K. . . . The Rak, or Ank, was the sign of all beginning (Arche) on this account, and the Ank-tie is the cross of the North, the hind part of Heaven. . . ."
Now this, again, is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Puranic version in India gives the whole another colour; and without, however,
*Certainly not; for very often there are symbols made to symbolize other symbols, and these are in turn used in ideographs.
** The R of the Slavonian and Russian alphabets (the Kyriletza) is also the Latin P.
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destroying the above interpretation it is made to reveal a portion of its mysteries with the help of the
astronomical key, and thus offers a more metaphysical rendering. The "Ankh-tie" does not belong to Egypt alone. It exists under the name of pasa, a cord which Siva holds in the hand of his right back arm* (Siva having four arms). The Mahadeva is represented in the posture of an ascetic, as
Maha-Yogi, with his third eye , which is "the Ru, ,set upright on the Tau-Cross" in another form. The pasa is held in the hand in such a way that it is the first finger and hand near the thumb
which make the cross, or loop and crossing. Our Orientalists would have it to represent a cord to bind refractory offenders with, because, forsooth, Kali, Siva's consort, has the same as an attribute!
The pasa has here a double significance, as also has Siva's trisula and every other divine attribute. This significance lies in Siva, as Rudra has certainly the same meaning as the Egyptian ansated cross
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in its cosmic and mystic meaning. In the hand of Siva it becomes linga and yonic. That which is meant is this: Siva, as said before, is unknown by that name in the Vedas; and it is in the white Yajur Veda that he appears for the first time as the great god -- MAHADEVA -- whose symbol is the lingham. In Rig Veda he is called Rudra, the "howler," the beneficent and the maleficent Deity at the same time, the Healer and the Destroyer. In the Vishnu Purana, he is the god who springs from the forehead of Brahma, who separates into male and female, and he is the parent of the Rudras or Maruts, half of whom are brilliant and gentle, others, black and ferocious. In the Vedas, he is the divine Ego aspiring to return to its pure, deific state, and at the same time that divine ego imprisoned in earthly form, whose fierce passions make of him the "roarer," the "terrible." This is well shown in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra, god of fire, are called the "ten vital breaths" (prana, life) with manas, as eleventh, whereas as Siva, he is the Destroyer of that life. Brahma calls him Rudra, and gives him, besides, seven other names, which names are his seven forms of manifestation, also the seven powers of nature which destroy but to recreate or regenerate.
Hence the cruciform noose (pasa ) in his hand, when he is represented as an ascetic, the Mahayogin, has no phallic signification, and it, indeed, requires a strong imagination bent in this direction to find such even in
an astronomical symbol. As an emblem of "door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet" it signifies the "strait gate" that leads to the kingdom of heaven, far more than the "birth-place" in a physiological sense.
It is a Cross in a Circle and Crux Ansata, truly; but it is a Cross on which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogi passes through the "strait gate," the narrow circle that widens into an infinite one, as soon as the inner man has passed the threshold.
As to the mysterious constellation of the Seven Rishis in the great Bear, if Egypt made them sacred to "the oldest genitrix, Typhon" -- India has connected all these symbols ages ago with time or Yuga revolutions, and the Saptarishis are intimately connected with our present age -- the Dark Kali Yug.* The great Circle of Time, on the face of which fancy in India has represented the Tortoise (Kurma, or Sisumara, one of the Avatars of Vishnu), has the Cross placed on it by nature in its division and localisation of stars, planets and constellations. Thus in Bhagavata Purana V., xxx., it is said that "at the extremity of the tail of that animal, whose head is directed toward the South and whose body is in the shape of a ring (Circle), Dhruva (the ex-pole star) is placed; and along that tail are the Prajapati, Agni, Indra, Dharma, etc.; and across its loins the Seven Rishis." This is then the first and earliest Cross and Circle, into the formation of which enters the Deity (symbolized by Vishnu), the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time, Kala, on whose plane lie crossways all the gods, creatures, and creations born in Space and Time; -- who, as the philosophy has it, all die at the Mahapralaya.
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Meanwhile it is they, the Seven Rishis, who mark the time and the duration of events in our septenary life cycle. They are as mysterious as their supposed wives, the Pleiades, of whom only one -- she who hides -- has proven virtuous. The Pleiades (Krittika) are the nurses of Karttikeya, the God of War (Mars of the Western Pagans), who is called the Commander of the celestial armies -- or rather of the Siddhas (translated Yogis in heaven, and holy sages on the earth) -- "Siddha-sena," which would make Karttikeya identical with Michael, the "leader of the celestial hosts" and, like himself, a virgin Kumara.** Verily he is the "Guha," the mysterious one, as much so as are the Saptarshis and the Krittika (seven Rishis and the Pleiades), for the interpretation of all these combined, reveal to the adept the greatest mysteries of occult nature. One point is worth mention in this question of cross and
* Described in the "Mission des Juifs" by the Marquis St. Yves d'Alveydre, the hierophant and leader of a large party of French Kabalists, as the Golden Age!
** The more so since he is the reputed slayer of Tripurasura and the Titan Taraka. Michael is the conqueror of the dragon, and Indra and Karttikeya are often made identical.
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circle, as it bears strongly upon the elements of fire and water, which play such an important part in the circle and cross Symbolics. Like Mars, who is alleged by Ovid to have been born of a mother alone (Juno), without the participation of a father, or like the Avatars (Krishna, for instance), in the West as in the East -- Karttikeya is born, but in a still more miraculous manner -- begotten by neither father nor mother, but out of a seed of Rudra Siva, via Agni, who dropped it into the Ganges. Thus he is born from fire and water -- a "boy bright as the Sun and beautiful as the moon." Hence he is called Agnibhuva (Agni's son) and Ganga-putra (Son of Ganges). Add to this the fact that the Krittika, his nurses, as Matsya Purana shows, are presided over by Agni, or, in the authentic words -- "The seven Rishis are on a line with the brilliant Agni," and hence are called Agneya -- and the connection is easy to follow.
It is, then, the Rishis who mark the time and the periods of Kali-yuga, the age of sin and sorrow. See in the Bhagavata Purana XII., II, 2, 6, 32, and Vishnu Purana. Says the latter: "When the splendour of Vishnu (Krishna) departed for heaven, then did the Kali Yug, during which men delight in sin, invade the world. . . . . When the Seven Rishis were in Magha, the Kali Yug, comprising 1,200 (divine) years (432,000 years of mortals), began; and when from Magha, they shall reach Purvashadha, then will this Kali age attain its growth, under Nanda and his successors."* This is the revolution of the Rishis "when the two first stars of the Seven Rishis (of the Great Bear) rise in the heavens, and some lunar asterism is seen at night, at an equal distance between them, then the Seven Rishis continue stationary in that conjunction for a hundred years," a hater of Nanda makes Parasara say. According to Bentley, it is in order to show the quantity of the precession of the equinoxes that this notion originated among the astronomers. It was done "by assuming an imaginary line, or great circle, passing through the poles of the ecliptic and the beginning of the fixed Magha, which circle was supposed to cut some of the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
stars in the Great Bear. . . . The seven stars being called the Rishis, the Circle so assumed was called the line of the Rishis . . . . and being invariably fixed to the beginning of the lunar asterism Magha, the precession would be noted by stating the degree . . . of any moveable lunar mansion cut by that line or circle as an index" ("Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy," p. 65).
* Nanda is the first Buddhist Sovereign, Chandragupta, against whom all the Brahmins were so arrayed; he of the Morya Dynasty, and the grandfather of Asoka. This is one of those passages that do not exist in the earlier Puranic MSS. They were added by the Vaishnavas, who interpolated almost as much, out of Sectarian spite, as the Christian Fathers did.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 551 THE RISHIS AND THE PLEIADES.
There was, and still exists, a seemingly endless controversy about the chronology of the Hindus. Here is a point that could help to determine -- approximately at least -- the age when the symbolism of the Seven Rishis and their connection with the Pleiades began. When Karttikeya was delivered to them by the gods to be nursed, the Krittika were only six -- whence Karttikeya is represented with six heads; but when the poetical fancy of the early Aryan symbologists made of them the consorts of the Seven Rishis, they were seven. Their names are given, and these are Amba, Dula, Nitatui, Abrayanti, Maghayanti, Varshayanti, and Chupunika. There are other sets of names which differ, however. Anyhow, the Seven Rishis were made to marry the Seven Krittika before the disappearance of the seventh Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindu astronomers speak of that which, without the help of the strongest telescopes, no one can see? This is why, perhaps, in every such case the majority of the events described in the Hindu allegories is fixed upon as "a very recent invention, certainly within the Christian era"?
The oldest MSS. in Sanskrit on astronomy, begin their series of Nakshatras (the 27 lunar asterisms) with the sign of Krittika, and this can hardly make them earlier than 2780 B.C., (see the "Vedic Calendar," accepted even by the Orientalists); though they get out of the difficulty by saying that the said Calendar does not prove that the Hindus knew anything of astronomy at that date, and assure their readers that, Calendars notwithstanding, the Indian pundits may have acquired their knowledge of the lunar mansions headed by Krittika from the Phoenicians, etc. However that may be, the Pleiades are the central group of the system of sidereal symbology. They are situated in the neck of the constellation of Taurus, regarded by Madler and others, in astronomy, as the central group of the system of The Milky Way, and in the Kabala and Eastern Esotericism, as the sidereal septenate born
from the first manifested side of the upper triangle, the concealed . This manifested side is Taurus,
the Symbol of ONE (the figure 1), or of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph (bull or ox)
whose synthesis is ten (10), or Yodh, the perfect letter and number. The Pleiades (Alcyone, especially), are thus considered, even in astronomy, as the central point around which our Universe of fixed stars revolves, the focus from which, and into which the divine breath, MOTION, works incessantly during the Manvantara. Hence -- in the Occult philosophy and its sidereal symbols -- it is
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
this Circle and the starry cross on its face, which play the most prominent part.
The Secret Doctrine teaches us that everything in the universe, as well as the universe itself, is formed (created) during its periodical manifestations -- by accelerated MOTION set into activity by the BREATH of
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the ever-to-be-unknown power (unknown to present mankind, at any rate) within the phenomenal world. The Spirit of Life and Immortality was everywhere symbolized by a circle: hence the serpent biting his tail, represents the circle of Wisdom in infinity; as does the astronomical cross -- the cross within a circle, and the globe, with two wings added to it, which then became the sacred Scarabaeus of the Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it. For the Scarabaeus is called in Egypt (in the papyri ) Khopirron and Khopri from the verb Khopron "to become," and has thus been made a symbol and an emblem of human life and of the successive becomings of man, through the various peregrinations and metempsychoses (reincarnations) of the liberated Soul. This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in reincarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal entity. Being, however, an esoteric doctrine, revealed only during the mysteries by the priest-hierophants and the Kings-Initiates to the candidates, it was kept secret. The incorporeal intelligences (the Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers) were always represented under the form of circles. In the primitive philosophy of the Hierophants these invisible circles were the prototypic causes and builders of all the heavenly orbs, which were their visible bodies or coverings, and of which they were the souls. It was certainly a universal teaching in antiquity. (See Ezekiel, ch. 1.)
"Before the mathematical numbers," says Proclus (in Quinto Libro, EUCLID), "there are the Self-
moving numbers; before the figures apparent -- the vital figures, and before producing the material worlds which move in a Circle, the Creative Power produced the invisible Circles."
Deus enim et circulus est, says Pherecydes, in his hymn to Jupiter. It was a Hermetic axiom, and Pythagoras prescribed such a circular prostration and posture during the hours of contemplation. "The devotee must approach as much as possible the form of a perfect circle," prescribes the Secret Book. Numa tried to spread among the people the same custom, Pierius* tells his readers; and Pliny says: "During our worship, we roll up, so to say, our body in a ring, totum corpus circumagimur."** The vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one
** The goddess Basht (or Pasht) was represented with the head of a cat. This animal was sacred in Egypt for several reasons: as a symbol of the Moon "the eye of Osiris" or the "Sun," during night. The cat was also sacred to Sokhit. One of the mystic reasons was because of its body being rolled up in a circle when asleep. The posture is prescribed for occult and magnetic purposes, in order to regulate in
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
a certain way the circulation of the vital fluid, with which the cat is pre-eminently endowed. "The nine lives of a cat" is a popular saying based on good physiological and occult reasons. Mr. G. Massey gives also an astronomical reason for it which may be found in § I. "SYMBOLISM." "The cat saw the Sun, had it in its eye by night (was the eye [[footnote continued on following page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 553 THE DEGRADATION OF THE SYMBOL.
forcibly of this mysticism of the circle, when he beheld a whirl-wind from which came out "one wheel upon the earth" whose work "was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel " (ch. i. vv. 4-16). . . . "for the Spirit of the living creature was in the wheels" (v. 20).
"Spirit whirleth about continually and returneth again according to his circuits" -- says Solomon (Eccles. i. 6), who is made in the English translation to speak of the "Wind," and in the original text to refer both to the Spirit and the Sun. But the Zohar, the only true glossary of the Kabalistic Preacher, in explanation of this verse, which is, perhaps, rather hazy and difficult to comprehend, says that "it seems to say that the sun moves in circuits, whereas it refers to the Spirit under the Sun, called the holy Spirit, that moves circularly, toward both sides, that they (It and the Sun) should be united in the same Essence." . . . (Zohar, fol. 87, col. 346.)
The Brahmanical "Golden Egg," from within which emerges Brahma, the creative deity, is the "circle with the Central Point" of Pythagoras, and its fitting symbol. In the Secret Doctrine the concealed UNITY -- whether representing PARABRAHMAM, or the "GREAT EXTREME" of Confucius, or the Deity concealed by PHTA, the Eternal Light, or again the Jewish EN-SOPH, is always found to be symbolized by a circle or the "nought" (absolute No-Thing and Nothing, because it is infinite and the ALL); while the god-manifested (by its works) is referred to as the diameter of that circle. The symbolism of the underlying idea is thus made evident: the right line passing through the centre of a circle has, in the geometrical sense, length, but neither breadth or thickness: it is an imaginary and feminine symbol, crossing eternity and made to rest on the plane of existence of the phenomenal world. It is dimensional, whereas its circle is dimensionless, or, to use an algebraical term, it is the dimension of an equation. Another way of symbolizing the idea is found in the Pythagorean sacred Decade which synthesizes, in the dual numeral Ten (the 1 and a circle or cipher), the absolute ALL manifesting itself in the WORD or generative Power of Creation.
-------
B.
THE FALL OF THE CROSS INTO MATTER.
Those who would feel inclined to argue upon this Pythagorean symbol by objecting that it is not yet ascertained, so far, at what period of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of night), when it was otherwise unseen by men (for as the moon reflects the light of the Sun, so the cat was supposed to reflect it on account of its phosphorescent eyes) . . . We might say the moon mirrored the solar light, because we have looking-
glasses. With them the cat's eye was the mirror."
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antiquity the nought or cipher occurs for the first time -- especially in India -- are referred to Vol. II. of "Isis Unveiled," pp. 299, 300, et seq.
Admitting for argument's sake that the ancient world was not acquainted with our modes of calculation or Arabic figures -- though we know it was -- yet the circle and diameter idea is there to show that it was the first symbol in cosmogony. Before the trigrammes of Fo-hi, Yang, the Unity, and Yin, the binary , explained cunningly enough by Eliphas Levi thus (Dogme et Rituel, Vol. I., p. 124): -- China had her Confucius, and her Tau-ists.* The former circumscribes the "great extreme" within a circle with a horizontal line across; the latter place three concentric circles beneath the great circle, while the Sung Sages showed the "great Extreme" in an upper circle, and Heaven and Earth in two lower and smaller circles. The Yangs and the Yins are a far later invention.
Plato and his school never understood the Deity otherwise, many epithets of his applied to the "God over all" ([[ho epi pasi theos]]) notwithstanding. Plato having been initiated, could not believe in a personal God -- a gigantic Shadow of Man. His epithets of "monarch" and "Law-giver of the Universe" bear an abstract meaning well understood by every Occultist, who, no less than any Christian, believes in the One Law that governs the Universe, recognizing it at the same time as immutable. "Beyond all finite existences," he says, "and secondary causes, all laws, ideas and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE or MIND ([[nous]]), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded . . . the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the Universe" -- who is called, by way of preeminence and excellence, the Supreme** good "the god" ([[Theos]]), and "the god over all." These words apply, as Plato himself shows, neither to the "Creator" nor to the "Father" of our modern Monotheist, but to the ideal and abstract cause. For, as he says, "this [gk char], the god over all, is not the truth or the intelligence, but the FATHER of it," and its Primal cause. Is it Plato, the greatest pupil of the archaic Sages, a sage himself, for whom there was but a single object of attainment in this life -- REAL KNOWLEDGE -- who would have ever believed in a deity that curses and damns men for ever, on the slightest provocation?*** Not he, who considered only those to be
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
*Also in T'sang-t-ung-ky, by Wei-Pa-Yang.
** Cocker's "Christianity and Greek Philosophy," xi., p. 377.
*** The cry of despair uttered by Count de Montlosier in his Mysteres de la Vie Humaine, p. 117, is a warrant that the Cause of "excellence and goodness," supposed by Plato to pervade the Universe is neither his Deity, nor our World. "Au spectacle de tant [[footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 555 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION.
genuine philosophers and students of truth who possessed the knowledge of the really existing in opposition to mere seeming; of the always existing in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists permanently in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately.* Speusippus and Xenocrates followed in his footsteps. The ONE, the original, had no existence, in the sense applied to it by mortal men. "The [[timion]] (honoured one) dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity -- the world Soul"** -- the plane of the surface of the circle. The Cross and Circle are a universal conception -- as old as human mind itself. They stand foremost on the list of the long series of, so to say, international symbols, which expressed very often great scientific truths, besides their direct bearing upon psychological, and even physiological mysteries; and this symbol is precisely one of this kind, and is based upon the oldest esoteric cosmogony.
It is no explanation to say, as Eliphas Levi does, that God, the universal Love, having caused the male unit to dig an abyss in the female Binary, or chaos, produced thereby the world. Besides being as gross a conception as any, it does not remove the difficulty of conceiving it without losing one's veneration for the rather too human-like ways of the Deity. It is to avoid such anthropomorphic conceptions that the Initiates never use the epithet "God" to designate the One and Secondless Principle in the Universe; and that -- faithful in this to the oldest traditions of the Secret Doctrine the world over -- they deny that such imperfect and often not very clean work could ever be produced by Absolute Perfection. There is no need to mention here other still greater metaphysical difficulties. Between speculative Atheism and idiotic anthropomorphism there must be a philosophical mean, and a reconciliation. The Presence of the Unseen Principle throughout all nature, and the highest manifestation of it on Earth -- MAN, can alone help to solve the Problem, which is that of the mathematician whose x must ever elude the grasp of our terrestrial algebra. The Hindus have tried to solve it by their avatars, the Christians think
[[Continued from previous page]] de grandeur oppose a celui de tant de misere, l'esprit qui se met a observer ce vaste ensemble, se represente je ne sais quelle grande diviniti qu'une diviniti, plus grande et plus pressante encore, aurait comme brisee et mise en pieces en dispersant les debris dans tout l'Univers." The "still greater and still more exacting divinity" than the god of this world, supposed so "good" -- is KARMA. And this true Divinity shows well that the lesser one, our inner God (personal
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 2, ch 22
for the time being), has no power to arrest the mighty hand of this greater Deity, the CAUSE awakened by our actions generating smaller causes, which is called the LAW OF RETRIBUTION.
* See "Isis Unveiled," Before the Veil, xii. (Vol. I.).
** Plato: "Parmenides," 141, E.
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they did it -- by their one divine Incarnation. Exoterically -- both are wrong; esoterically both of them are very near the truth. Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to have fathomed -- if not actually revealed -- the archaic mystery of the Cross. As for the rest of those who, by unifying and individualizing the Universal Presence, have thus synthesized it into one symbol -- the central Point in the Crucifix -- they have shown thereby that they have never seized the true Spirit of the teaching of Christ, and by their interpretations they have degraded it in more than one way. They have forgotten the Spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it -- as though the Boundless and the Infinite can ever be limited and conditioned to one manifestation individualized in one man, or even in a nation!
The four arms of the " ," the decussated cross, and of the "Hermetic," pointing to the four cardinal points -- were well understood by the mystical minds of the Hindus, Brahmins and Buddhists, thousands of years before it was heard of in Europe; and that symbol was and is found all over the
world. They bent the ends of that cross and made of it their Swastica now the Wan of the Buddhist Mongolian.* It implies that the "Central point" is not limited to one individual, however perfect. That the Principle (God) is in Humanity, and Humanity, as all the rest, is in it, like drops of water are in the Ocean, the four ends being toward the four cardinal points, hence losing themselves in infinity.
Isarim, an Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the dead body of Hermes, the well known Smaragdine tablet, which, it is said, contained the essence of Hermetic wisdom . . . . "Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross . . . . Ascend from the earth to heaven and then descend again to earth" was traced on it. The riddle of the cross is contained in these words, and its double mystery is solved -- to the Occultist.
"The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circum-
* The Swastica is certainly one of the oldest symbols of the Ancient Races. In our century, says Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (Royal Masonic Cyclopeadia) it (the Swastica) "has survived in the form of the mallet" in the Masonic Fraternity. Among the many "meanings" the author gives of it, we do not find, however, the most important one, masons evidently not knowing it.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 557 THE PRIMITIVE CROSS
scribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY.
" 'Attach thyself,' say the alchemists, 'to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner: The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters.' " ( "Isis Unveiled.")
Again: -- The (Tau), and the astronomical cross of Egypt are conspicuous in several apertures of the remains of Palenque. In one of the basso-relievos of the Palace of Palenque, on the west side, sculptured as a hieroglyphic right under the seated figure, is a Tau. The standing figure, which leans over the first one, is in the act of covering its head with the left hand with the veil of initiation; while it extends its right with the index and middle finger pointing to heaven. The position is precisely that of a Christian bishop giving his blessing, or the one in which Jesus is often represented while at the Last Supper. . . . The Egyptian Hierophant had a square head-dress which he had to wear always during his functions. . . . The perfect Tau, formed of the perpendicular (descending male ray), and a horizontal line (matter, female principle), and the mundane circle was an attribute of Isis, and it is but at death that the Egyptian cross was laid on the breast of the mummy." These square hats are worn unto this day by the Armenian priests. The claim that the cross is purely a Christian symbol introduced after our era, is strange indeed, when we find Ezekiel stamping the foreheads of the men of Judah, who feared the Lord (Ezekiel ix. 4), with the signum Thau, as it is translated in the
Vulgate. In the ancient Hebrew this sign was formed thus , but in the original Egyptian
hieroglyphics as a perfect Christian cross (Tat, the emblem of stability). In the Revelation, also, the "Alpha and Omega" (spirit and matter), the first and the last, stamps the name of his Father in the foreheads of the elect, (p. 323, Vol. II.) Moses, in Exodus xii. 22, orders his people to mark their door-
posts and lintels with blood, lest the "Lord God" should make a mistake and smite some of his chosen people, instead of the doomed Egyptians. And this mark is a tau! The identical Egyptian handled cross, with the half of which talisman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a sculptured ruin at Philoe.
Enough was said in the text about the Swastica and the Tau. Verily may the Cross be traced back into the very depths of the unfathomable Archaic Ages! Its Mystery deepens rather than clears, as we find
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it on the statues of Easter Island -- in old Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks as Tau and Swastica, in pre-Christian Scandinavia,
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everywhere! The author of the "Hebrew Egyptian Mystery" stands perplexed before the endless shadow it throws back into antiquity, and is unable to trace it to any particular nation or man. He shows the Targums handed down by the Hebrews, obscured by translation. In Joshua (viii. 29) read in Arabic, and in the Targum of Jonathan, it is said: "The king of Ai he crucified upon a tree." The Septuagint rendering is of suspension from a double word (Wordsworth on Joshua.) . . . The strangest expression of this kind is in Numbers xxv. 4, where, by Onkalos (?) it is read: "Crucify them before
the Lord (Jehovah) against the Sun." "The word here , to nail to, is rendered properly (Fuerst) by the Vulgate to crucify. The very construction of this sentence is mystic."
So it is, but the spirit of it has been ever misunderstood. "To crucify before (not against) the sun" is a phrase used of initiation. It comes from Egypt, and primarily from India. The enigma can be unriddled only by searching for its key in the Mysteries of Initiation. The initiated adept, who had successfully passed through all the trials, was attached, not nailed, but simply tied on a couch in the form of a tau
(in Egypt) of a Svastika without the four additional prolongations (thus: , not ) plunged in a deep sleep (the "Sleep of Siloam" it is called to this day among the Initiates in Asia Minor, in Syria, and even higher Egypt). He was allowed to remain in this state for three days and three nights, during which time his Spiritual Ego was said to confabulate with the "gods," descend into Hades, Amenti, or Patala, (according to the country), and do works of charity to the invisible beings, whether souls of men or Elemental Spirits; his body remaining all the time in a temple crypt or subterranean cave. In Egypt it was placed in the Sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and carried during the night of the approaching third day to the entrance of a gallery, where at a certain hour the beams of the rising Sun struck full on the face of the entranced candidate, who awoke to be initiated by Osiris, and Thoth the God of Wisdom.
Let the reader who doubts the statement consult the Hebrew originals before he denies. Let him turn to some most suggestive Egyptian bas reliefs. One especially from the temple of Philoe, represents a scene of initiation. Two Gods-Hierophants, one with the head of a hawk (the Sun), the other ibis-
headed (Mercury, Thoth, the god of Wisdom and secret learning, the assessor of Osiris-Sun), are standing over the body of a candidate just initiated. They are in the act of pouring on his head a double stream of water (the water of life and new birth), which stream is interlaced in the shape of a cross and full of small ansated crosses. This is allegorical of the awakening of the candidate
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(now an Initiate), when the beams of the morning sun (Osiris) strike the crown of his head (his entranced body being placed on its wooden tau so as to receive the rays). Then appeared the Hierophants-Initiators, and the sacramental words were pronounced, ostensibly, to the Sun-Osiris, addressed in reality to the Spirit Sun within, enlightening the newly-born man. Let the reader meditate on the connection of the Sun with the Cross in both its generative and spiritually regenerative capacities -- from the highest antiquity. Let him examine the tomb of Bait-Oxly, in the reign of Ramses II., where he will find the crosses in every shape and position. So again, on the throne of that sovereign, and finally on a fragment from the Hall of the ancestors of Totmes III., preserved in the National Library of Paris, which represents the adoration of Bakhan-Aleare.
In this extraordinary sculpture and painting one sees the disc of the Sun beaming upon an ansated cross placed upon a cross of which those of the Calvary were perfect copies. The ancient MSS. mention these as the "hard couches of those who were in (spiritual) travail, the act of giving birth to themselves." A quantity of such cruciform "couches," on which the candidate, thrown into a dead trance at the end of his supreme initiation, was placed and secured, were found in the underground halls of the Egyptian temples after their destruction. The worthy and holy Fathers of the Cyril and Theophilus types used them freely, believing they had been brought and concealed there by some new converts. Alone Origen, and after him Clemens Alexandrinus and other ex-initiates, knew better. But they preferred to keep silent.
Again, let the reader read the Hindu "fables," as the Orientalists call them, and remember the allegory of Visvakarma, the creative power, the great architect of the world, called in the Veda "the all-seeing god," who "sacrifices himself to himself" (the Spiritual Egos of mortals are his own essence, one with him, therefore). Remember that he is called Deva Vardhika "the builder of the gods" and that it is he who ties (the Sun) Surya, his son-in-law, on his lathe, in the exoteric allegory; on the Swastika, in esoteric tradition, as on earth he is the Hierophant Initiator, and cuts away a portion of his brightness. Visvakarma, remember again, is the Son of Yoga-Siddha, i.e., the holy power of Yoga, and the fabricator of the "fiery weapon," the magic Agneyastra. The narrative is given more fully elsewhere. The author of the Kabalistic work so often quoted from, asks: --
"The theoretical use of crucifixion must have been somehow connected with the personification of this symbol (the structure of the garden of Paradise symbolized by a crucified man). But how? And as showing what? The symbol was of the origin of measures, shadowing forth creative law or design. What practically, as regards humanity,
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could actual crucifixion betoken? Yet, that it was held as the effigy of some mysterious working of the same system, is shown from the very fact of the use. There seems to be deep below deep as to the mysterious workings of these number values -- (the symbolization of the connection of 113 : 355, with 20612 : 6561, by a crucified man). Not only are they shown to work in the Kosmos . . . . but by sympathy, they seem to work out conditions relating to an unseen and spiritual world, and the prophets seem to have held knowledge of the connecting link. . . . Reflection becomes more involved when it is considered that the power of expression of the law, exactly, by numbers, clearly defining a system,
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was not the accident of the language, but was its very essence, and of its primary organic construction; therefore, neither the language, nor the mathematical system attaching to it, could be of man's invention, unless both were founded upon a prior language, which afterwards became obsolete . . . " (p. 205).
The author proves these points by further elucidation, and reveals the secret meaning of more than one
dead-letter narrative, by showing that probably man was the primordial word -- "the very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever they were, to carry the idea by sound of a man. The essential of this word was 113 (the numerical value of that word) from the beginning, and carried with it the elements of the cosmical system displayed."
This is demonstrated by the Hindu Wittoba -- a form of Vishnu -- as said already. The figure of Wittoba, even to the nail-marks on the feet,* is that of Jesus crucified, in all its details save the Cross; and that MAN was meant is proved to us further by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on the TREE OF LIFE. This "tree" has now become exoterically, through its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture, and the ignorance of the early Christian schemers, the tree of death!
Thus, one of the seven esoteric meanings implied in this mystery of Crucifixion by the mystic inventors of the system -- the original elaboration and adoption of which dates back to the very establishment of the MYSTERIES -- is discovered in the geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The Hebrews, whose prophet Moses was so learned in the esoteric Wisdom of Egypt, and who adopted their numerical system from the Phoenicians, and later from the Gentiles, from whom they borrowed most of their Kabalistic Mysticism, adapted, most ingeniously, the Cosmic and anthropological symbols of the "heathen" nations to their peculiar secret records. If Christian
* See Moor's Hindu Pantheon, where Wittoba's left foot bears the mark of the
nail -- on the figure of his idol.
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sacerdotalism has lost the key of it to-day, the early compilers of the Christian Mysteries were well versed in Esoteric philosophy and the Hebrew occult metrology, and used it dexterously. Thus they took the word aish (one of the Hebrew word forms for MAN) and used it in conjunction with that of Shanah "lunar year," so mystically connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed "father" of Jesus, and embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula.
The original idea of "Man Crucified" in Space belongs certainly to the ancient Hindus, and Muir shows it in his "Hindu Pantheon" in the engraving that represents Wittoba. Plato adopted it in his decussated Cross in Space, the , "the Second God who impressed himself on the Universe in the
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form of the Cross"; Krishna is likewise shown "crucified." (See Dr. Lundy's Monumental Christianity, fig. 72.) Again it is repeated in the Old Testament in the queer injunction to crucify men before the Lord, the Sun -- which is no prophecy at all, but has a direct phallic significance. In § II. of that same most suggestive work on the Kabalistic meanings -- "The Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery," we read again: --
"In symbol, the nails of the cross have for the shape of the heads thereof a solid pyramid, and a tapering square obeliscal shaft, or phallic emblem, for the nail. Taking the position of the three nails in the Man's extremities and on the cross, they form or mark a triangle in shape, one nail being at each corner of the triangle. The wounds or stigmata in the extremities are necessarily four designative of the square. . . . The three nails with the three wounds are in number 6, which denotes the 6 faces of the cube unfolded (which make the cross or man-form, or 7, counting three horizontal and four vertical bars) on which the man is placed; and this in turn points to the circular measure transferred on to the edges of the cube. The one wound of the feet separates into two when the feet are separated, making three together for all, and four when separated, or 7 in all -- another most holy (and with the Jews) feminine base number."
Thus, while the phallic or sexual meaning of the "Crucifixion Nails" is proven by the geometrical and numerical reading, its mystical meaning is indicated by the short remarks upon it, as given above, in its connection with, and bearing upon, Prometheus. He is another victim, for he is crucified on the Cross of Love, on the rock of human passions, a sacrifice to his devotion to the cause of the spiritual element in Humanity.
Now, the primordial system, the double glyph that underlies the idea of the Cross, is not "of human invention," for Cosmic ideation and the Spiritual representation of the divine Ego-man are at its basis. Later, it expanded in the beautiful idea adopted by and represented in the Mysteries, that of regenerated man, the mortal, who, by crucifying the man of flesh and his passions on the
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Procrustean bed of torture, became reborn as an Immortal. Leaving the body, the animal-man, behind him, tied on the Cross of Initiation like an empty chrysalis, the Ego Soul became as free as a butterfly. Still later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the cross became in Cosmogony and Anthropology no higher than a phallic symbol.
With the Esotericists, from the remotest times the Universal Soul or anima mundi, the material reflection of the Immaterial Ideal, was the Source of Life of all beings and of the life principle of the three kingdoms; and it was Septenary with the Hermetic philosophers, as with all ancients. For it is represented as a Sevenfold cross, whose branches are respectively, light, heat, electricity, terrestrial magnetism, astral radiation, motion, and Intelligence, or what some call self-consciousness.
We have said it elsewhere. Long before the cross or its sign were adopted as symbols of Christianity, the sign of the cross was used as a sign of recognition among adepts and neophytes, the latter being called Chrests (from Chrestos, man of tribulation and sorrow). Says E. Levi: "The sign of the cross
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adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is Kabalistic, and represents the opposition and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the Occult verse of the Paternoster that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least two very different formulas to express its meaning -- one reserved for priests-initiates, the other given to neophites and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong: and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast -- the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder -- justice: to the right shoulder -- and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut et Geburah et Chassed per Aeonas' -- a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." (Dogma et Ritual, etc., Vol. II., p. 88.)
The "militant and official Church" did more: having helped herself to what had never belonged to her, she took only that which the "profane" had, the Kabalistic meaning of the male and female Sephiroth. She never lost the inner and higher meaning since she never had it -- E. Levi's pandering to Rome, notwithstanding. The sign of the cross adopted by the Latin Church was phallic from the beginning, while that of the Greeks was the cross of the neophytes, the CHREST.
We are reminded in King's "Gnostics" that the Greek language has but one word for vowel and voice; and this has led the uninitiated to many erroneous interpretations. On the simple knowledge, however, of that well-known fact a comparison may be attempted, and a flood of light thrown upon several mystic meanings. Thus the words, so often used in the Upanishads and the Puranas, "Sound" and "Speech," may be collated with the Gnostic "Vowels" and the "Voices" of the Thunders and Angels in "Revelation." The same will be found in Pistis Sophia, and other ancient Fragments and MSS. This was remarked even by the matter-of-fact author of "The Gnostics and their Remains."
Through Hippolytus, an early Church Father, we learn what Marcus -- a Pythagorean rather than a Christian Gnostic, and a Kabalist most certainly -- had received in mystic revelation. It is said that "Marcus had it revealed unto him that 'the seven heavens'* . . . . sounded each one vowel, which, all combined together, formed a complete doxology"; in clearer words: "the Sound whereof being carried down (from these seven heavens) to earth, became the creator and parent of all things that be on earth." (See "Hippolytus," vi., 48, and King's Gnostics, p. 200.) Translated from the Occult phraseology into still plainer language this would read: "The Sevenfold LOGOS having differentiated into seven Logoi, or creative potencies (vowels) these (the second logos, or "Sound") created all on Earth.
Assuredly one who is acquainted with Gnostic literature can hardly help seeing in St. John's Apocalypse, a work of the same school of thought. For we find John saying (chap. x. 3, 4), "Seven thunders uttered their voices . . . and I was about to write . . . (but) I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, 'Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.' " The same injunction is given to Marcus, the same to all other semi and full Initiates. Yet the sameness of equivalent expressions used, and of the underlying ideas, always betrays a portion of the mysteries. We must always seek for more than one meaning in every mystery allegorically revealed, especially in those in which the number seven and its multiplication seven by seven, or forty-nine, appear. Now when the Rabbi Jesus is requested (in Pistis
Sophia) by his disciples to reveal to them, "the mysteries of the Light of thy (his) Father" (i.e., of the higher SELF enlightened by Initiation and Divine knowledge), Jesus answers: "Do ye seek after these mysteries? No mystery is more excellent than they which shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights, unto the place of Truth and Goodness, unto the place where there is neither male nor female, neither form in that place but Light, everlasting, not to be uttered. 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 their numbers thereof; and no name is more excellent than all these vowels." "The Seven Fathers and the Forty-nine Sons blaze in DARKNESS, but they are the LIFE and LIGHT and the continuation thereof through the Great Age" -- says the Commentary speaking of the "Fires."
Now it becomes evident that, in every esoteric interpretation of exoteric beliefs expressed in allegorical forms, there was the same underlying idea -- the basic number seven, the compound of
three and four, preceded by the divine THREE ( ) making the perfect number ten.
Also, these numbers applied equally to divisions of time, to cosmography metaphysical and physical, as well as to man and everything else in visible nature. Thus these Seven vowels with their forty-nine powers are identical with the three and the Seven Fires of the Hindus and their forty-nine fires; identical with the numerical mysteries of the Persian Simorgh; identical with those of the Jewish Kabalists. The latter, dwarfing the numbers (their mode of blinds), made the duration of each successive renewal (what we call in esoteric parlance Round) of the seven renewals of the globe only of 7,000 years, instead of, as is more likely, 7,000,000,000, and assigned to the total duration of the universe 49,000 years only. (Compare § "Chronology of the Brahmins.")
Now, the Secret Doctrine furnishes a key which reveals to us on indisputable grounds of comparative analogy that Garuda, the allegorical and monstrous half-man and half-bird, -- the Vahan or vehicle on which Vishnu (who is Kala, "time") is shown to ride -- is the origin of all other such allegories. He is the Indian phoenix, the emblem of cyclic and periodical time, the "man-lion" Singha, of whose representations the so-called "gnostic gems" are so full.* "Over the seven rays of the lion's crown, and corresponding to their points, stand, in many cases, the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet [Gk char], testifying to the Seven Heavens." This is the Solar lion and the emblem of the Solar cycle, as
*As confessed by King, the great authority on Gnostic antiquities, these gnostic gems are not the work of the Gnostics, but belong to pre-christian periods, and are the work of magicians (p. 241).
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Garuda* is that of the great cycle, the "Maha-Kalpa" co-eternal with Vishnu, and also, of course, the
emblem of the Sun, and Solar cycle. This is shown by the details of the allegory. At his birth, Garuda is mistaken for Agni, the God of Fire, on account of his (Garuda's) "dazzling splendour," and called thereupon Gaganeswara, "lord of the sky." Again, his being represented as Osiris, and by many heads of allegorical monsters on the Abraxas (gnostic) gems, with the head and beak of an eagle or a hawk (solar birds), denotes Garuda's solar and cyclic character. His Son is Jatabu, the cycle of 60,000 years. As well remarked by C. W. King: -- "Whatever the primary meaning (of the gem with the solar lion and vowels) it was probably imported in its present shape from INDIA, that true fountain head of gnostic iconography" (Gnostics, p. 218).
The mysteries of the seven gnostic vowels, uttered by the thunders of St. John, can be unriddled only by the primeval and original Occultism of Aryavarta, brought into India by the primeval Brahmins, who had been initiated in Central Asia. And this is the Occultism we study and try to explain, as much as is possible in these pages. Our doctrine of seven Races and Seven Rounds of life and evolution around our terrestrial chain of spheres, may be found even in Revelation. ** When the seven "thunders," or "sounds," or "vowels" -- one meaning out of the seven for each such vowel relating directly to our own Earth and its seven Root-Races in each Round -- "had uttered their voices" -- but forbidden the Seer to write them, and made him "seal up those things" -- what did the Angel "standing upon the sea and upon the earth" do? He lifted his hand to heaven "and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . . that there should be time no longer." "But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel when he shall begin to sound, the Mystery of God (of the Cycle) should be finished" (x. 7), which means, in theosophic phraseology, that when the Seventh Round is completed, then Time will cease. "There shall be time no longer" very naturally, since pralaya shall set in and there will remain no one on earth to keep a division of time, during that periodical dissolution and arrest of conscious life.
Dr. Kenealy and others believed this doctrine of the Rabbins (their calculations of cyclic seven and forty-nine) to have been brought by
* The lack of intuition in Orientalists and antiquarians past and present, is remarkable. Thus, Wilson, the translator of Vishnu Purana, declares in his Preface that in the Garuda Purana he found "no account of the birth of Garuda." Considering that an account of "Creation" in general is given therein, and that Garuda is co-eternal with Vishnu, the Maha Kalpa, or Great Life-CycIe, beginning with and ending with the manifesting Vishnu, what other account of Garuda's birth could be expected !
** Vide Revelation xvii., verses 2 and 10; and Leviticus xxiii., verses 15 to 18; the first passage speaking of the "Seven Kings," of whom five have gone; and the second about the "Seven Sabbaths," etc.
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them from Chaldea. This is more than likely. But the Babylonians, who had all those cycles and taught them only at their great initiatory mysteries of astrological magic, got their wisdom and
learning from India. It is not difficult, therefore, to recognize in them our own esoteric doctrine. In their secret computations, the Japanese have the same figures in their cycles. As to the Brahmins, their Puranas and Upanishads are a good proof of it. The latter have passed entirely into Gnostic literature; and a Brahmin needs only to read Pistis Sophia* to recognize his forefathers' property, even to the phraseology and similes used. Compare: in Pistis Sophia the disciple says to Jesus: "Rabbi, reveal unto us the Mysteries of the Light (i.e., the "Fire of Knowledge or Enlightenment") . . . forasmuch as we have heard thee saying that there is another baptism of smoke, and another baptism of the Spirit of Holy Light," i.e., the Spirit of FIRE. "I baptize you with water, but . . . . he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire," says John of Jesus (Matt. iii. 2); meaning this esoterically. The real significance of this statement is very profound. It means that he, John, a non-initiated ascetic, can impart to his disciples no greater wisdom than the mysteries connected with the plane of matter (water being a symbol of it). His gnosis was that of exoteric and ritualistic dogma, of dead-letter orthodoxy; ** while the wisdom which Jesus, an Initiate of the higher mysteries, would reveal to them, was of a higher character, for it was the "FIRE" Wisdom of the true gnosis or the real spiritual enlightment. One was FIRE, the other the SMOKE. For Moses, the fire on Mount Sinai, and the spiritual wisdom imparted; for the multitudes of the "people" below, for the profane, Mount Sinai in (through) smoke, i.e., the exoteric husks of orthodox or sectarian ritualism.
Now, having the above in view, read the dialogue between the sages Narada and Davamata in the Anugita, the antiquity and importance of which MS. (an episode from the Mahabharata) one can learn in the "Sacred Books of the East," edited by Prof. Max Muller.** Narada is discussing upon the breaths or the "life-winds," as they are called in
*Pistis Sophia is an extremely important document, a genuine Evangel of the Gnostics, ascribed at random to Valentinus, but much more probably a pre-Christian work in its original. It was discovered in a Coptic MS. by Schwartze, in the British Museum, quite accidentally, and translated by him into Latin; after which text and (Latin) version were published by Petermann in the year 1853. In the text itself the authorship of this Book is ascribed to Philip the Apostle, whom Jesus bids to sit down and write the revelation. It is genuine and ought to be as canonical as any other gospel. Unfortunately it remains to this day untranslated.
** In the Cycle of Initiation, which was very long, water represented the first and lower steps toward purification, while trials connected with fire came last. Water could regenerate the body of matter; FIRE alone, that of the inner Spiritual man.
*** See Introduction by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 567 TRUTH BETWEEN TWO CONTRASTS.
the clumsy translations of such words as Prana, Apana, etc., whose full esoteric meaning and application to individual functions can hardly be rendered in English. He says of this Science that "it is the teaching of the Veda that the fire verily is all the deities, and knowledge of it arises among
Brahmans, being accompanied by intelligence." By "fire," says the Commentator, he means the SELF. By "intelligence," the Occultist says, Narada means neither "discussion" nor "argumentation," as Aruna Misra believes, but "intelligence" truly, or the adaptation of the fire of Wisdom to Exoteric Ritualism for the profane. This is the chief concern of the Brahmans (who were the first to set the example to other nations who thus anthropomorphized and carnalized the grandest metaphysical truths). Narada makes it plain and is made to say: "The smoke of that fire, which is of excellent glory, appears in the shape of darkness" (verily so!); "its ashes (are) passion; and goodness is that in connection with it in which the offering is thrown": i.e., that faculty in the disciple which apprehends the subtle truth (the flame) which escapes heavenward, while the objective sacrifice remains as a proof and evidence of piety only to the profane. For what can Narada mean in teaching that "those who understand the sacrifice understand the Samana and the Vyana as the principal (offering)"; and "the Prana and Apana, but portions of the offering . . . and between them is the fire . . . . that is the excellent seat of the Udana as understood by Brahmanas. As to that which is distinct from these pairs, hear me speak about that. Day and night are a pair, between them is the fire. . . That which exists and that which does not exist are a pair, between them is the fire, etc.," and after every such contrast Narada adds "That is the excellent seat of the Udana as understood by Brahmanas."
Now many people do not know the full meaning of such terms as Samana and Vyana, Prana and Apana, explained as being "life-winds" (we say "principles and their respective faculties and senses"), being offered up to Udana, the soi-disant principal "life wind," (?) said to act at all the joints. Therefore the reader, who is ignorant that the word "fire" means in these allegories both the "Self" and the higher divine knowledge, will understand nothing in this; and will therefore entirely miss the point of our argument, as its translators and even its editor the great Oxford Sanskritist, Max Muller, has missed the true meaning of Narada's words. Exoterically, all this enumeration of "life winds" means, of course, approximately, that which is surmised in the foot-notes; namely, "The sense appears to be this . . . . worldly life is due to the operations of the life-winds which are attached to the SELF, and lead to its manifestations as individual souls (?). Of these the Samana and Vyana are controlled and held under check by
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the Prana and Apana. . . . The latter two are held in check and controlled by the Udana, which thus controls all. And the control of this, which is the control of all five . . . . leads to the Supreme Self" (p. 259, Anugita, "Sacred Books of the East," Vol. VIII.)
The above is given as an explanation of the text, which records the words of the Brahmana, who narrates how he reached the ultimate Wisdom of Yogism, and had reached all knowledge in this wise. Saying that he had "perceived by means of the SELF the seat abiding in the SELF," where dwells the Brahman free from all; and explaining that that indestructible principle was entirely beyond the perception of senses (i.e., of the five "life-winds"), he adds that "in the midst of an these (life-winds) which move about in the body and swallow up one another, blazes the Vaisvanara fire sevenfold." This "Fire," according to Nilakantha's Commentary, is identical with the "I," the SELF, which is the goal of the ascetic (Vaisvanara being a word often used for the Self). Then the Brahmana goes on to enumerate that which is meant by the word "Sevenfold," and says, "The nose (or smell), the tongue
(taste), the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth, the mind, and the understanding, these are the seven tongues of the blaze of Vaisvanara,*. . . . . those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me,**. . . . . these are the seven great officiating priests."
These seven priests are accepted by Arjuna Misra in the sense of meaning "the soul distinguished as so many (souls, or principles) with reference to these several powers"; and, finally, the translator seems to accept the explanation, and reluctantly admits that "they may mean" this; though he himself takes the sense to mean "the powers of hearing, etc. (the physical senses, in short) which are presided over by the several deities." ( Vide loc. cit., p. 259, f.n. 6.)
But whatever it may mean, whether in scientific or orthodox interpretations, this passage on page 259 explains Narada's statements on page 276, and shows them referring to exoteric and esoteric methods and contrasting them. Thus the Samana and the Vyana, though subject to the Prana and the Apana, and all the four to Udana in the matter of acquiring the Pranayama (of the Hatha-Yogi, chiefly, or the "lower" form of the Yoga) are yet referred to as the principal offering, for, as rightly argued by the commentator, their "operations are more practically important for vitality"; i.e., they are the grossest, and are offered in the sacrifice, to disappear, so to speak, in the quality of darkness of that fire or its SMOKE (mere exoteric ritualistic form). But
*In the astronomical and cosmical key, Vaisvanara is Agni, son of the Sun, or Viswanaras, but in the psycho-metaphysical symbolism it is the SELF, in the sense of non-separateness, i.e., both divine and human.
**Here the speaker personifies the said divine SELF.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 569 THE DIVINE SELF'S WISDOM.
Prana and Apana, though shown as subordinate (because less gross or more purified), have the FIRE between them: the Self and the secret knowledge possessed by that Self. So for the good and evil, and for "that which exists and that which does not exist"; all these "pairs"* have fire between them, i.e., esoteric knowledge, the Wisdom of the divine SELF. Let those who are satisfied with the Smoke of the FIRE remain wherein they are, that is to say within the Egyptian darkness of theological fictions and dead-letter interpretations.
The above is written only for the Western students of Occultism and Theosophy. The writer presumes to explain these things neither to the Hindus, who have their own Gurus; nor to the Orientalists, who think they know more than all the Gurus and Rishis, past and present, put together. These rather lengthy quotations and examples cited are necessary, if even to point out to the student the works he has to study so as to derive benefit and learning from comparison. Let him read Pistis Sophia in the light of the Bhagavatgita, the Anugita and others; and then the statement made by Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel will become clear, and the dead letter blinds disappear at once. Read this and compare with the explanation from the Hindu scriptures just given. . . . "And no name is more excellent than all
these (seven) vowels. A name wherein be contained all names, all Lights, and all (the fortynine) powers, knowing it, if a man quits this body of matter** no Smoke (i.e., no theological delusion),*** no darkness, nor Ruler of the Sphere (no personal genius or planetary spirit called God), or of Fate (karma) shall
* Compare with these "pairs of opposites," in the Anugita , the "pairs" of AEons, in the elaborate system of Valentinus, the most learned and profound master of Gnosis. As the "pairs of opposites," male and female, are all derived from Akasa (undeveloped and developed, differentiated and undifferentiated, or SELF or Prajapati), so are the Valentinian "pairs" of male and female AEons shown to emanate from Bythos, the pre-existing eternal Depth, and in their secondary emanation from Ampsiu-Ouraan (or sempiternal Depth and Silence), the second Logos. In the esoteric emanation there are seven chief "pairs of opposites"; and so also in the Valentinian system there were fourteen, or twice seven. Epiphanius, copying incorrectly, "copied one pair twice over," Mr. C. W. King thinks, "and thus adds one pair to the proper fifteen." ("The Gnostics," etc., pp. 263-4.) Here King falls into the opposite error: the pairs of AEons are not 15 (a blind) but 14, as the first AEon is that from which others emanate, Depth and Silence being the first and only emanation from Bythos. As Hippolytus shows: "The AEons of Valentinus are confessedly the Six Radicals of Simon (Magus)," with the seventh, Fire, at their head. And these are: Mind, Intelligence, Voice, Name, Reason and Thought subordinate to FIRE, the higher self, or precisely the "Seven Winds" or the "Seven Priests" of Anugita.
** Not necessarily at death only, but during Samadhi or mystic trance.
*** All the words and sentences between parenthetical marks, are the writer's. This is translated directly from the Latin MS. of the British Museum. King's translation in the Gnostics conforms too much to the gnosticism as explained by the Church-Fathers.
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be able to hold back the soul that knoweth that name. . . If he shall utter that (Name) unto the fire, the darkness shall flee away. . . And if he shall utter that name unto . . . all their Powers, nay, even unto Barbelo,* the Invisible God, and the triple-powered Gods, so soon as he shall have uttered that name in those places, they shall all be shaken and thrown one upon the other, so that they shall be ready to melt, perish and disappear, and shall cry aloud, 'O, Light of all Lights that art in the Boundless Light, remember us also and purify us!' "
It is easy to see who this Light and Name are: the light of Initiation and the name of the "Fire-Self," which is no name, no action, but a Spiritual, ever-living Power, higher even than the "Invisible God," as this Power is ITSELF.
But if the able and learned author of the "Gnostics and their Remains" has not sufficiently allowed for
the Spirit of allegory and mysticism in the fragments translated and quoted by him, in the above named work, from Pistis Sophia -- other Orientalists have done far worse. Having neither his intuitional perception of the Indian origin of the Gnostic Wisdom still more than of their "gems," most of them, beginning with Wilson and ending with the dogmatic Weber, have made most extraordinary blunders with regard to almost every symbol. Sir M. Monier Williams and others show a very decided contempt for the "Esoteric Buddhists" as theosophists are now called; yet no Student of Occult philosophy has ever mistaken a cycle for a living personage and vice versa, as was very often the case with our learned Orientalists. An instance or two may illustrate the statement more graphically. Let us choose the best known.
In the Ramayana, Garuda is called "the maternal uncle of Sagara's 60,000 sons"; and Ansumat, Sagara's grandson, "the nephew of the 60,000 uncles" reduced to ashes by the look of Kapila, "the Purushottama" (or infinite Spirit), who caused Sagara's horse for the Aswamedha sacrifice to disappear. Again, Garuda's son** -- Garuda being himself the Maha-Kalpa or great cycle -- Jatayu, the king of the feathered tribe, when on the point of being slain by Ravana who carries off Sita -- says, speaking of himself:
"It is 60,000 years O King, that I am born," after which turning his back on the Sun -- he dies.
Jatayu is, of course, the cycle of 60,000 years within the great cycle of GARUDA; hence he is represented as his son, or nephew, ad libitum,
*Barbelo is one of the three "Invisible Gods," and, as C. W. King believes, includes "the Divine Mother of the Saviour," or rather Sophia Achamoth ( Vide cap. 359).
** In other Puranas Jatayu is the son of Aruna, Garuda's brother, both the Sons of Kasyapa. But all this is external allegory.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 571 THE ANTIQUITY OF THE KAPILAS.
since the whole meaning rests in his being placed on the line of Garuda's descendants. Then, again, there is Diti -- the Mother of the Maruts -- whose descendants and progeny belonged to the posterity of Hiranyaksha, "whose number was 77 crores (or 770 millions) of men." (See Padma Purana.) All such narratives are pronounced meaningless fictions and absurdities. But -- Truth is the daughter of Time, verily; and time will show.
Meanwhile, what could be easier than an attempt, at least, to verify Puranic chronology? There are many Kapilas; but the Kapila who slew King Sagara's progeny -- 60,000 men strong -- was undeniably Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy, since it is so stated in the Puranas; although one of them flatly denies the imputation without explaining its esoteric meaning. It is the Bhagavata Purana (IX. viii., 12 and 13), which says that "the report that the sons of the King were
reduced to ashes by the mere glance of the sage is not true." "For," as it argues, "how can the quality of darkness, the product of anger, exist in a sage whose goodness was the essence that purified the world -- the earth's dust, as it were, attributed to Heavens! How should mental perturbation distract that sage, identified with the Supreme Spirit, and who has steered here (on earth) that solid vessel of the Sankhya (philosophy), with the help of which he who desires to obtain liberation crosses the dreaded ocean of existence, that path to death?"
The Purana is in duty bound to speak as it does. It has a dogma to promulgate and a policy to carry out -- that of great secrecy with regard to mystical divine truths divulged for countless ages only at initiation. It is not in the Puranas, therefore, that we have to look for an explanation of the mystery connected with various transcendental states of being. That the story is an allegory is seen upon its very face: the 60,000 Sons, brutal, vicious, and impious, are the personification of the human passions that a "mere glance of the sage" -- the SELF who represents the highest state of purity that can be reached on earthreduces to ashes. But it has also other significations -- cyclic and chronological meanings, -- a method of marking the periods when certain sages flourished, found also in other Puranas.
Now it is as well ascertained as any tradition can be, that it was at Hardwar (or Gangadwara, the "door or gate of the Ganges") at the foot of the Himalayas, that Kapila sat in meditation for a number of years. Not far from the Sewalik range, the "pass of Hardwar" is called to this day "Kapila's Pass"; and the place, "Kapilasthen," by the ascetics. It is there that Ganga (Ganges) emerging from its mountainous gorge, begins its course over the sultry plains of India. And it is as clearly ascertained by geological survey that the tradition which claims that the
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ocean ages ago washed the base of the Himalayas -- is not entirely without foundation, for there are traces left of this.
The Sankhya philosophy may have been brought down and taught by the first, and written out by the last Kapila.
Now Sagara is the name of the Ocean, and even of the Bay of Bengal, at the mouth of the Ganges, to this day in India ( Vide Wilson's Vishnu Purana, Vol. III. p. 309). Have geologists ever calculated the number of millenniums it has taken the sea to recede to where it is now, from Hardwar, 1,024 feet above the level of the sea at present? If they did, those Orientalists who show Kapila flourishing from the 1st to the 9th cent. A.D., might change their opinions, if only for one of two very good reasons: the true number of years elapsed since Kapila's day is in the Puranas unmistakably, though the translators fail to see it. And secondly -- the Kapila of the Satya, and the Kapila of the Kali-Yugas may be one and the same INDIVIDUALITY, without being the same PERSONALITY.
Kapila, besides being the name of a personage, of the once living Sage and the author of Sankhya philosophy, is also the generic name of the Kumaras, the celestial ascetics and virgins; therefore the
very fact of Bhagavata Purana calling that Kapila -- which it showed just before as a portion of Vishnu -- the author of Sankhya philosophy, ought to have warned the reader of a blind containing an esoteric meaning. Whether the Son of Vitatha, as Harivansa shows him to be, or of anyone else, the author of Sankhya cannot be the same as the Sage of the SatyaYuga -- at the very beginning of the Manvantara, when Vishnu is shown in the form of Kapila, "imparting to all creatures true Wisdom"; for this relates to that primordial period when "the Sons of God" taught to the just created men the arts and sciences, which have been cultivated and preserved since then in the sanctuaries by the Initiates. There are several well-known Kapilas in the Puranas. First the primeval sage, then Kapila, one of the three "Secret" Kumaras; and Kapila, son of Kasyapa and Kadru -- the "many-headed Serpent," (See Vayu Purana placing him on the list of the forty renowned sons of Kasyapa), besides Kapila, the great sage and philosopher of the Kali Yuga. Being an Initiate, "a Serpent of Wisdom," a Naga, the latter was purposely blended with the Kapilas of the former ages.
THE early Gnostics claimed that their Science, the GNOSIS, rested on a square, the angles of which represented respectively Sige (Silence), Bythos (depth), Nous (Spiritual Soul or Mind), and Aletheia (Truth).
It is they who were the first to introduce and reveal to the world that which had remained concealed for ages: namely, the Tau, in the shape of a Procrustean bed, and Christos as incarnating in Chrestos, he who became for certain purposes a willing candidate for a series of tortures, mental and physical.
For them the whole of the Universe, metaphysical and material, was contained within, and could be expressed and described by the digits of Number 10, the Pythagorean decade.
This Decade representing the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and the unknown Depths of the Spiritual Soul, or anima mundi, presented two sides or aspects to the student. It could be, and was at first so used and applied to the Macrocosm, after which it descended to the Microcosm, or Man. There was, then, the purely intellectual and metaphysical, or the "inner Science," and the as purely materialistic or "surface science," both of which could be expounded by and contained in the Decade. It could be studied, in short, from the Universals of Plato, and the inductive method of Aristotle. The former started from a divine comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the digits of the decade appeared, but to be finally re-absorbed, lost in the infinite Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the Decade could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which differentiates, its study being limited to the plane surface; to the Cross, or the Seven which proceeds from the ten -- or the perfect number, on Earth as in heaven.
This dual system was brought, together with the Decade, by Pythagoras from India. That it was that of the Brachmans and Iranians, as they are called by the ancient Greek philosophers, is warranted to us by the whole range of Sanskrit literature, such as the Puranas and the laws of Manu. In these "Laws" or "Ordinances of Manu," it is said that Brahma first creates "the ten lords of Being," the ten Prajapati or creative Forces; which ten produce "seven" other Manus, or, rather, as some MSS. have it, Munin, instead of Manun = "devotees," or holy Beings, which are the Seven Angels of the Presence in the
Western religion. This mysterious number Seven, born from the upper triangle , the latter itself born from the apex thereof, or the Silent Depths of the unknown universal soul (Sige and Bythos), is the sevenfold Saptaparna plant, born and manifested on the surface of the soil of mystery, from the threefold root buried deep under that impenetrable soil. This idea is fully elaborated in Vol. I. § "Primordial Substance and Divine Thought," which the reader has to notice carefully, if he would grasp the metaphysical idea involved in the above symbol. In man as in nature, it is, according to the cis-Himalayan esoteric philosophy (which is that of the original Manu Cosmogony), the septenary division that is intended by Nature herself. The seventh principle (purusha ) alone is the divine SELF, strictly speaking; for, as said in Manu, "He (Brahma) having pervaded the subtile parts of those six of unmeasured brightness," created or called them forth to "Self"-consciousness or the consciousness of that One SELF (V. 16, ch. i. Manu). Of these six, five elements (or principles, or Tattva, as Medhatithi, the commentator thinks) "are called the atomic destructible elements" (v. 27); they are described in the above-named section.
We have now to speak of the Mystery language, that of the prehistoric races. It is not a phonetic, but a purely pictorial and symbolical tongue. It is known at present in its fulness to the very few, having become with the masses for more than 5,000 years an absolutely dead language. Yet most of the learned Gnostics, Greeks and Jews, knew it, and used it, though very differently. A few instances may be given.
On the plane above, the Number is no Number but a nought -- a CIRCLE. On the plane below, it becomes one -- which is an odd number. Each letter of the ancient alphabets having had its philosophical meaning and raison d'etre, the number I signified with the Alexandrian Initiates a body erect, a living standing man, he being the only animal that has this privilege. And, by adding to the I a head, it was transformed into a P, a symbol of paternity, of the creative potency; while R signified a "moving man," one on his way. Hence PATER ZEUS had nothing sexual or phallic either in its sound or form of letters; nor had [[pater Deus ]] (vide Ragon). If we turn now to the Hebrew Alphabet, we
shall find that while I or aleph, , has a bull or an Ox for its symbol, 10, the perfect number, or One
of the Kabala is a Yodh (y, i, or j); and means, as the first letter of Jehovah, the procreative organ, et seq.
The odd numbers are divine, the even numbers are terrestrial, devilish, and unlucky. The Pythagoreans hated the binary. With them it was the origin of differentiation, hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the beginning of evil. In the Valentinian theogony, Bythos and Sige (Depth, Chaos, matter born in Silence) are the primordial binary.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 575 THE THREE SCIENCES.
With the early Pythagoreans, however, the duad was that imperfect state into which the first manifested being fell when it got detached from the Monad. It was the point from which the two roads -
- the Good and the Evil -- bifurcated. All that which was double-faced or false was called by them "binary." ONE was alone Good, and Harmony, because no disharmony can proceed from one alone.
Hence the Latin word Solus in relation to one and only God, the Unknown of Paul. Solus, however, very soon became Sol -- the Sun.
The ternary is thus the first of the odd numbers, as the triangle is the first of the geometrical figures. This number is truly the number of mystery par excellence. To study it on the exoteric lines one has to read Ragon's Cours Interpretatif des Initiations; on the esoteric -- the Hindu symbolism of numerals; as the combinations which were applied to it are numberless. It is on the occult properties of the three equal lines or sides of the Triangle that Ragon based his studies and founded the famous masonic society of the Trinosophists (those who study three sciences; an improvement upon the ordinary three masonic degrees, given to those who study nothing except eating and drinking at the meetings of their lodges). "The first line of the triangle offered to the apprentice for study," writes the founder, -- "is the mineral kingdom, symbolized by Tubalc . . . (Tubal-cain). The second side on which the 'companion' has to meditate, is the vegetable kingdom, symbolized by Schibb (Schibboleth). In this kingdom begins the generation of the bodies. This is why the letter G is presented radiant before the eyes of the adept (? !). The third side is left to the master mason, who has to complete his education by the study of the animal kingdom. It is symbolized by Maoben (Sun of putrefaction)" etc., etc.
The first solid figure is the Quaternary, symbol of immortality. It is the pyramid: for the pyramid stands on a triangular, square, or polygonal base, and terminates with a point at the top, thus yielding the triad and the quaternary or the 3 and 4. It is the Pythagoreans who taught the connection and relation between the gods and the numbers -- in a Science called arithmomancy. The Soul is a number, they said, which moves of itself and contains the number 4; and spiritual and physical man is number 3, as the ternary represented for them not only the surface but also the principle of the formation of the physical body. Thus animals were ternaries only, man alone being a septenary, when virtuous; a quinary when bad, for: --
Number 5 was composed of a binary and a ternary, which binary threw everything in the perfect form into disorder and confusion. The
* The reason for it is simple, and was given in "Isis Unveiled. " In geometry, one line fails to represent a perfect body or figure, nor can two lines constitute a demonstratively perfect figure. The triangle alone is the first perfect figure.
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perfect man, they said, was a quaternary and a ternary, or four material and three immaterial elements; which three spirits or elements we likewise find in 5, when it represents the microcosm. The latter is a compound of a binary directly relating to gross matter, and of three Spirits:
"since 5 is the ingenious union of two Greek accents placed over vowels which have or have not to be aspirated. The first sign is called 'Strong Spirit' or superior Spirit, the spirit of God aspired
(spiratus) and breathed by man. The second sign the lower, is the Spirit of Love, representing the secondary Spirit; the third embraces the whole man. It is the universal Quintessence, the vital fluid or Life." (Ragon.)
The more mystic meaning of 5 is given in an excellent article by Mr. Subba Row, in "Five Years of Theosophy" (pp. 110, et seq.) -- "The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac," in which he gives some rules that may help the inquirer to ferret out "the deep significance of ancient Sanskrit nomenclature in the old Aryan myths and allegories." Meanwhile, let us see what has been hitherto stated about the constellation Capricornus in theosophical publications, and what is known of it generally. Every one
knows that is the tenth sign of the Zodiac into which the Sun enters at the winter solstice, about December 21st. But very few are those who know -- even in India, unless they are initiated -- the real mystic connection which seems to exist, as we are told, between the names Makara and Kumara. The first means some amphibious animal called flippantly 'crocodile,' as some Orientalists think, and the second is the title of the great patrons of Yogins (See "Saiva Puranas,") the Sons of, and even one with, Rudra (Siva); a Kumara himself. It is through their connection with Man that the Kumaras are likewise connected with the Zodiac. Let us try to find out what the word Makara means.
The word Makara, says the author of "The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac," "contains within itself the clue to its correct interpretation. The letter Ma is equivalent to No. 5, and Kara means hand. Now in Sanskrit Thribhujam means a triangle, bhujam or Karam (both synonyms) being understood to mean a side. So Makaram or Panchakaram means a Pentagon" -- the five-pointed star or pentagon representing the five limbs of man.* Under the old system, we are told, Makara was the eighth instead of the tenth sign.** It is "intended to represent the faces of the Universe, and indicates that the Universe is bounded by Pentagons, " as the Sanskrit writers "speak also of
* What is the meaning and the reason of this figure? Because, Manas is the fifth principle, and because the pentagon is the symbol of Man -- not only of the five-limbed, but rather of the thinking, conscious MAN.
** The reason for it becomes apparent when Egyptian symbology is studied. See further on.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 577 POSEION'S FIVE MINISTERS.
Ashtadisa or eight faces bounding Space," referring thus to the loka-palas, the eight points of the compass (the four cardinal and the four intermediate points) . . . "From an objective point of view the Microcosm is represented by the human body. Makaram may be taken to represent simultaneously both the microcosm and the macrocosm, as external objects of perception." (pp. 113, 115).
But the true esoteric sense of the word "Makara," does not mean "crocodile," in truth, at all, even when it is compared with the animal depicted on the Hindu Zodiac. For it has the head and the fore-
legs of an antelope and the body and tail of a fish. Hence the tenth sign of the Zodiac has been taken
variously to mean a shark, a dolphin, etc.; as it is the vahan of Varuna, the Ocean God, and is often called, for this reason, Jala-rupa or "water-form." The dolphin was the vehicle of Poseidon-Neptune with the Greeks, and one with him, esoterically; and this "dolphin" is the "sea-dragon" as much as the Crocodile of the Sacred Nile is the vehicle of Horus, and Horus himself. "I am the fish and seat of the great Horus of Kem-our," says the mummy-form God with the crocodile's head (ch. lxxxviii., 2, "Book of the Dead"). With the Peratae Gnostics it is Chozzar (Neptune), who converts into a sphere the dodecagonal pyramid, "and paints its gate with many colours." He has FIVE androgyne ministers -- he is Makara, the Leviathan.
The rising Sun being considered the Soul of the Gods sent to manifest itself to men every day, and the crocodile rising out of the water at the first sunbeam, that animal came finally to personify a Solar-fire devotee in India, as it personified that fire, or the highest soul with the Egyptians.
In the Puranas, the number of the Kumaras changes according to the exigencies of the allegory. For occult purposes their number is given in one place as seven, then as four, then as five. In the Kurma Purana it is said of them: "These five (Kumara), O Brahman, were Yogins who acquired entire exemption from passion." Their very name shows their connection with the said constellation -- the Makara, and with some other Puranic characters connected with the Zodiacal signs. This is done in order to veil what was one of the most suggestive glyphs of the primitive Temples. They are mixed up astronomically, physiologically, and mystically, in general, with a number of Puranic personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the " Vishnu," they figure in various dramas and events throughout all the other Puranas and sacred literature; so that the Orientalists, having to pick up the threads of connection hither and thither, have ended by proclaiming the Kumaras "due chiefly to the fancy of the Puranic writers." But --
Ma, -- we are told by the author of the "Twelve Signs of the Zodiac" -- is Five; kara, a hand with its five fingers, as also a five-sided sign or
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a pentagon. The Kumara (in this case an anagram for occult purposes) are five in esotericism, as Yogis -- because the last two names have ever been kept secret; they are the fifth order of Brahmadevas, and the fivefold Chohans, having the soul of the five elements in them, Water and Ether predominating, and therefore their symbols were both aquatic and fiery . "Wisdom lies concealed under the couch of him who rests on the golden lotos (padma ) floating on the water." In India it is Vishnu (one of whose avatars was Budha, as claimed in days of old). The Prachetasas, the worshippers of Narayana (who, like Poseidon moved or dwelt over not under the waters), plunged into the depths of the ocean for their devotions and remained therein 10,000 years; and the Prachetasas are ten exoterically, but five , esoterically. "Prachetas" is in Sanskrit, the name of Varuna, the water god, Nereus, an aspect of the same as Neptune, the Prachetasas being thus identical with the "five ministers" of [[CHOZZAR]] (Poseidon) of the Peratae Gnostics. These are respectively called [[AOT, AOAI, OTO, OTOB ]], "the fifth, a triple name (making Seven) being lost"* -- i.e., kept secret. This much for the "aquatic" symbol; the "fiery" connecting them with the fiery symbol -- spiritually. For purposes of identity, let us remember that as the mother of the Prachetasas was Savarna, the daughter of the Ocean, so was
Amphitrite the mother of Neptune's mystic "ministers."
Now the reader is reminded that these "five ministers" are symbolized both in the Dolphin, who had overcome the chaste Amphitrite's unwillingness to wed Poseidon, and in Triton their son. The latter, whose body above the waist is that of a man and below a dolphin, a fish, is, again, most mysteriously connected with Oannes, the Babylonian Dag, and further also with the (fish) Avatar of Vishnu, Matsya, both teaching mortals Wisdom. The Dolphin, as every mythologist knows, was placed for his service by Poseidon among the constellations, and became with the Greeks, Capricornus, the goat, whose hind part is that of a dolphin, thus shown identical with Makara, whose head is also that of an antelope and the body and tail those of a fish. This is why the sign of the Makara was borne on the banner of Kama deva, the Hindu god of love, identified, in Atharva Veda, with Agni (the fire-god), the son of Lakshmi, as correctly given by Harivansa. For Lakshmi and Venus are one, and Amphitrite is the early form of Venus. Now Kama (the Makara-ketu) is "Aja" (the unborn), and "Atma-bhu" (the self-existent), and Aja is the LOGOS in the Rig-Veda, as he is shown therein to be the first manifestation of the ONE: "Desire first arose in IT, which was the primal
* So is Brahma's fifth head, said to be lost, burnt to ashes by Siva's "central eye"; Siva being also panchanana "five faced." Thus the number is preserved and secresy maintained on the true esoteric meaning.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 579 THE PUZZLES OF SYMBOLISM.
germ of mind," that "which connects entity with non-entity" (or Manas, the fifth, with Atma, the seventh, esoterically) say the Sages. This is the first stage. The second, on the following plane of manifestation, shows Brahma (whom we select as a representative for all the other first gods of the nations) as causing to issue from his body his mind-born sons, "Sanandana and others," who, in the fifth "creation," and again in the ninth (for purposes of blind) become the Kumara. Let us close by reminding the reader that goats were sacrificed to Amphitrite and the Nereids on the sea-shore, as goats are sacrificed to this day to Durga Kali, who is only the black side of Lakshmi (Venus), the white side of Sakti; and by suggesting what connection these animals may have with Capricornus, in which appear twenty-eight stars in the form of a goat, which goat was transformed by the Greeks into Amalthaea -- Jupiter's foster-mother. Pan, the god of Nature, had goat's feet, and changed himself into a goat at the approach of Typhon. But this is a mystery which the writer dares not dwell upon at length, not being sure of being understood. Thus the mystical side of the interpretation must be left to the intuition of the student. Let us note one more thing in relation to the mysterious number five. It symbolizes at one and the same time the Spirit of life eternal and the Spirit of life and love terrestrial -- in the human compound; and, it includes divine and infernal magic, and the universal and the individual quintessence of being. Thus, the five mystic words or vowels (vide infra) uttered by Brahma at "creation," which forthwith became the Panchadasa (certain Vedic hymns, attributed to that God) are in their creative and magical potentiality, the white side of the black Tantrik five "makaras," or the five m's. "Makara," the constellation, is a seemingly meaningless and absurd name. Yet, even besides its anagrammatical significance in conjunction with the term "Kumara," the
numerical value of its first syllable and its esoteric resolution into five has a very great and occult meaning in the mysteries of nature.
Suffice it to say, that as the sign of Makara is connected with the birth of the spiritual "microcosm," and the death or dissolution of the physical Universe (its passage into the realm of the Spiritual)*; so the Dhyan Chohans, called in India Kumara, are connected with both. Moreover, in the exoteric religions, they have become the synonyms of the Angels of Darkness. Mara is the God of Darkness, the Fallen One, and Death**; and yet it is one of the names of Kama, the first god in the Vedas, the Logos, from whom have sprung the Kumaras, and this
* "When the Sun passes away behind the 30th degree of Makara and will reach no more the sign of the Meenam (pisces) then the night of Brahma has come." . . .
** Death of every physical thing truly; but Mara is also the unconscious quickener of the birth of the Spiritual.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 580 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
connects them still more with our "fabulous" Indian Makara, and the crocodile-headed God in Egypt.* The crocodiles in the Celestial Nile are Five, and the God Toum, the primordial deity creating the heavenly bodies and the living beings, calls forth these crocodiles in his fifth creation. When Osiris, "the defunct Sun," is buried and enters into Amenti, the sacred crocodiles plunge into the abyss of primordial Waters -- "the great Green One." When the Sun of life rises, they re-emerge out of the sacred river. All this is highly symbolical, and shows how primeval esoteric truths found their expression in identical symbols. But, as Mr. T. Subba Row truly declares, "The veil, that was dexterously thrown over certain portions of the mystery connected with the (Zodiacal) signs by the ancient philosophers, will never be fully lifted up for the amusement or edification of the uninitiated public. "
Nor was number five less sacred with the Greeks. The five words (Panchadasa) of Brahma have become with the Gnostics the "Five Words" written upon the akasic (shining) garment of Jesus at his glorification: the words [[ZAMA ZAMA OZZA PAXAMA, OZAI]], translated by the Orientalists "the robe, the glorious robe of my strength." These words were, in their turn, the anagrammatic blind of the five mystic powers represented on the robe of the "resurrected" Initiate after his last trial of three days' trance; the five becoming seven only after his death, when the Adept became the full CHRISTOS, the full KRISHNA-VISHNU, i.e., merged in Nirvana. The E Delphicum, a sacred symbol, was the numeral five , again; and how sacred it was is shown by the fact that the Corinthians (according to Plutarch) replaced the wooden numeral in the Delphic Temple by a bronze one; and this one was transmuted by Livia Augusta into a fac-simile of gold.
It is easy to recognize in the two spirits -- the Greek accents or signs ( ) spoken of by Ragon (vide
supra) -- Atma and Buddhi, or "divine spirit and its vehicle" (spiritual soul).
The six or the "Senary" is dealt with later, while the Septenary will be fully treated in the course of this volume. ( Vide the "Mysteries of the Hebdomad.")
The Ogdoad or 8 symbolizes the eternal and spiral motion of cycles, the 8, , and is symbolized in its turn by the Caduceus. It shows the regular breathing of the Kosmos presided over by the eight great gods -- the seven from the primeval Mother, the One and the Triad.
Then comes the number nine or the triple ternary. It is the number which reproduces itself incessantly under all shapes and figures in
* Osiris is called in the "Book of the Dead " "Osiris, the double Crocodile." (See Chapter "On the Names of Osiris, " cxlii.) "He is the good and the bad Principle; the Day, and the Night Sun, the God, and the mortal man." Thus far the Macrocosm and the Microcosm.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 581 THE MASTER MASON'S GRIP.
every multiplication. It is the sign of every circumference, since its value in degrees is equal to 9, i.e., to 3 + 6 + 0. It is a bad number under certain conditions, and very unlucky. If number 6 was the symbol of our globe ready to be animated by a divine spirit, 9 symbolized our earth informed by a bad or evil spirit.
Ten, or the Decade, brings all these digits back to unity, and ends the Pythagorean table. Hence this
figure -- , unity within zero -- was the symbol of Deity, of the Universe, and of man. Such is the secret meaning of "the strong grip of the Lion's paw, of the tribe of Judah" between two hands (the "master mason's grip"), the joint number of whose fingers is ten.
If we now give our attention to the Egyptian cross, or the Tau, we may discover this letter, so exalted by Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews, to be mysteriously connected with the Decade. The tau is the Alpha and the Omega of secret divine Wisdom, which is symbolized by the initial and the final letter of Thot (Hermes). Thot was the inventor of the Egyptian alphabet, and the letter tau closed the alphabets of the Jews and the Samaritans, who called this character the "end" or "perfection," "culmination" and "security." Thence -- Ragon tells us -- the words terminus (end), and tectum (roof), are symbols of shelter and security, which is rather a prosaic definition. But such is the usual destiny of ideas and things in this world of spiritual decadence, if also of physical progress. PAN was at one time absolute nature, the one and GREAT-ALL; but when history catches a first glimpse of him, Pan has already tumbled down into a godling of the fields, a rural god; and history will not recognize him, while theology makes of him the devil. Yet his seven-piped flute, the emblem of the seven forces of nature, of the seven planets, the seven musical notes, of all the septenary harmony, in short, shows well his primordial character. So with the Cross. Far earlier than the Jews had devised their golden candlestick
* Reflecting on the Cross, the author of the "Source of Measures" shows that this candlestick in the temple "was so composed that counting on either side there were four candle-sockets; while at the apex, there being one in common to both sides, there were in fact three to be counted on the one side and four on the other, making in all number 7 upon the self-same idea of one in common with the cross display. Take a line of one unit in breadth by three units long, and place it on an incline; take another of four units long, and lean it upon this one, from an opposite incline, making the top unit of the four in length the corner or apex of a triangle. This is the display of the candlestick. Now take away the line of three units in length and cross it on the one of four units in length, and the cross form results. The same idea is conveyed in the six days of the week in Genesis, crowned by the seventh, which was used by itself as a base of circular measure" (p. 51).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 582 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the phallic element into religion, the more spiritually-minded nations had made of the cross (as 3, 4 = 7), their most sacred divine symbol. In fact, Circle, Cross, and Seven -- the latter being made a base of circular measurement -- are the first primordial symbols. Pythagoras, who brought his wisdom from India, left to posterity a glimpse into this truth. His school regarded number 7 as a compound of numbers 3 and 4, which they explained in a dual manner. On the plane of the noumenal world, the triangle was, as the first conception of the manifested Deity, its image: "Father-Mother-Son"; and the Quaternary, the perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on the physical plane. Some students, in view of the sacredness of Tetraktis and the Tetragrammaton, mistake the mystic meaning of the Quaternary. The latter was with the ancients only a secondary "perfection," so to speak, because it related only to the manifested planes. Whereas it is the Triangle, the Greek
delta, , which was the "vehicle of the unknown Deity." A good proof of it lies with the name of the Deity beginning with Delta. Zeus was written [[Deus]], by the Boeotians,* thence the Deus of the Latins. This, in relation to the metaphysical conception, with regard to the meaning of the Septenary in the phenomenal world, but for purposes of profane or exoteric interpretation, the symbolism changed. Three became the ideograph of the three material elements -- air, water, earth; and four became the principle of all that which is neither corporeal nor perceptible. But this has never been accepted by the real Pythagoreans. Viewed as a compound of 6 and 1, the senary and the unity, number seven was the invisible centre, the spirit of everything (see further the explanation of 6), as there exists no body with six lines constituting its form without a seventh being found as the central point in it (see crystals and snow-flakes in so-called inanimate nature). Moreover, number seven, they said, has all the perfection of the UNIT -- the number of numbers. For as absolute unity is uncreated, and impartite (hence number-less) and no number can produce it, so is the seven: no digit contained within the decade can beget or produce it. And it is 4, which affords an arithmetical division between unity and seven, as it surpasses the former by the same number (three), as it is itself surpassed by the seven, since four is by as many numbers above one, as seven is above four . (From a MS. supposed to be by "St. Germain.")
"With the Egyptians number 7 was the symbol of life eternal," says Ragon, and adds that this is why the Greek letter Z, which is but a double 7 is the initial letter of Zao, "I live," and of Zeus, "the father of all living."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 583 THE MYSTERY OF THE NUMBER SIX.
Moreover, figure 6 was the symbol of the Earth during the autumn and winter "sleeping" months, and figure 7 during spring and summer, -- as the Spirit of life animated her at that time -- the seventh or central informing Force. We find the same in the Egyptian mythos and symbol of Osiris and Isis, personifying Fire and Water metaphysically, and the Sun and the Nile physically. The number of the Solar year, 365 in days, is the numerical value of the word Neilos (Nile). This, together with the Bull, with the Crescent and the ansated cross between its horns, and the Earth under its astronomical symbol
-- -- are the most phallic symbols of later antiquity.
"The Nile was the river of time with the number of a year, or year and a day (364 + 1 = 365). It represented the parturient water of Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon, the woman, and the cow, also the workshop of Osiris, representing the T'sod Olaum of the Hebrews. The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the Hebrew Iardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the Hebrew word Jared, or 'Source,' or Descent . . . of the river Jordan, which had the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians,* it was the source of descent, and held the waters of life" (Unpub. MS.) It was, to put it plainly, the symbol of the personified Earth, or Isis, regarded as the womb of that Earth. This is shown clearly enough; and Jordan -- the river so sacred now to Christians -- held no more sublime or poetical meaning in it than the parturient waters of the moon (Isis, or Jehovah in his female aspect). Now, as shown by the same scholar, Osiris was the sun, and the river Nile, and the tropical year of 365 days; while Isis was the moon, the bed of that river, or the mother earth "for the parturient energies, of which water was a necessity," as also the lunar year of 354 days, "the time-
maker of the periods of gestation." All this then is sexual and phallic, and our modern scholars seem to find in these symbols nothing beyond a physiological or phallic meaning. Nevertheless, the three figures 365, or the number of days in a solar year, have but to be read with the Pythagorean Key to find in them a highly philosophical and moral meaning. One instance will be sufficient. It can read:
Simply because 3 is equivalent to the Greek gamma, or [[G]], which letter is the symbol of gaia (the Earth); while the figure 6 is the symbol of the animating or informing principle, and the 5 is the universal quintessence which spreads in every direction and forms all matter. (St. Germain's MS.)
* It had no such meaning in the beginnings; nor during the earlier dynasties.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 584 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The few instances and examples brought forward reveal only one small portion of the methods used to read the symbolical ideographs and numerals of antiquity. The system being of an extreme and complex difficulty, very few, even among the Initiates, could master all the seven keys. Is it to be wondered, then, that the metaphysical gradually dwindled down into the physical nature; that the Sun, once upon a time the symbol of DEITY, became, as aeons glided by, that of its creative ardour only; and that thence it fell into a glyph of phallic significance? But surely, it is not those whose method was (like Plato's) to proceed from the universals down to the particulars, who could ever have begun by symbolizing their religions by sexual emblems! It is quite true, though uttered by that incarnated paradox, Eliphas Levi, that "man is God on Earth, and God is man in Heaven." But this could not, and never did apply to the One Deity, only to the Hosts of ITS incarnated beams, called by us Dhyan Chohans, by the ancients, Gods; and now transformed by the Church into devils on the left, and into the Saviour on the right side!
But all such dogma grew out of the one root, the root of wisdom, which grows and thrives on the Indian soil. There is not an Archangel that could not be traced back to its prototype in the sacred land of Aryavarta. These "prototypes" are all connected with the Kumaras who appear on the scene of action by refusing -- as Sanatkumara and Sananda -- to "create progeny." Yet they are called the "creators" of (thinking) man. More than once they are brought into connection with Narada -- another bundle of apparent incongruities, yet a wealth of philosophical tenets. Narada is the leader of the Gandharvas, the celestial singers and musicians; esoterically, the reason for it is explained by the fact that the latter (the Gandharvas) are "the instructors of men in the secret sciences." It is they, who "loving the women of the Earth," disclosed to them the mysteries of creation; or, as in the Veda -- the "heavenly Gandharva" is a deity who knew and revealed the secrets of heaven and divine truths, in general. If we remember what is said of this class of Angels in Enoch and in the Bible, then the allegory is plain: their leader, Narada, while refusing to procreate, leads men to become gods. Moreover, all of these, as stated in the Vedas, are Chhandaja (will-born) or incarnated (in different Manvantaras) of their own will; -- and they are shown in exoteric literature as existing age after age; some being "cursed to be re-born," others, incarnating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumaras who went to visit Vishnu on the "White Island" (Sveta-dwipa) the island inhabited by the Maha Yogins -- they are connected with Sakadwipa and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 585 SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS.
In Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumaras, Adityas, Gandharvas, Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhyan Chohans or Devas as regards intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having
acquired by self-development the five-fold nature -- hence the sacredness of number five -- became independent of the pure Arupa devas. This is a mystery very difficult to realize and understand correctly. For, we see that those who were "obedient to law" are, equally with the rebels, doomed to be reborn in every age. Narada, the Rishi, is cursed by Brahma to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly reborn. He is a rebel against Brahma, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas -- the twelve great creative gods produced by Brahma as his assistants in the functions of creation. For the latter, lost in meditation, only forgot to create; and for this, they are equally cursed by Brahma to be born in every manvantara. And still they are termed -- together with the rebels -- Chhandajas, or those born of their own will in human form!
All this is very puzzling to one who is unable to read and understand the Puranas except in their dead letter sense.* Hence we find the Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot of perplexity by declaring the whole scheme "figments" "of Brahminical fancy and love of exaggeration." But to the student of occultism, the whole is pregnant with deeply philosophical meaning. We willingly leave the rind to the Western Sanskritist, but claim the essence of the fruit for ourselves. We do more: we concede that in one sense much in these so-called "fables" refers to astronomical allegories about constellations, asterisms, stars, and planets. Yet, while the Gandharva of the Rig-Veda may there be made to personify the fire of the Sun, the Gandharva devas are entities both of a physical and psychic character; while the Apsarasas (with other Rudras) are both qualities and quantities. In short, if ever unravelled, the theogony of the Vedic Gods will reveal fathomless mysteries of Creation and being. Truly says Parasara: "These thirty-three divinities exist age after age, and their appearance and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again." (Book I., xv.)
There was a time, when the Eastern symbol of the Cross and Circle, the Swastica, was universally adopted. With the esoteric (and, for the matter of that, exoteric) Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means "the 10,000 truths." These truths, they say, belong to the
* Yet this sense, if once mastered, will turn out to be the secure casket which holds the keys to the Secret Wisdom. True, a casket so profusely ornamented that its fancy work hides and conceals entirely any spring for opening it, and thus makes the unintuitional believe it has not, and cannot have, any opening in it. Still the Keys are there, deeply buried, yet ever present to him who searches for them.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 586 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mysteries of the unseen Universe and primordial Cosmogony and Theogony. "Since Fohat crossed the Circle like two lines of flame (horizontally and vertically), the hosts of the Blessed Ones have never failed to send their representatives upon the planets they are made to watch over from the beginning." This is why the Swastica is always placed -- as the ansated Cross was in Egypt -- on the breasts of the defunct mystics. It is found on the heart of the images and statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the seal placed also on the hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh, for ever, with some. This, because they have to keep those truths inviolate and intact, in eternal silence and secrecy to the
day these are perceived and read by their chosen successors -- new Initiates -- "worthy of being entrusted with the ten thousand perfections." So degraded, however, has it now become, that it is often placed on the headgear of the "gods," the hideous idols of the sacrilegious Bhons, the Dugpas (Sorcerers) of the Tibetan borderlands; until found out by a Galukpa and torn off together with the head of the "god;" though it would be better were it that of the worshipper which was severed from the sinful body. Still, it can never lose its mysterious properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it used alike by the Initiates and Seers, as by the priests of Troy (found by Schliemann on the site of that old city). One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians, Chaldeans, as well as on the walls of the old-world cyclopean buildings; in the catacombs of the New world, and in those of the Old (?), at Rome, where, because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed themselves and their religion, it is called Crux Dissimulata.
"According to de Rossi, the Swastica from an early period was a favourite form of the cross employed with an occult signification, which shows the secret was not that of the Christian cross. One Swastica cross in the catacombs is the sign of an inscription which reads [['ZOTIKO ZOTIKE]],' ' Vitalis Vitalia,' or 'life of life.' "*
But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the author of Natural Genesis on page 433.
"The value of the cross," says Mr. Massey, "as a Christian symbol, is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the 'Christian' Iconography of the Catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that -- the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.** During some six
* Quoted in "The Natural Genesis" (p. 427, Vol. I.).
** With the Christians, most undeniably. With the pre-Christian symbologists it was, as said, the Bed or Couch of Torture during the Initiation Mystery, the "Crucifix" being placed horizontally, on the ground, and not erect, as at the time when it became the Roman gallows.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 587 THE CROSS, A CHRISTIAN AFTER-THOUGHT.
centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the Catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century. . . . There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros cross was a type and a name of Horus, the
Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a 'Warfare with the X'; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.* During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was made divine at first, and humanized at last."
Few world-symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the Swastica. It is symbolized by the figure 6; for, like that figure, it points in its concrete imagery, as the ideograph of the number does, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit. It is the emblem of the activity of Fohat, of the continual revolution of the "wheels," and of the Four Elements, the "Sacred Four," in their mystical, and not alone in their cosmical meaning; further, its four arms, bent at right angles, are intimately related, as shown elsewhere, to the Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into the mysteries of the meaning of the Swastica, say the Commentaries, "can trace on it, with mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole period of Sandhya." Also "the relation of the Seen to the Unseen," and "the first procreation of man and species."
To the Eastern Occultist the TREE of Knowledge in the Paradise of man's own heart, becomes the Tree of Life eternal, and has nought to do with man's animal senses. It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas and the Ego to liberate themselves from the thraldom of sensuous perception and see, in the light of the one eternal present Reality. To the Western Kabalist, and now far more to the superficial Symbologist, nursed in the lethal atmosphere of materialistic science, there is but one chief explanation of the mysteries of the Cross -- its sexual element. Even the otherwise spiritualistic modern commentator discerns in the Cross and Swastica, this feature before all others.
* So it was, and could not be otherwise. Julian (the Emperor) was an Initiate, and as such knew well the "mystery-meaning," both metaphysical and physical.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 588 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The cross was used in Egypt as a protecting talisman and a symbol of saving power. Typhon, or Satan, is actually found chained and bound to the cross. In the Ritual, the Osirian cries, 'The Apophis is overthrown, their cords bind the South, North, East, and West, their cords are on him. Har-ru-bah has knotted him.'* These were the cords of the four Quarters, or the cross. Thor is said to smite the head of the Serpent with his hammer . . . a form of Swastica or four-footed Cross. . . . In the primitive sepulchres of Egypt the model of the Chamber had the form of a Cross.** The pagoda of Mathura . . . the birth-place of Krishna, was built in the form of a Cross . . . . ***
This is perfect and no one can discern in this "sexual worship," with which the Orientalists love to break the head of Paganism. But how about the Jews, and the exoteric religions of some Hindu sects, especially the rites of the Vallabacharyas? For, as said, the Lingham and Yoni of Siva-worship stand too high philosophically, its modern degeneration notwithstanding, to be called a simple phallic worship. But the tree or Cross-worship**** of the Jews, as denounced by their own Prophets, can hardly escape the charge. The "Sons of Sorcerers," "the seed of the adulterer," as Isaiah calls them (lvii.), never lost an opportunity of "enflaming themselves with idols under every green tree," which denotes no metaphysical recreation. It is from these monotheistic Jews that the Christian nations have derived their religion, their "God of gods, the One living God," while despising and deriding the worship of the Deity of the ancient philosophers. Let such believe in and worship the physical form of the Cross, by all means.
But to the follower of the true Eastern archaic Wisdom, to him who worships in spirit nought outside the Absolute Unity, that ever-pulsating great Heart that beats throughout, as in every atom of nature, each such atom contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits give life eternal and not physical life alone. For him the Cross and Circle, the Tree or the Tau, are, after every symbol relating to these has been applied to, and read one after another, still a profound mystery in their Past, and it is to that Past alone that he directs his eager gaze. He cares little whether it be the seed from
* Apophis or Apap is the Serpent of evil, symbol of human passions. The Sun (Osiris-Horus), destroys him, when Apap is thrown down, bound and chained. The god Aker, "the chief of the gate of the Abyss," of Aker, the realm of the Sun (xv. 39) binds him. Apophis is the enemy of Ra (light), but the "great Apap has fallen!" exclaims the defunct. "The Scorpion has hurt thy mouth," he says to the conquered enemy (xxxix. v. 7). The Scorpion is the "worm that never dies" of the Christians. Apophis is bound on the Tau or Tat, "the emblem of stability." (See the erection of Tat in Tatoo, Ritual xviii.).
** So have the crypts in cis-Himalayan regions where Initiates live, and where their ashes are placed for seven lunar years.
*** The Natural Genesis, Vol. I. p. 432.
**** The Cross and the Tree are identical and synonymous in symbolism.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 589 MAN, THE REVILER OF GOD.
which grows the genealogical Tree of Being, called the Universe. Nor is it the Three in One, the triple aspect of the seed -- its form, colour, and substance -- that interest him, but rather the FORCE which directs its growth, the ever mysterious, as the ever unknown. For this vital Force, that makes the seed germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form the trunk and branches, which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of the Aswattha, the holy Tree of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and
procreate other trees -- this is the only FORCE that has reality for him, as it is the never-dying breath of life. The pagan philosopher sought for the Cause, the modern is content with only the effects and seeks the former in the latter. What is beyond, he does not know, nor does the modern A-gnostic care: thus rejecting the only knowledge upon which he can with full security base his Science. Yet this manifested Force has an answer for him who seeks to fathom it. He who sees in the cross, the decussated circle of Plato, the Pagan, not the antitype of circumcision, as Christian (St.) Augustine did,* is forthwith regarded by the Church as a heathen: by Science, as a lunatic. This because, while refusing to worship the god of physical generation, he confesses that he can know nothing of the Cause which underlies the so-called First Cause, the causeless Cause of this Vital Cause. Tacitly admitting the All-Presence of the boundless Circle and making of it the universal Postulate upon which the whole of the manifested universe is based, the Sage keeps a reverential silence concerning that upon which no mortal men should dare to speculate. "The Logos of God is the revealer of man, and the logos (the verb) of man is the revealer of God," says Eliphas Levi in one of his paradoxes. To this, the Eastern Occultist would reply: -- "On this condition, however, that man should be dumb on the CAUSE that produced both God and its logos. Otherwise, he becomes invariably the reviler, not the 'revealers' of the incognizable Deity."
We have now to approach a mystery -- the Hebdomad in nature. Perchance, all that we may say, will be attributed to coincidence. We may be told that this number in nature is quite natural (so we say too), and has no more significance than the illusion of motion which forms the so-called "Strobic circles." No great importance was given to these "singular illusions" when Professor Sylvanus Thompson exhibited them at the meeting of the British Association in 1877. Nevertheless we should like to learn the scientific explanation why seven should ever form itself as a pre-eminent number -- six concentric circles around a seventh, and seven rings within one another round a central point, etc., etc. -- in this illusion, produced by a swaying saucer, or any other vessel. We give the solution refused by science in the section which follows.
WE must not close this Part on the Symbolism of Archaic History, without an attempt to explain the perpetual recurrence of this truly mystic number in every scripture known to the Orientalists. As every religion, from the oldest to the latest, claims its presence, and explains it on its own grounds agreeably with its own special dogmas, this is no easy task. We can, therefore, do no better or more explanatory work than to give a bird's-eye view of all. These sacred numbers (3, 4, 7) are the sacred numbers of Light, Life, and Union -- especially in this present manvantara, our Life-cycle; of which number seven is the special representative, or the Factor number. This has now to be demonstrated.
If one happened to ask a Brahmin learned in the Upanishads -- so full of the secret wisdom of old, why "he, of whom seven forefathers have drunk the juice of the moon-plant, is trisuparna," as Bopaveda is credited with saying; and why the Somapa Pitris should be worshipped by the Brahmin trisuparna -- very few could answer the question; or, if they knew, they would still less satisfy one's curiosity. Let us, then, hold to what the old Esoteric doctrine teaches.
"When the first 'Seven' appeared on earth, they threw the seed of everything that grows on the land into the soil. First came three, and four were added to these as soon as stone was transformed into plant. Then came the second 'Seven,' who, guiding the Jivas of the plants, produced the middle (intermediate) natures between plant and moving living animal. The third 'Seven' evolved their Chhayas. . . . The fifth 'Seven' imprisoned their ESSENCE. . . . Thus man became a Saptaparna." (Commentary.)
-------
A.
SAPTAPARNA.
Such is the name given in Occult phraseology to man. It means as shown elsewhere, a seven-leaved plant, and the name has a great significance in the Buddhist legends. So it had, also, under disguise, in
the Greek "myths." The T, or (tau), formed from the figure 7, and the Greek letter [[G]] (gamma), was (see § "Cross and Circle") the symbol of life,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 591 THE MEANING OF THE DOUBLE TRIANGLE.
and of life eternal: of earthly life, because [[G]] (gamma) is the symbol of the Earth (gaia)*; and of "life eternal," because the figure 7 is the symbol of the same life linked with divine life, the double glyph expressed in geometrical figures being: --
a triangle and a quaternary, the symbol of septenary MAN.
Now, the number six has been regarded in the ancient mysteries as an emblem of physical nature. For six is the representation of the six dimensions of all bodies: the six lines which compose their form, namely, the four lines extending to the four cardinal points, North, South, East, and West, and the two lines of height and thickness that answer to the Zenith and the Nadir. Therefore, while the senary was applied by the sages to physical man, the septenary was for them the symbol of that man plus his immortal soul.
Ragon gives in his Maconnerie Occulte a very good illustration of the "hieroglyphical senary," as he
calls our double equilateral triangle, . He shows it as the symbol of the commingling of the "philosophical three fires and the three waters, whence results the procreation of the elements of all things. The same idea is found in the Indian equilateral double triangle. For, though it is called in that country the sign of Vishnu, yet in truth it is the symbol of the Triad (or the Trimurti). For, even in the
exoteric rendering, the lower triangle with the apex downward, is the symbol of Vishnu, the god of the moist principle and water ("Nara-yana," or the moving Principle in Nara, water;**) while the
triangle, with its apex upward, is Siva, the Principle of Fire, symbolized by the triple flame in his hand. (See the bronze statue of Tripurantika Siva, "Mahadeva destroying Tripurasura," at the museum of the India House). It is these two interlaced triangles -- wrongly called "Solomon's seal," which also form the emblem of our
** See the Mahabharata, e.g., III., 189, 3, where Vishnu says, "I called the name of water nara in ancient times, and am hence called Narayana, for that was always the abode I moved in" (Ayana). It is into the water (or chaos, the "moist principle" of the Greeks and Hermes), that the first seed of the Universe is thrown. "The 'Spirit of God' moves on the dark waters of Space"; hence Thales makes of it the primordial element and prior to Fire, which was yet latent in that Spirit.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 592 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Society -- that produce the Septenary and the Triad at one and the same time, and are the Decad,
whatever way this sign is examined, as all the ten numbers are contained therein. For with a
point in the middle or centre, thus it is a sevenfold sign; its triangles denote number 3; the two triangles show the presence of the binary; the triangles with the central point common to both yield the quaternary; the six points are the senary; and the central point, the unit; the quinary being traced by combination, as a compound of two triangles, the even number, and of three sides in each triangle, the first odd number. This is the reason why Pythagoras and the ancients made the number six sacred to Venus, since "the union of the two sexes, and the spagyrisation of matter by triads are necessary to develop the generative force, that prolific virtue and tendency to reproduction which is inherent in all bodies."*
Belief in "Creators," or the personified Powers of Nature, is in truth no polytheism, but a philosophical necessity. Like all the other planets of our system, the Earth has seven Logoi -- the emanating rays of the one "Father-Ray" -- the PROTOGONOS, or the manifested "Logos" -- he who sacrifices his Esse (or flesh, the Universe) that the world may live and every creature therein have conscious being.
Numbers 3 and 4 are respectively male and female, Spirit and Matter, and their union is the emblem of life eternal in spirit on its ascending arc, and in matter as the ever resurrecting element -- by
procreation and reproduction. The spiritual male line is vertical ; the differentiated matter-line is
horizontal; the two forming the cross or . The former (the 3), is invisible; the latter (the 4), is on the plane of objective perception. This is why all the matter of the Universe, when analyzed by science to its ultimates, can be reduced to four elements only -- carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen: and why the three primaries, the noumenoi of the four, or graduated Spirit or Force, have remained a terra incognita and mere speculations, names, to exact Science. Her servants must believe in and study first the primary causes, before they can hope to fathom the nature and acquaint themselves with the potentialities of the effects. Thus, while the men of Western learning had, and still have, the four, or matter to toy with, the Eastern Occultists and their disciples, the great alchemists the world over, have the whole septenate to study from.** As those Alche-
* The "Potency of the Pythagorean Triangles" (Ragon).
** There are learned Brahmins who have protested against our septenary division. They are right from their own standpoint, as we are right from ours. Leaving the [[footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 593 SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL CORRESPONDENCES.
mists have it: -- "When the Three and the Four kiss each other, the Quaternary joins its middle nature with that of the Triangle," (or Triad, i.e., the face of one of its plane surfaces becoming the middle face of the other), "and becomes a cube; then only does it (the cube unfolded) become the vehicle and the number of LIFE, the Father-Mother SEVEN."
The following diagram will perhaps assist the student to grasp these parallelisms.
Now we are taught that all these earliest forms of organic life also appear in septenary groups of
[[Continued from previous page]] three aspects, or adjunct principles out of calculation, they accept only four Upadhis (bases) including the Ego -- the reflected image of the Logos in the "Karana Sarira" -
- and even "strictly speaking . . . . only three Upadhis." For purely theoretical metaphysical philosophy, or purposes of meditation, these three may be sufficient, as shown by the Taraka Yoga system; but for practical occult teaching our septenary division is the best and easiest. It is, however, a matter of school and choice.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 594 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
stones that hardened" (Stanza) followed by the "hard plants that softened," which are the product of the mineral, for "it is from the bosom of the stone that vegetation is born" (Commentary, Book IX., F. 19); and then to man -- all the primitive models in every kingdom of nature begin by being ethereal, transparent, films. This, of course, takes place only in the first beginning of life. With the next period they consolidate, and at the seventh begin to branch off into species, all except men, the first of the mammalian animals* in the Fourth Round.
Virgil, versed as every ancient poet was, more or less, in esoteric philosophy, sang evolution in the following strains: --
Principio coelum ac terras, camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum lunae, Titaniaque astra*
SPIRITUS intus alit; totamque infusa per artus MENS agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet Inde Hominum pecudumque genus, etc.** (AEneid VI. )
"First came three, or the triangle." This expression has a profound meaning in Occultism, and the fact is corroborated in mineralogy, botany, and even in geology, as was demonstrated in the section on "Ancient Chronology," by the compound number seven, the three and the four being in it. Salt in solution proves it. For when its molecules, clustering together, begin to deposit themselves as a solid, the first shape they assume is that of triangles, of small pyramids and cones. It is the figure of fire , whence the word "pyramids "; while the second geometrical figure in manifested Nature is a square or a cube, 4 and 6; for, "the particles of earth being cubical, those of fire are pyramidal" truly -- (Enfield). The pyramidal shape is that assumed by the pines -- the most primitive tree after the fern period. Thus the two opposites in cosmic nature -- fire and water, heat and cold -- begin their metrographical manifestations, one by a trimetric, the other by a hexagonal system. For the stellate crystals of snow, viewed under a microscope, are all and each of them a double or a treble six-pointed star, with a central nucleus, like a miniature star within the larger one. Says Mr.
* Protista are not animals. The reader is asked to bear in mind that when we speak of "animals," the mammalians alone are meant. Crustacea, fishes, and reptiles are contemporary with, and most have preceded physical man in this Round. All were bisexual, however, before the age of mammalia in the closing portion of the secondary or Mesozoic ages, yet nearer to the Palaeozoic than the Cenozoic ages. Smaller marsupial mammalia are contemporary with the huge reptilian monsters of the Secondary.
** "First Divine Spirit within sustains the Heavens, the earth and watery plains, the moon's orb and shining stars and the Eternal Mind diffused through all the parts of nature, actuates the whole stupendous frame and mingles with the vast body of the universe. Thence proceed the race of men and beasts, the vital principles of the flying kind and the monsters which the Ocean breeds under its smooth crystal plane." "All proceeds from Ether and from its seven natures" -- said the alchemists. Science knows these only in their superficial effects.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 595 NOAH, AN ASPECT OF THE CREATOR.
Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," p. 164. showing that the inhabitants of the sea-shore are greatly affected by the tides: --
"The most ancient progenitors in the Kingdom of the Vertebrata . . . apparently consisted of a group of marine animals. . . . Animals living either about the mean high-water mark, or about the mean low-water mark, pass through a complete cycle of tidal changes in a fortnight. . . . Now it is a mysterious fact that in the higher and now terrestrial Vertebrata . . . many normal and abnormal processes have one or more weeks (septenates) as their periods . . . such as gestation of mammals, the duration of fevers," etc. . . "The eggs of the pigeon are hatched in two weeks (or 14 days); those of the fowl in three; those of the duck in four: those of the goose in five; and those of the ostrich in seven." (Bartlett's "Land and Water.")
This number is closely connected with the moon, whose occult influence is ever manifesting itself in septenary periods. It is the moon which is the guide of the occult side of terrestrial nature, while the Sun is the regulator and factor of manifested life; (See also Vol. I., Part II.), and this truth was ever evident to the Seers and the adepts. Jacob Boehme, by insisting on the fundamental doctrine of the seven properties of everlasting mother Nature, proved himself thereby a great Occultist.
But to return to the consideration of the septenary in ancient religious symbolism. To the metrological key to the symbolism of the Hebrews, which reveals numerically the geometrical relations of the Circle (All-Deity) to the Square, Cube, Triangle, and all the integral emanations of the divine area, may be added the theogonic Key. This Key explains that Noah, the deluge-Patriarch, is in one aspect the permutation of the Deity (the Universal Creative Law), for the purpose of the formation of our Earth, its population, and the propagation of life on it, in general.
Now bearing in mind the Septenary division in divine Hierarchies, as in Cosmic and human constitutions, the student will readily understand that Jah-Noah is at the head of, and is the synthesis of
the lower Cosmic Quaternary. The upper Sephirothal , triad -- of which Jehovah-Binah
(Intelligence) is the left, female angle -- emanates the Quaternary. The latter symbolizing by itself the "Heavenly Man," the sexless Adam-Kadmon viewed as Nature in the abstract, becomes a septenate again by emanating from itself the additional three principles, the lower terrestrial or manifested physical Nature, Matter and our Earth (the seventh being Malkuth, the "Bride of the Heavenly Man"), thus forming, with the higher triad, or Kether, the Crown, the full number of the Sephirothal Tree -- the 10, the Total in Unity, or the Universe. Apart from the higher Triad, the lower creative Sephiroth are seven.
The above is not directly to our point, though it is a necessary
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 596 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
reminder to facilitate the comprehension of what follows. The question at issue is to show that Jah-
Noah, or the Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible, the alleged Creator of our Earth, of man and all upon it, is: -
-
(a) The lowest Septenary, the Creative Elohim -- in his Cosmic aspect.
(b) The Tetragrammaton or the Adam-Kadmon, "the Heavenly Man" of the Four letters -- in his theogonic and Kabalistic aspects.
(c) Noah -- identical with the Hindu Sishta, the human seed, left for the peopling of the Earth from a previous creation or Manvantara, as expressed in the Puranas, or the pre-diluvian period as rendered allegorically in the Bible -- in his Cosmic character.
But whether a Quaternary (Tetragrammaton) or a Triad, the Bible Creative God is not the Universal 10, unless blended with AIN-SOPH (as Brahma with Parabrahm), but a septenary, one of the many Septenaries of the Universal Septenate. In the explanation of the question now in hand, his position
and status as Noah may best be shown by placing the 3, ,and 4, on parallel lines with the "Cosmic" and "Human" principles. For the latter, the old familiar classification is made use of. Thus: --
of Moses Cherenensis says: 'By this, they say, is signified the first place of descent (of the ark).' (Bryant's Anal., Vol. IV., pages 5, 6, 15.) Under "Berge " mountain, Nork says of Ararat: , for
(i.e., Ararat for Arath) EARTH, Aramaic reduplication.' Here it is seen that Nork and Hatho make use of the same equivalent in Arath, with the meaning of Earth. "*****
Noah thus symbolizing both the Root-Manu and the Seed-Manu, or the Power which developed the planetary chain, and our earth, and the Seed Race (the Fifth) which was saved while the last sub-races of the Fourth perished -- Vaivasvata Manu -- the number Seven will be seen to recur at every step. It is he (Noah), who represents, as Jehovah's permutation, the septenary Host of the Elohim, and is thus the Father or Creator (the Preserver) of all animal life. Hence verses 2 and 3 of
* The Adwaitee Vedantic philosophy classifies this as the highest trinity, or rather the Trinitarian aspect of Chinmatra (Parabrahmam), explained by them as the "bare potentiality of Pragna" -- the
power or the capacity that gives rise to perception; Chidakasam, the infinite field or plane of Universal Consciousness; and Asath (Mulaprakriti), or undifferentiated matter. (See "Personal and Impersonal God" in "Five Years of Theosophy. ")
** Differentiated matter existing in the Solar System (let us not touch the whole Kosmos) in seven different conditions, and Pragna, or the capacity of perception, existing likewise in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter, there must necessarily be seven states of consciousness in man; and according to the greater or smaller development of these states, the systems of religions and philosophies were schemed out.
*** Represented as the jealous, angry, turbulent and ever active-god, revengeful, and kind only to his chosen people when propitiated by them.
**** Noah and his three Sons are the collective symbol of this Quaternary in many and various applications, Ham being the Chaotic principle.
***** "Source of Measures," p. 65. The author explains, "Note that in Hebrew, Jared , the father of Enoch, is construed to be 'the mount of descent,' and it is said to be the same with Ararat on which the cubical structure of Noah, or foundation measure rested. Jared, in Hebrew, is . The root derivations are the same with those of Ararat, of acre, of earth." As by Hebrew metrology "Jared, is, literally in British Y R D; hence in Jared is to be found literally our English word yard (and also , for Jah, or Jehovah, is rod). It is noteworthy that the son of Jared, viz., Enoch, lived 365 years, and it is said of him by rabbinical commentators, that the year period of 365 days was discovered by him, thus bringing, again, time and distance values together, i.e., year time descended by co-ordination, through the yard, or jared, who thus was its father, in or through Enoch ; and truly enough, 1296 = yard (or jared ) x 4 = 5184, the characteristic value of the solar day, in thirds, which as stated may be styled the parent numerically, of the solar year" (ibid. p. 65). This, however, by the astronomical and numerical Kabalistic methods. Esoterically, Jared is the Third race and Enoch the Fourth -- but as he is taken away alive he symbolizes also the Elect saved in the Fourth, while Noah is the Fifth from the beginning -- the family saved from the waters, eternally and physically.
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chapter vii. of Genesis, "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male (3), and the female (4); of fowls also of the air by sevens," etc., etc., followed by all the sevening of days and the rest.
Thus Number Seven, as a compound of 3 and 4, is the factor element in every ancient religion, because it is the factor element in nature. Its adoption must be justified, and it must be shown to be the number par excellence, for, since the appearance of "Esoteric Buddhism," frequent objections have been made, and doubts expressed as to the correctness of these assertions.
And here let the student be told at once, that in all such numerical divisions the ONE universal Principle, -- although referred to as (the) one, because the Only One -- never enters into the calculations. IT stands, in its character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the universal abstraction, entirely by ITSELF and independent of every other Power whether noumenal or phenomenal. IT "is neither matter nor spirit; IT is neither Ego nor non-Ego; and IT is neither object nor subject," says the author of "Personal and Impersonal God, " and adds: --
"In the language of Hindu philosophers it is the original and eternal combination of Purusha (Spirit) and Prakriti (matter). As the Adwaitees hold that an external object is merely the product of our mental states, Prakriti is nothing more than an illusion, and Purusha is the only reality; it is the ONE existence which remains in the universe of Ideas. This . . . then, is the Parabrahm of the Adwaitees. . . . ."
"Even if there were to be a personal God with anything like a material upadhi (physical basis of whatever form), from the standpoint of an Adwaitee there will be as much reason to doubt his noumenal existence, as there would be in the case of any other object. In their opinion, a conscious God cannot be the origin of the Universe, as his Ego would be the effect of a previous cause, if the word conscious conveys but its ordinary meaning. They cannot admit that the grand total of all the states of consciousness in the Universe is their deity, as these states are constantly changing, and as cosmic ideation ceases during Pralaya . There is only one permanent condition in the Universe, which is the state of perfect unconsciousness, bare Chidakasam (the field of consciousness) in fact. When my readers once realize the fact that this grand universe is in reality but a huge aggregation of various states of consciousness, they will not be surprised to find that the ultimate state of unconsciousness is considered as Parabrahmam by the Adwaitees."*
Being itself entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet this "huge aggregation of various states of consciousness" is a Septenate,
*" Five Years of Theosophy," Art. "Personal and Impersonal God."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 599 THE ROOTS OF THINGS.
in its totality entirely composed of Septenary groups; simply because "the capacity of perception exists in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter" (ibid), or the seven properties, or states, or conditions of matter. And, therefore, number 1 down to number 7 begins in the
esoteric calculations with the first manifested principle, which is number one if we commence from above, and the seventh when reckoning from below, or from the lowest Principle.
The Tetrad is esteemed in the Kabala, as it was by Pythagoras, the most perfect, or rather sacred number, because it emanated from the one, the first manifested Unit, or rather the three in one. Yet the latter has been ever impersonal, sexless, incomprehensible, though within the possibility of the higher mental perceptions.
The first manifestation of the eternal monad was never meant to stand as the symbol of another symbol, the UNBORN for the Element-born, or the one LOGOS for the Heavenly man. Tetragrammaton, or the Tetractys of the Greeks, is the Second logos, the Demiurgos. The Tetrad, as Thomas Taylor thought (vide the "Pythagorean Triangle "), "is the animal itself of Plato, who, as Syrianus justly observes, was the best of the Pythagoreans; it subsists at the extremity of the intelligible triad, as is most satisfactorily shown by Proclus in the third book of his treatise on the theology of Plato. And between these two triads (the double triangle), the one intelligible, and the other intellectual, another order of gods exists which partakes of both extremes." "The Pythagorean world," Plutarch tells us (in De anim. procr., 1027) "consisted of a double quaternary." This statement corroborates what is said about the choice, by the exoteric theologies, of the lower Tetraktis. For: -- "The quaternary of the intellectual world (the world of Mahat) is T'Agathon, Nous, Psyche, Hyle; while that of the sensible world (of matter), which is properly what Pythagoras meant by the word Kosmos -- is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. The four elements are called by the name of rizomata, the roots or principles of all mixed bodies," i.e., the lower Tetraktis is the root of illusion of the world of matter; and this is the tetragrammaton of the Jews, and the "mysterious deity," over which the modern Kabalists make such a fuss!
"Thus number four forms the arithmetical mean between the monad and the heptad, as this contains all powers, both of the productive and produced numbers; for this of all numbers under ten, is made of a certain number; the duad doubled makes a tetrad, and the tetrad doubled or unfolded makes the hebdomad (the septenary). Two multiplied into itself produces four; and retorted into itself makes the first cube. This first cube is a fertile number, the ground of multitude and variety, constituted of two and four (depending on the monad, the seventh). Thus the two principles of temporal things, the pyramis and
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 600 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
cube, form and matter, flow from one fountain, the tetragon (on earth) the monad (in heaven) . . . . " (See Reuchlin, "Cabala" 1, ii.).
Here Reuchlin, the great authority on the Kabala, shows the cube to be matter, whereas the pyramid or the triad is "form." With the Hermesians the number four becomes the symbol of truth only when amplified into a cube, which, unfolded, makes seven, as symbolizing the male and female elements and the element of LIFE.*
Some students have been puzzled to account for the vertical line, which is male, becoming (vide infra)
in the cross a four-partitioned line -- four being a female number, while the horizontal (the line of matter) becomes three-divisioned. But this is easy of explanation. Since the middle face of the cube unfolded is common to both the vertical and the horizontal bar, or double-line, it becomes neutral ground so to say, and belongs to neither. The spirit line remains triadic, and the matter line two-fold -- two being an even and therefore a female number also. Moreover, according to Theon, the Pythagoreans who gave the name of Harmony to the Tetraktis, "because it is a diatessaron in sesquitertia" -- were of opinion that "the division of the canon of the monochord was made by the tetraktis in the duad, triad, and tetrad; for it comprehends a sesquitertia, a sesquialtera, a double, a triple, and a quadruple proportion, the section of which is 27." "In the ancient musical notation, the tetrachord consisted of three degrees or intervals, and four terms of sounds called by the Greeks diatessaron, and by us a fourth." Moreover, the quaternary though an even, therefore a female ("infernal") number, varied according to its form. This is shown by Stanley (in Pythag. p. 61). The 4 was called by the
* In the "Hebrew Egyptian Mystery, the Source of Measures, " the Author shows (on p. 50) that the figure of the cube unfolded in connection with the circle . . . . "becomes . . a cross proper, or of the tau form, and the attachment of the circle to this last gives the ansated cross of the Egyptians . . . . while there are but 6 faces to a cube, the representation of the cross as the cube unfolded, as to the cross-bars, displays one face of the cube as common to two bars, counted as belonging to either . . . (i.e., once counted horizontally, and once vertically)
. . . 4 for the upright and 3 for the cross bar making seven in all," -- 4 for the upright, and 3 for the -- adding -- "Here we have the famous 4, and 3, and 7." Esoteric philosophy explains that four is the symbol of the Universe in its potential state, or chaotic matter, and that it requires Spirit to permeate it actively, i.e., the primordial abstract triangle has to quit its one dimensional quality and spread across that matter, thus forming a manifested basis on the three dimensional space, in order that the Universe
should manifest intelligibly. This is achieved by the cube unfolded. Hence the ansated cross as the symbol of man, generation and life. In Egypt ank signified soul, life and blood. It is the ensouled, living man, the Septenary.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 601 THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.
Pythagoreans the Key-Keeper of Nature; but in union with the 3, which made it seven, it became the most perfect and harmonious number -- nature herself. The four was "the Masculine of Feminine
Form," when forming the Cross; and Seven is "the Master of the Moon," for this planet is forced to alter her appearance every seven days. It is on number seven that Pythagoras composed his doctrine on the Harmony and Music of the Spheres, calling "a tone" the distance of the Moon from the Earth; from the Moon to Mercury half a tone, from thence to Venus the same; from Venus to the Sun l 1/2 tones; from the Sun to Mars a tone; from thence to Jupiter 1/2 a tone; from Jupiter to Saturn 1/2 a tone; and thence to the Zodiac a tone; thus making seven tones -- the diapason harmony. All the melody of nature is in those seven tones, and therefore is called "the Voice of Nature."
Plutarch explains (de Plac. Phil., p. 878) that the Achaean Greeks regarded the tetrad as the root and principle of all things, since it was the number of the elements which gave birth to all visible and invisible created things. With the brothers of the Rosy Cross, the figure of the Cross, or Cube unfolded, formed the subject of a disquisition in one of the theosophic degrees of Peuret, and was treated according to the fundamental principles of light and darkness, or good and evil.
"The intelligible world proceeds out of the divine mind (or unit) after this manner. The Tetraktis reflecting upon its own essence, the first unit, productrix of all things, and on its own beginning, saith thus: Once one, twice two, immediately ariseth a tetrad, having on its top the highest unit, and becomes a Pyramis, whose base is a plain tetrad, answerable to a superficies, upon which the radiant light of the divine unity produceth the form of incorporeal fire, by reason of the descent of Juno (matter) to inferior things. Hence ariseth essential light, not burning but illuminating. This is the creation of the middle world, which the Hebrews call the Supreme, the world of the (their) deity. It is termed Olympus, entirely light, and replete with separate forms, where is the seat of the immortal gods, 'deum domus alta,' whose top is UNITY, its wall trinity, and its superficies quaternity." (Reuchlin, Cabala, p. 689).
The "superficies" has thus to remain a meaningless surface, if left by itself. UNITY only "illuminating" quaternity; the famous lower four has to build for itself also a wall from trinity, if it would be manifested. Moreover, the tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus, is "Jehovah" arrogating to himself very improperly the "Was, Is, Will be," now translated into the "I am that I am, " and interpreted as referring to the highest abstract Deity, while esoterically and in plain truth, it means only periodically chaotic, turbulent, and eternal MATTER with all its potentialities. For the Tetragrammaton is one with Nature or Isis, and is the exoteric series of androgyne gods such as Osiris-
Isis, Jove-Juno, Brahma-Vach, or the Kabalistic Jah-hovah; all male-females. Every anthropomorphic god, in old nations, as Marcelinus Vicinus well observed,
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has his name written with four letters. Thus with the Egyptians, he was Teut; the Arabs, Alla ; the Persians, Sire; the Magi, Orsi; the Mohammedans, Abdi ; the Greeks, Theos; the ancient Turks, Esar; the Latins, Deus; to which J. Lorenzo Anania adds the German Gott; the Sarmatian, Bouh, etc., etc.
The Monad being one, and an odd number, the ancients therefore called the odd, the only perfect numbers; and -- selfishly, perhaps, yet as a fact -- considered them all as masculine and perfect, being
applicable to the celestial gods, while even numbers, such as two, four, six, and especially eight, as being female, were regarded as imperfect, and given only to the terrestrial and infernal deities. In his eighth eclogue, Virgil records the fact by saying, "Numero deus impare gaudet, " "Unequal numbers please the gods."
But number seven, or the heptagon, the Pythagoreans considered to be a religious and perfect number. It was called "Telesphoros," because by it all in the Universe and mankind is led to its end, i.e., its culmination (Philo. de Mund. opif.). Being under the rule of seven sacred planets,* the doctrine of the Spheres shows, from Lemuria to Pythagoras, the seven powers of terrestrial and sublunary nature, as well as the seven great Forces of the Universe, proceeding and evolving in seven tones, which are the seven notes of the musical scale. The heptad (our Septenary) was regarded "as the number of a virgin, because it is unborn" (like the Logos or the "Aja" of the Vedantins); "without a father or a mother, but proceeding directly from the Monad, which is the origin and crown of all things." (Pythag. Triangle, p. 174.) And if the heptad is made to proceed from the Monad directly, then it is, as taught in the Secret Doctrine of the oldest schools, the perfect and sacred number of this Maha-Manvantara of ours.
The septenary, or heptad, was sacred indeed to several gods and goddesses; to Mars, with his seven attendants, to Osiris, whose body was divided into seven and twice seven parts; to Apollo (the Sun), between his seven planets, and playing the hymn to the seven-rayed on his seven-stringed harp; to Minerva, the fatherless and the motherless, and others.
Cis-Himalayan Occultism with its sevening, and because of such sevening, must be regarded as the most ancient, the original of all. It is opposed by some fragments left by Neo-Platonists; and the admirers of the latter, who hardly understand what they defend, say to us: "See, your forerunners believed only in triple man, composed of
* The seven planets are not limited to this number because the ancients knew of no others, but simply because they were the primitive or primordial houses of the seven Logoi. There may be nine and ninety-nine other planets discovered -- this does not alter the fact of these seven alone being sacred.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 603 THE SEPTENARY DEMONSTRATED.
Spirit, Soul, and body. Behold, the Taraka Raja Yoga of India limits that division to 3, we, to 4, and the Vedantins to 5 (koshas)." To this, we of the Archaic school, ask: --
Why then does the Greek poet say that "it is not four but SEVEN who sing the praise of the Spiritual Sun," [[HEPTA ME]]? He says--
Why again is the triune IAO (the Mystery God) called the "fourfold," and yet the triad and tetradic symbols come under one unified name with the Christians -- the Jehovah of the seven letters? Why again in the Hebrew Sheba is the Oath (the Pythagorean Tetraktis) identical with number 7; or, as Mr. G. Massey has it, "taking an oath was synonymous with 'to seven,' and the 10 expressed by the letter Yod, was the full number of IAO-SABAOTH, the ten-lettered God"? In Lucian's Auction, Pythagoras asks, "How do you reckon?" The reply is, "One, Two, Three, Four." "Then, do you see," says Pythagoras, "in what you conceive FOUR there are Ten; then, a perfect triangle and our Oath (tetraktis, four! )," or Seven. Why does Proclus say in Timaeus, c. iii. -- "The Father of the golden verses celebrates the Tetractys as the fountain of perennial nature"?
Simply because those Western Kabalists who quote the exoteric proofs against us have no idea of the real esoteric meaning. Because all the ancient Cosmologies -- the oldest Cosmographies of the two most ancient people of the Fifth Root Race, the Hindu Aryans and the Egyptians, adding to them the early Chinese races (the remnants of the Fourth or Atlantean Race) -- based the whole of their mysteries on number 10: the higher triangle standing for the invisible and metaphysical world, the lower three and four, or the Septenate, for the physical realm. It is not the Jewish Bible that brought number seven into prominence. Hesiod used the words "The seventh is the sacred day," before the Sabbath of "Moses" was ever heard of. The use of number seven was never confined to any one nation. This is well testified by the seven vases in the temple of the Sun, near the ruins of Babion in Upper Egypt; the seven fires burning continually for ages before the altars of Mithra; the seven holy fanes of the Arabians; the seven peninsulas, the seven islands, seven seas, mountains, and rivers of India; and of the Zohar (See Ibn Gebirol); the Jewish Sephiroth of the Seven splendours; the seven Gothic deities, the seven worlds of the Chaldeans and their seven Spirits; the seven constellations mentioned by Hesiod and Homer; and all the interminable sevens which the Orientalists find in every MS. they discover.
What we have to say finally is this: Enough has been brought forward to show why the human principles were and are divided in the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 604 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
esoteric schools into seven. Make it four and it will either leave man minus his lower terrestrial elements, or, if viewed from a physical stand-point, make of him a soulless animal. The Quaternary must be the higher or the lower -- the celestial or terrestrial Tetraktis: to become comprehensible, according to the teachings of the esoteric ancient school man must be regarded as a Septenary. This was so well understood, that even the so-called Christian Gnostics had adopted this time-honoured system (Vide § on "The Seven Souls"). This remained for a long time secret as, though suspected, no MSS. of that time spoke of it clearly enough to satisfy the sceptic. But there comes to our rescue the literary curiosity of our age -- the oldest and best preserved gospel of the Gnostics, Pistis Sophia [[Pictic Cophia]]. To make the proof absolutely complete, we shall quote from an authority (C. W. King) -- the only archaeologist who had a faint glimmer of this elaborate doctrine, and the best writer of the day on the Gnostics and their gems.
According to this extraordinary piece of religious literature -- a true Gnostic fossil -- the human Entity
is the Septenary ray from the One,* just as our school teaches. It is composed of seven elements, four of which are borrowed from the four Kabalistical manifested worlds. Thus "from Asia it gets the Nephesh or seat of the physical appetites (vital breath, also); from Jezirah, the Ruach, or seat of the passions (? !); from Briah, the Neshamah, and from Aziluth it obtains the Chaiah, or principle of spiritual life;" (King). "This looks like an adaptation of the Platonic theory of the Soul's obtaining its respective faculties from the Planets in its downward progress through their Spheres. But the Pistis-
Sophia, with its accustomed boldness, puts this theory into a much more poetical shape (§ 282)." The Inner Man is similarly made up of four constituents, but these are supplied by the rebellious AEons of the Spheres, being the Power -- a particle of the Divine light ("Divinae particula aurae ") yet left in themselves; the Soul (the fifth) "formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments; the [[Antimimon Prieumatos ]], Counterfeit of the Spirit (seemingly answering to our Conscience), (the sixth); and lastly the [[Moira]], Fate** (Karmic Ego), whose
* The Seven Centres of Energy evolved, or rendered objective by the action of Fohat upon the one element; or, in fact, the "Seventh Principle" of the Seven Elements which exist throughout manifested Kosmos. We may here point out that they are in truth the Sephiroth of the Kabalists; the "Seven gifts of the Holy Ghost" in the Christian system; and in a mystical sense, the seven children or sons of Devaki killed before the birth of Krishna by Kamsa. Our seven principles symbolize all of these. We have to part or separate from them before we reach the Krishna or Christ-state, that of a Jivanmukta , and centre ourselves entirely in the highest, the Seventh or the ONE.
** [[Moira]] is destiny, not "Fate," in this case, as it is an appellation, not a proper noun. (See Wolf's transl. in Odyssey 22, 413). But Moira, the Goddess of Fate, is a deity [[Continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 605 THE VEDIC TEACHINGS.
whose business it is to lead the man to the end appointed for him; if he hath to die by the fire, to lead him into the fire, if he hath to die by a wild beast, to lead him unto the wild beast, etc."* -- the SEVENTH!
IT CORROBORATES THE OCCULT TEACHING CONCERNING THE SEVEN GLOBES
AND THE SEVEN RACES.
We have to go to the very source of historical information, if we would bring our best evidence to testify to the facts enunciated. For, though entirely allegorical, the Rig-Vedic hymns are none the less suggestive. The seven rays of Surya (the Sun) are made therein parallel to the Seven Worlds (of every planetary chain), to the seven rivers of heaven and earth, the former being the seven creative Hosts, and the latter the Seven men, or primitive human groups. The Seven ancient Rishis -- the progenitors of all that lives and breathes on earth -- are the seven friends of Agni, his seven "horses," or seven "HEADS." The human race has sprung from fire and water, it is allegorically stated; fashioned by the FATHERS, or the ancestor-sacrificers, from Agni; for Agni, the Aswins, the Adityas (Rig-Veda III., 54, 16, II., 29, 3, 4), are all synonymous with that "sacrificer," or the fathers, variously called Pitar (Pitris, fathers), Angirases ** (Ibid, 1, 31, 17, 139, et seq.), the Sadhyas, "divine sacrificers," the most occult of all. They are all called deva putra rishayah or "the Sons of God" (X., 62; 1, 4). The "sacrificers," moreover, are collectively the ONE sacrificer, the father of the gods, Visvakarman, who performed the great Sarva-Medha ceremony, and ended by sacrificing himself. (See Rig-Vedic Hymns.)
[[Continued fn from previous page]] "who like [[Aisa ]] gives to all their portion of good and evil, " and is therefore Karma ( Vide Liddell). By this abbreviation, however, the subject to Destiny or Karma is meant, the SELF or Ego, and that which is reborn. Nor is [[Antimimon Pneumatos ]] our conscience, but our Buddhi; nor is it again the "counterfeit of Spirit" but "modelled after," or a counterpart of the Spirit -- which Buddhi is, as the vehicle of Atma ( Vide Ar. Theism, 17; and Liddell's definitions).
* C. W. King's Gnostics, p. 38.
** Prof. Roth (in Peter's Lexicon) defines the Angirases as an intermediate race of higher beings between gods and men; while Prof. Weber, according to his invariable custom of modernising and
anthropomorphising the divine, sees in them the original priests of the religion which was common to the Aryan Hindus and Persians. Roth is right. "Angirases" was one of the names of the Dhyanis, or Devas instructors ("guru-deva"), of the late Third, the Fourth, and even of the Fifth Race Initiates.
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In these Hymns the "Heavenly Man" is called purusha, "the Man," (X. 90, 1) from whom Viraj was born (X. 90, 5); and from Viraj, the (mortal) man. It is Varuna (now drawn from his sublime position to be the chief of the lords-Dhyanis or Devas) who regulates all natural phenomena, who "makes a path for the Sun, for him to follow." The seven rivers of the sky (the descending creative gods) and the seven rivers of the earth (the seven primitive mankinds) are under his control, as will be seen. For he who breaks Varuna's laws (Vratani, "courses of natural action," active laws) is punished by Indra (X . 113, 5), the Vedic powerful god, whose Vrata (law or power) is greater than the Vratani of any other god.
Thus, the Rig Veda, the oldest of all the known ancient records, may be shown to corroborate the occult teachings in almost every respect. Its hymns -- the records written by the earliest Initiates of the Fifth (our race) concerning the primordial teachings -- speak of the Seven Races (two still to come) allegorising them by the "seven streams" (1, 35, 8); and of the Five Races ("panca krishtayah ") which have already inhabited this world (ibid) on the five regions "panca pradicah " (IX, 86, 29), as also of the three continents that were.*
It is those scholars only who will master the secret meaning of the Purushasukta (in which the intuition of the modern Orientalist has chosen to see "one of the very latest hymns of the Rig-Veda"), who may hope to understand how harmonious are its teachings and how corroborative of the Esoteric doctrines. One must study in all the abstruseness of their metaphysical meaning the relations in it between the (Heavenly) man "Purusha," SACRIFICED for the production of the Universe and all in it (See Visvakarman), and the terrestrial mortal man (Hymn X. 20, 1, 16), before one realizes the hidden philosophy of this verse: --
"15. He ("Man," purusha, or Visvakarman) had seven enclosing logs of fuel, and thrice seven layers of fuel; when the gods performed the sacrifice, they bound the Man as victim" . . . . This relates to the three Septenary primeval Races, and shows the antiquity of the Vedas, who knew of no other, probably in this earliest oral teachings; and also
* Three submerged, or otherwise destroyed, continents -- the first "continent" of the First Race prevailing to the last and existing to this day -- are described in the occult Doctrine, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian (adopting the name now known in Science), and the Atlantean . Most of Asia issued from under the waters after the destruction of Atlantis; Africa came still later, while Europe is the fifth and the latest -- portions of the two Americas being far older. But of these, more anon. The Initiates who recorded the Vedas -- or the Rishis of our Fifth Race -- wrote at a time when Atlantis had already gone down. Atlantis is the fourth continent that appeared, but the third that disappeared.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 607 THE SEVEN EARTHS AND THE SEVEN RACES.
to the seven primeval groups of mankind, as Visvakarman represents divine humanity collectively.*
The same doctrine is found reflected in the other old religions. It may, and must have come down to us disfigured and misinterpreted, as in the case of the Parsis, who read it in their Vendidad and elsewhere, without understanding the allusions they contain any better than the Orientalists do; yet the doctrine is plainly mentioned in their old works. (See the enumeration of the seven spheres --not the "Karshvare of the earth," as believed -- in Fargard XIX., 30). But see further on.
Comparing the esoteric teaching with the interpretations by James Darmesteter (the Vendidad, edited by Prof. Max Muller), one may see at a glance where the mistake is made, and the cause that produced it. The passage runs thus: --
"The Indo-Iranian Asura (Ahura) was often conceived as seven-fold; by the play of certain mythical (?) formulae and the strength of certain mythical (?) numbers, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds,** and the Supreme God was often made seven-fold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled." ( Vide the foot note). "The seven worlds became in Persia the seven Karshvare of the earth: the earth is divided into seven Karshvare, only one of which is known and accessible to man, the one on which we live, namely, Hvaniratha; which amounts to saying that there are seven earths.*** Parsi mythology knows also of seven heavens. Hvaniratha itself is divided into seven climes. (Orm. Ahr. § 72. "Vendidad Introd. p. Lx.,)" and the same division and doctrine is to be found in the oldest and most revered of the Hindu
* Nor is this archaic teaching so very unscientific, since one of the greatest naturalists of the age -- the late Professor Agassiz -- admitted the multiplicity of the geographical origins of man, and supported it to the end of his life. The unity of the human species was accepted by the illustrious Professor of Cambridge (U.S.A.) in the same way as the Occultists do -- namely, in the sense of their essential and original homogeneity and their origin from one and the same source: -- e.g., Negroes, Aryans, Mongols, etc., have all originated in the same way and from the same ancestors. The latter were all of one essence, yet differentiated, because belonging to seven planes which differed in degree though not in kind. That original physical difference was but little more accentuated by that of geographical and climatic conditions, later on. This is not the theory of Agassiz, of course, but the esoteric version. It is fully discussed in the Addenda (Part III.).
** The seven worlds are, as said, the seven spheres of the chain, each presided over by one of the "Seven great gods" of every religion. When the latter became degraded and anthropomorphized, and the metaphysical ideas nearly forgotten, the synthesis or the highest, the seventh, was separated from the rest, and that personification became the eighth god, whom monotheism tried to unify but -- failed. In no exoteric religion is God really one, if analyzed metaphysically.
*** The six invisible globes of our chain are both "worlds" and "earths" as is our own, albeit invisible. But where could be the Six invisible earths on this globe?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 608 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
scriptures -- the Rig-veda. Mention is made therein of six worlds, besides our earth: the six rajamsi above prithivi -- the earth, -- or "this" (idam) as opposed to that which is yonder (i.e., the six globes on the three other planes or worlds). (See Rig-veda I. 34, III. 56; VII 10, 411, and V., 60. 6).
The italics are ours to point out the identity of the tenets with those of the esoteric doctrine, and the mistake made. The Magi or Mazdeans only believed in what other people believed in; namely, in seven "worlds" or globes of our planetary chain, of which only one is accessible to man (at the present time), our Earth; and in the successive appearance and destruction of seven continents or earths on this our globe, each continent being divided, in commemoration of the seven globes (one visible, six invisible), into seven islands or continents, "seven climes," etc., etc. This was a common belief in those days when the now Secret Doctrine was open to all. It is this multiplicity of localities under Septenary division, that made the Orientalists (led astray, moreover, by the oblivion of both the uninitiated Hindus and Parsis of their primitive doctrines) feel so puzzled by this ever-recurring seven-
fold number, as to regard it as "mythical." It is that oblivion of the first principles which has led the Orientalists off the right track and made them commit the greatest blunders. The same failure is found in the definition of the Gods. Those who are ignorant of the esoteric doctrine of the earliest Aryans, can never assimilate or understand correctly the metaphysical meaning contained in these BEINGS.
Ahura Mazda (Ormazd) was the head and synthesis of the seven Amesha Spentas (or Amshaspends), and, therefore, an Amesha Spenta himself. Just as "Jehovah-Binah Arelim" was the head and synthesis of the Elohim and no more; so Agni-Vishnu-Surya was the synthesis and head, or the focus whence emanated in physics as in metaphysics, from the Spiritual as from the physical Sun, the Seven Rays, the seven fiery tongues, the seven planets or gods. All these became supreme gods and the ONE GOD, but only after the loss of the primeval secrets, the sinking of Atlantis, or "the Flood," and the occupation of India by the Brahmans, who sought safety on the summits of the Himalayas, when even the high table-lands of what is now Tibet became submerged for a time. Ahura Mazda is addressed only as "the Most Blissful Spirit, Creator of the corporeal World" in the Vendidad. "Ahura Mazda" in its literal translation means the "Wise Lord" (Ahura "lord," and Mazda "wise"). Moreover, this name of Ahura, in Sanskrit Asura, connects him with the Manasaputras, the Sons of Wisdom who informed the mindless man, and endowed him with his mind (manas). Ahura (asura) may be derived from the root ah "to be," but in its primal signification it is what the Secret Teaching shows it to be.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 609 THE ZOROASTRIAN SEPTENARY.
When geology shall have found out how many thousands of years ago the disturbed waters of the Indian Ocean reached the highest plateaux of Central Asia, when the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf made one with it, then only will they know the age of the Aryan Brahminical nation, and the time of
its descent into the plains of Hindostan, which it did millenniums later.
Yima, the so-called "first man" in the Vendidad, as much as his twin-brother Yama, the Son of Vaivasvata Manu, belongs to two epochs of the Universal History. He is the "Progenitor" of the Second human Race, hence the personification of the shadows of the Pitris, and the father of the postdiluvian Humanity. The Magi said "Yima," as we say "man" when speaking of mankind. The "fair Yima," the first mortal who converses with Ahura Mazda, is the first "man" who dies or disappears, not the first who is born. The "Son of Vixanghat," was, like the Son of Vaivasvata, the symbolical man, who stood in esotericism as the representative of the first three races and the collective Progenitor thereof. Of these races the first two never died* but only vanished, absorbed in their progeny, and the third knew death only towards its close, after the separation of the sexes and its "Fall" into generation. This is plainly alluded to in the II. Fargard of the Vendidad. Yima refuses to become the bearer of the law of Ahura Mazda, saying "I was not born, I was not taught to be the preacher and the bearer of thy law." And then Ahura Mazda asks him to make his men increase and "watch over his world" (3 and 4).
He refuses to become the priest of Ahura Mazda, because he is his own priest and sacrificer, but he accepts the second proposal. He is made to answer: --
"Yes! . . . yes, I will rule and watch over thy world. There shall be, while I am King, neither cold wind nor hot wind, neither disease nor death."
Then Ahura Mazda brings him a golden ring and a poniard, the emblems of sovereignty, and under the sway of Yima --
"Three hundred winters passed away, and the earth was replenished with flocks and herds, with men, and dogs, and birds, and with red blazing fires," etc. (300 winters mean 300 periods or cycles.)
"Replenished," mark well, that is to say, all this had been on it before; and thus is proven the knowledge of the doctrine about the successive destructions of the world and its life cycles. Once the "300 winters" were over, Ahura Mazda warns Yima that the earth is becoming too full, and men have nowhere to live. Then Yima steps forward, and with the help of Spenta Armaita (the female genius, or Spirit of the Earth) makes that earth stretch out and become larger by
* Death came only after man had become a physical creature, vide supra. The men of the First Race and also of the Second, dissolved and disappeared in their progeny.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 610 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
one-third, after which "new herds and flocks and men" appear upon it. Ahura Mazda warns him again,
and Yima makes the earth by the same magic power to become larger by two-thirds. "Nine hundred winters" pass away, and Yima has to perform the ceremony for the third time. The whole of this is allegorical. The three processes of stretching the earth, refer to the three successive continents and races issuing one after and from the other, as explained more fully elsewhere. After the third time, Ahura Mazda warns Yima in an assembly of "celestial gods and excellent mortals" that upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, and all life will perish. This is the old Mazdean symbolism for the "flood," and the coming cataclysm to Atlantis, which sweeps away every race in its turn. Like Vaivasvata Manu and Noah, Yima makes a vara (an enclosure, an ark) under the God's direction, and brings thither the seed of every living creature, animals and "fires."
It is of this "earth" or new continent that Zarathustra became the law-giver and ruler. This was the Fourth Race in its beginning, after the men of the Third began to die out. Till then, as said (vide supra, foot note) there had been no regular death, but only a transformation, for men had no personality as yet. They had monads -- breaths of the ONE Breath, and as impersonal as the source from which they proceeded. They had bodies, or rather shadows of bodies, which were sinless, hence Karmaless. Therefore, as there was no Kamaloka -- least of all Nirvana or even Devachan -- for the "souls" of men who had no personal Egos, there could be no intermediate periods between the incarnations. Like the Phoenix, primordial man resurrected out of his old into a new body. Each time, and with each new generation, he became more solid, more physically perfect, agreeably with the evolutionary law, which is the Law of Nature. Death came with the complete physical organism, and with it -- moral decay.
This explanation shows one more old religion agreeing in its symbology with the universal Doctrine.
Elsewhere the oldest Persian traditions, the relics of Mazdeism of the still older Magians, are given, and some of them explained. Mankind did not issue from one solitary couple. Nor was there ever a first man -- whether Adam or Yima -- but a first mankind.
It may, or may not be, "mitigated polygenism." Once that both creation ex-nihilo -- an absurdity -- and a superhuman Creator or creators -- a fact -- are made away with by science, polygenism presents no more difficulties or inconveniences (rather fewer from a scientific point of view) than monogenism does.
Nevertheless, it is as scientific as any other claim. For in his Introduction to Nott's and Gliddon's "Types of Mankind," Agassiz declares
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 611 THE SEPTENATE IN THE PURANAS.
his belief in an indefinite number of "primordial races of men created separately"; and remarks that, "whilst in every zoological province animals are of different species, man, in spite of the diversity of his races, always forms one and the same human being."
Occultism defines and limits the number of primordial races to seven, because of the "seven
progenitors," or prajapatis, the evolvers of beings. These are neither gods, nor supernatural Beings, but advanced Spirits from another and lower planet, reborn on this one, and giving birth in their turn in the present Round to present Humanity. This doctrine is again corroborated by one of its echoes -- the Gnostic. In their Anthropology and Genesis of man they taught that "a certain company of Seven angels," formed the first men, who were no better than senseless, gigantic, shadowy forms -- "a mere wriggling worm" (!) writes Irenaeus (I., 24, 1), who takes, as usual, the metaphor for reality.
D.
THE SEPTENARY IN THE EXOTERIC WORKS.
We may now examine other ancient Scriptures and see whether they contain the septenary classification, and, if so, to what degree.
As much, if not much more, even than in the Jewish Bible, scattered about in the thousands of Sanskrit texts, some still unopened, others yet unknown, as well as in all the Puranas, the numbers seven and forty-nine (7 x 7) play a most prominent part. They are found from the Seven creations in Chapter I., down to the seven rays of the Sun at the final Pralaya, which expand into Seven Suns and absorb the material of the whole Universe. Thus the Matsya Purana has: "For the sake of promulgating the Vedas, Vishnu, in the beginning of a Kalpa, related to Manu the story of Narasimha and the events of seven Kalpas." Then again the same Purana shows that "in all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishis* appear by seven and seven, and having established a code of law and morality depart to felicity" -- the Rishis representing many other things besides living Sages.
In Hymn xix., 53, of Atharva Veda (Dr. Muir's translation) one reads: --
*" These are the seven persons by whom in the several Manvantaras" -- says Parasara -- "created beings have been protected. Because the whole world has been pervaded by the energy of the deity, he is entitled Vishnu, from the root Vis 'to enter' or 'pervade,' for all the gods, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the Sons of the Manu, the Indras, all are but the impersonated potencies ( Vibhutayah) of Vishnu" (Vish. Purana). Vishnu is the Universe; and the Universe itself is divided in the Rig Veda into seven regions -- which ought to be sufficient authority, for the Brahmins, at all events.
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" 1. Time carries (us) forward, a steed, with seven rays, a thousand eyes, undecaying, full of fecundity. On him intelligent sages mount; his wheels are all the worlds."
"2. Thus Time moves on seven wheels; he has seven naves; immortality is his axle. He is at present all these worlds. Time hastens onward the first God."
"3. A full jar is contained in Time. We behold him existing in many forms. He is all these worlds in the future. They call him 'Time in the highest Heaven' " . . . .
Now add to this the following verse from the Esoteric volumes: --
"Space and Time are one. Space and Time are nameless, for they are the incognizable THAT, which can be sensed only through its seven rays -- which are the Seven Creations, the Seven Worlds, the Seven Laws, " etc., etc., etc. . . .
Remembering that the Puranas insist on the identity of Vishnu with Time and Space*; and that even the Rabbinical symbol for God is MAQOM, "Space," it becomes clear why, for purposes of a manifesting Deity -- Space, Matter, and Spirit -- the one central point became the Triangle and Quaternary (the perfect Cube), hence Seven. Even the Pravaha wind (the mystic and occult Force that gives the impulse to, and regulates the course of the stars and planets) is septenary. The Kurma and Linga Puranas enumerate seven principal winds of that name, which winds are the principles of Cosmic Space. They are intimately connected with Dhruva** (now Alpha), the Pole-Star, which is connected in its turn with the production of various phenomena through cosmic forces.
Thus, from the Seven Creations, seven Rishis, Zones, Continents, Principles, etc., etc. in the Aryan Scriptures, the number has passed through Indian, Egyptian, Chaldaic, Greek, Jewish, Roman, and finally Christian mystic thought, until it landed in and remained impressed indelibly on every exoteric theology. The seven old books stolen out of Noah's ark by Ham, and given to Cush, his son, and the seven Brazen columns of Ham and Cheiron, are a reflection and a remem-
* Vishnu is all -- the worlds, the stars, the seas, etc., etc. "Vishnu is all that is, all that is not . . . . but is not Vastubhuta," "a substance" (Vishnu Purana, Book II. ch. xii). "That which people call the highest God is not a substance but the cause of it; not one that is here, there, or elsewhere, not what we see, but that in which all is -- SPACE."
** Therefore it is said in the Puranas that the view of Dhruva (the polar star) at night, and of the celestial porpoise (Sisumara, a constellation) "expiates whatever sin has been committed during the day." The fact is that the rays of the four stars in the circle of perpetual apparition -- the Agni, Mahendra, Kasyapa, and Dhruva, placed in the tail of Ursa Minor (Sisumara) -- focussed in a certain way and on a certain object produce extraordinary results. The astro-magians of India will understand what is meant.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 613 WHO ARE THE MARUTS?
brance of the Seven primordial mysteries instituted according to the "Seven secret emanations," the "Seven Sounds," and seven rays -- the spiritual and sidereal models of the seven thousand times seven copies of them in later aeons.
The mysterious number is once more prominent in the no less mysterious Maruts. The Vayu Purana shows, and Harivansa corroborates, that the Maruts -- the oldest as the most incomprehensible of all the secondary or lower gods in the Rig Veda -- "are born in every manvantara (Round) seven times seven (or 49); that in each Manvantara, four times seven (or twenty-eight) they obtain emancipation, but their places are filled up by persons reborn in that character. " What are the Maruts in their esoteric meaning, and who those persons "reborn in that character"? In the Rig and other Vedas, the Maruts are represented as the storm gods and the friends and allies of Indra; they are the "Sons of heaven and of earth." This led to an allegory that makes them the children of Siva, the great patron of the Yogis, "the MAHA-YOGI, the great ascetic, in whom is centred the highest perfection of austere penance and abstract meditation, by which the most unlimited powers are obtained, marvels and miracles are worked, the highest spiritual knowledge is acquired, and union with the great spirit of the universe is eventually gained. " In the Rig Veda the name Siva is unknown, but the god is called Rudra, which is a word used for Agni, the fire god, the Maruts being called therein his sons. In the Ramayana and the Puranas, their mother, Diti -- the sister, or complement of, and a form of Aditi -- anxious to obtain a son who would destroy Indra, is told by Kasyapa the Sage, that "if, with thoughts wholly pious and person entirely pure, she carrys the babe in her womb for a hundred years" she will get such a son. But Indra foils her in the design. With his thunderbolt he divides the embryo in her womb into seven portions, and then divides every such portion into seven pieces again, which become the swift-
moving deities, the Maruts.* These deities are only another aspect, or a development of the Kumaras, who are Rudras in their patronymic, like many others.**
Diti, being Aditi, unless the contrary is proven to us, Aditi, we say, or Akasa in her highest form, is the Egyptian seven-fold heaven. Every true Occultist will understand what this means. Diti, we repeat, is the sixth
* In the Ramayana it is Bala-Rama, Krishna's elder brother, who does it.
** With regard to the origin of Rudra, it is stated in several Puranas that his (spiritual) progeny, created in him by Brahma, was not confined to either the seven Kumaras or the eleven Rudras, etc., but "comprehends infinite numbers of beings in person and equipments like their (virgin) father. Alarmed at their fierceness, numbers, and immortality, Brahma desires his son Rudra to form creatures of a different and mortal nature." Rudra refusing to create, desists, etc., hence Rudra is the first rebel. (Linga, Vayu, Matsya, and other Puranas.)
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principle of metaphysical nature, the Buddhi of Akasa. Diti, the mother of the Maruts, is one of her terrestrial forms, made to represent, at one and the same time, the divine Soul in the ascetic, and the divine aspirations of mystic Humanity toward deliverance from the webs of Maya, and final bliss in consequence. Indra, now degraded, because of the Kali Yuga, when such aspirations are no more general but have become abnormal through a general spread of Ahamkara (the feeling of Egotism, Self, or I-AM-NESS) and ignorance -- was, in the beginning, one of the greatest gods of the Hindu
Pantheon, as the Rig Veda shows. Sura-dhipa, "the chief of the gods," has fallen down from Jishnu, "the leader of the celestial host," -- the Hindu St. Michael -- to an opponent of asceticism, the enemy of every holy aspiration. He is shown married to Aindri (Indrani), the personification of Aindri-yaka, the evolution of the element of senses, whom he married "because of her voluptuous attractions"; after which he began sending celestial female demons to excite the passions of holy men, Yogis, and "to beguile them from the potent penances which he dreaded." Therefore, Indra, now characterized as "the god of the firmament, the personified atmosphere" -- is in reality the cosmic principle Mahat, and the fifth human -- Manas in its dual aspect: as connected with Buddhi; and as allowing himself to be dragged down by his Kama-principle (the body of passions and desires). This is demonstrated by Brahma telling the conquered god that his frequent defeats were due to Karma, and were a punishment for his licentiousness, and the seduction of various nymphs. It is in this latter character that he seeks, to save himself from destruction, to destroy the coming "babe" destined to conquer him: -- the babe, of course, allegorizing the divine and steady will of the Yogi -- determined to resist all such temptations, and thus destroy the passions within his earthly personality. Indra succeeds again, because flesh conquers spirit -- (Diti is shown frustrated in the Dvapara Yug, during that period when the Fourth Race was flourishing). He divides the "Embryo" (of new divine adeptship, begotten once more by the Ascetics of the Aryan Fifth Race), into seven portions -- a reference not alone to the seven sub-races of the new Root-Race, in each of which there will be a "Manu,"* but also to the seven degrees of adeptship -- and then each
* Notwithstanding the terrible, and evidently purposed , confusion of Manus, Rishis, and their progeny in the Puranas, one thing is made clear: there have been and there will be seven Rishis in every Root-
Race (called also Manvantara in the sacred books) as there are fourteen Manus in every Round, the "presiding gods, the Rishis and Sons of the Manus" being identical. (See Book III. ch. 1 of Vishnu Purana.) "Six" Manvantaras are given, the Seventh being our own in the Vishnu Purana. The Vayu Purana furnishes the nomenclature of the Sons of the fourteen Manus in every Manvantara, and the Sons of the seven Sages or Rishis. The latter are the progeny [[Continued on next page]]
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portion into seven pieces -- alluding to the Manu-Rishis of each Root-Race, and even sub-race.
It does not seem difficult to perceive what is meant by the Maruts obtaining "four times seven " emancipations in every "manvantara," and by those persons who, being reborn in that character (of the Maruts in their esoteric meaning), "fill up their places." The Maruts represent (a) the passions that storm and rage within every candidate's breast, when preparing for an ascetic life -- this mystically; (b) the occult potencies concealed in the manifold aspects of Akasa 's lower principles -- her body, or sthula sarira, representing the terrestrial, lower, atmosphere of every inhabited globe -- this mystically and sidereally; (c) actual conscious Existences, Beings of a cosmic and psychic nature.
At the same time "Maruts" is, in occult parlance, one of the names given to those EGOS of great Adepts who have passed away, and who are known also as Nirmanakayas; of those Egos for whom --
since they are beyond illusion -- there is no Devachan, and who, having either voluntarily renounced it for the good of mankind, or not yet reached Nirvana, remain invisible on earth. Therefore are the Maruts* shown firstly -- as the sons of Siva-Rudra -- the "Patron Yogi," whose "third eye," mystically, must be acquired by the ascetic before he becomes an adept; then, in their cosmic character, as the subordinates of Indra and his opponents -- variously. The "four times seven" emancipations have a reference to the four Rounds, and the four Races that preceded ours, in each of which Marut-Jivas (monads) have been re-born, and have obtained final liberation, if they have only availed themselves of it. Instead of which, preferring the good of mankind, which would struggle still more hopelessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery, were it not for this extraneous help -- they are re-born over and over again "in that character," and thus "fill up their own places." Who they are, "on earth" -- every student of Occult science knows. And he also knows that the Maruts are Rudras, among whom also the family of Twashtri, a synonym of Visvakarman -- the great patron of the Initiates -- is included. This gives us an ample knowledge of their true nature.
[[Continued.from previous page]] of the Progenitors of mankind. All the Puranas speak of the seven Prajapatis of this period (Round).
* "Chakshuba was the Manu of the sixth period (Third Round and Third Race), in which Indra was Manojava" (Mantradruma in the Bhagavata Purana). As there is a perfect analogy between the "great Round" (Mahakalpa), each of the seven Rounds, and each of the seven great Races in every one of the Rounds -- therefore, Indra of the sixth period, or Third Round, corresponds to the close of the Third Race (at the time of the Fall or the separation of sexes). Rudra, as the father of the Maruts, has many points of contact with Indra, the Marutwan, or "lord of the Maruts." To receive a name Rudra is said to have wept for it. Brahma called him Rudra; but he wept seven times more and so obtained seven other names -- of which he uses one during each "period."
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The same for the Septenary Division of Kosmos and human principles. The Puranas, along with other sacred texts, teem with allusions to this. First of all, the mundane Egg which contained Brahma, or the Universe, "was externally invested with seven natural elements, at first loosely enumerated as Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and three secret elements" (Book I.); then the "World" is said to be "encompassed on every side" by seven elements, also within the egg -- as explained, "the universe is encompassed on every side, above and below by the Andakat 'aha -- the shell of the egg of Brahma." . . . Around the shell flows water, which is surrounded with fire; fire by air; air by ether; ether by the origin of the elements (Ahamkara); the latter by Universal Mind ("Intellect" in the Texts) (Book II., ch. VII. Vishnu Purana). It relates to spheres of being as much as to principles. Prithivi is not our Earth, but the World, the Solar system, and means the broad, the Wide. In the Vedas -- the greatest of all authorities, though needing the key to read it correctly -- three terrestrial and three celestial earths are mentioned as having been called into existence simultaneously with Bhumi -- our earth. We have often been told that six, not seven, appears to be the number of spheres, principles, etc. We answer that there are, in fact, only six principles in man; since his body is no principle, but the covering, the shell
thereof. So with the planetary chain; speaking of which, esoterically, the Earth (as well as the seventh, or rather fourth plane, one that stands as the seventh if we count from the first triple kingdom of the Elementals that begin the formation) may be left out of consideration, being (to us) the only distinct body of the seven. The language of occultism is varied. But supposing that three earths only, instead of seven, are meant in the Vedas, what are those three, since we still know of but one? Evidently there must be an occult meaning in the statement under consideration. Let us see. The "Earth that floats" on the Universal Ocean (of Space), which Brahma divides in the Puranas into seven zones, is Prithivi, the world divided into seven principles; a cosmic division looking metaphysical enough, but, in reality, physical in its occult effects. Many Kalpas later, our Earth is mentioned, and, in its turn, is divided into seven zones* on that same law of analogy that guided ancient philosophers. After which one finds on it seven continents, seven isles, seven oceans, seven seas and rivers, seven mountains, and seven climates, etc., etc., etc.**
** In Vishnu Purana, Book II., chap. iv., it is stated that the EARTH, "with its continents, mountains, oceans, and exterior shell, is fifty crores (500 millions) of yojanas in extent," to which the commentator remarks that "this comprises the planetary spheres; for the diameter of the seven zones and oceans -- each ocean being of the same diameter as the continent it encloses, and each successive continent being twice the [[Continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 617 PERSIAN SYMBOLOGY.
Furthermore, it is not only in the Hindu Scriptures and philosophy that one finds references to the Seven Earths, but in the Persian, Phoenician, Chaldean, and Egyptian Cosmogonies, and even in Rabbinical literature. The Phoenix* -- called by the Hebrews Onech [Heb char] (from Phenoch, Enoch, symbol of a secret cycle and initiation), and by the Turks, Kerkes -- lives a thousand years, after which, kindling a flame, it is self-consumed; and then, reborn from itself -- it lives another thousand years, up to seven times seven: (See "Book of Ali" -- Russian transl.), when comes the day of Judgment. The "seven times seven," 49, are a transparent allegory, and an allusion to the forty-nine "Manus," the Seven Rounds, and the seven times seven human cycles in each Round on each globe. The Kerkes and the Onech stand for a race cycle, and the mystical tree Ababel -- the "Father Tree " in the Kuran -- shoots out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection of the Kerkes or Phoenix; the "Day of judgment" meaning a "minor Pralaya " (See "Esoteric Buddhism "). The author of the "Book of God" and the "Apocalypse" believes that "the Phoenix is very plainly the same as the Simorgh, the Persian roc, and the account which is given us of this last bird, yet more decisively establishes the opinion that the death and revival of the Phoenix exhibit the successive destruction and reproduction of the world, which many believed to be effected by the agency of a fiery deluge" -- (p. 175); and a watery one in turn. "When the Simorgh was asked her age, she informed Caherman that this world is very ancient, for it has been already seven times replenished with beings different from men, and seven times depopulated;** that the age of the human race, in which we now are, is to endure seven thousand numbers, and that she herself had seen twelve of these revolutions, and knew
not how many more she had to see." (Oriental Collections, ii., 119.)
The above, however, is no new statement. From Bailly, in the last century, down to Dr. Kenealy, in this one, these facts have been noticed by several writers, but now a connection can be established between
[[Continued from previous page]] diameter of that which precedes it -- amounts to but two crores or fifty-four lakhs etc. . . . Whenever any contradictions in different Puranas occur, they have to be ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the like." "The like" ought to read "Occult meaning," which explanation is withheld by the commentator, who wrote for exoteric, sectarian purposes, and was misunderstood by the translator for various other reasons, the least of which is -- ignorance of the esoteric philosophy.
* The Phoenix, connected with the Solar Cycle of 600 years (with ciphers taken out or with more added according to which cycle is meant), the Western cycle of the Greeks and other nations -- is a generic symbol for several kinds of cycles. Fuller details will be given in the section on "Kalpas and Cycles."
** The tense is the "past" because the book is allegorical, and has to veil the truths contained.
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the Persian oracle and the Nazarene prophet. Says the author of the "Book of God": --
"The Simorgh is in reality the same as the winged Singh of the Hindus, and the Sphinx of the Egyptians. It is said that the former will appear at the end of the world . . . . as a monstrous lion-bird. From these the Rabbins have borrowed their mythos of an enormous Bird, sometimes standing on the Earth, sometimes walking in the ocean . . . while its head props the sky; and with the symbol, they have also adopted the doctrine to which it relates. They teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe, that each reproduced system will last seven thousand years; (?) and that the total duration of the universe will be 49,000 years. This opinion, which involves the doctrine of the pre-existence of each renewed creature, they may either have learned during their Babylonian captivity, or it may have been part of the primeval religion which their priests had preserved from remote times" (p. 176). It shows rather that the initiated Jews borrowed, and their non-initiated successors, the Talmudists, lost the sense, and applied the Seven Rounds, and the forty-nine races, etc., to the wrong end.
Not only "their priests," but those of every other country. The Gnostics, whose various teachings are the many echoes of the one primitive and universal doctrine, put the same numbers, under another form, in the mouth of Jesus in the very occult Pistis Sophia. We say more: even the Christian editor or author of Revelation has preserved this tradition and speaks of the Seven RACES, four of which, with part of the fifth, are gone, and two have to come. It is stated as plainly as could be stated in chapter作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:24
xvii., verses 9 and 10. Thus saith the angel: "And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are SEVEN Kings, five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come . . . . " Who, acquainted in the least with the symbolical language of old, will fail to discern in the five Kings that have fallen, the four Root-Races that were, and part of the fifth, the one that is; and in the other, that "is not yet come," the sixth and seventh coming root races, as also the sub-races of this, our present race? Another still more forcible allusion to the Seven Rounds and the forty-nine root-races in Leviticus, will be found elsewhere in the Addenda, Part III.
-------
E.
SEVEN IN ASTRONOMY, SCIENCE, AND MAGIC.
Again, number seven is closely connected with the occult significance of the Pleiades, those seven daughters of Atlas, "the six present, the
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seventh hidden." In India they are connected with their nursling, the war god, Karttikeya. It is the Pleiades (in Sanskrit, Krittika) who gave the god their name, for Karttikeya is the planet Mars, astronomically. As a god he is the son of Rudra, born without the intervention of a woman. He is a Kumara, a "virgin youth" again, generated in the fire from the Seed of Siva -- the holy spirit -- hence called Agni-bhu. The late Dr. Kenealy believed that, in India, Karttikeya is the secret symbol of the cycle of Naros, composed of 600, 666, and 777 years, according to whether it is solar or lunar, divine or mortal, years that are counted; and the six visible, or the seven actual sisters, the Pleiades, are needed for the completion of this most secret and mysterious of all the astronomical and religious symbols. Therefore, when made to commemorate one particular event, Karttikeya appeared, of old, as a Kumara, an ascetic, with six heads -- one for each century of the Naros. When the symbolism was needed for another event, then, in conjunction with the seven sidereal sisters, Karttikeya is seen accompanied by Kaumara (or Sena) his female aspect. He is then riding on a peacock -- the bird of Wisdom and Occult Knowledge, and the Hindu Phoenix, whose Greek relation with the 600 years of Naros is well-known. A six-rayed star (double triangle) a Swastica, a six and occasionally seven-
pointed crown is on his brow; the peacock's tail represents the sidereal heavens; and the twelve signs of the Zodiac are hidden on his body; for which he is also called Dwadasa Kara," ("the twelve-
handed"), and Dwadasaksha, "twelve-eyed." It is as Sakti-dhara, however, the "Spear-holder," and the conqueror of Taraka, "Taraka-jit," that he is shown most famous.
The years of the Naros, being (in India) counted in two ways -- either "100 years of the gods," (divine years) -- or 100 mortal years -- one can see the tremendous difficulty for the non-initiated in comprehending correctly this cycle, which plays such an important part in St. John's Revelation. It is the truly apocalyptic Cycle; yet in none of the numerous speculations about it have we found anything
but a few approximate truths, because of its being of various lengths and relating to various pre-
historic events.
It has been urged against the duration claimed by the Babylonians for their divine ages, that Suidas shows the ancients counting, in their chronological computations, days for years. Dr. Sepp in his ingenious plagiarism -- exposed elsewhere -- of the Hindu 432 in thousands and millions of years (the duration of the Yugas) which he dwarfed to 4,320 lunar years before the "birth of Christ" -- as "foreordained" in the sidereal (besides the invisible) heavens, and proved "by the apparition of the Star of Bethlehem" -- appeals to Suidas and his authority. But Suidas had no other warrant for it than his own speculations, and he
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was no Initiate. He cites, as a proof, Vulcan, in showing him as having, according to chronological claim, reigned 4,477 years, i.e., 4,477 days, as he thinks, or rendered in years, 12 years, 3 months, and 7 days; he has 5 days in his original -- thus committing an error even in such an easy calculation. (See Suidas, art. [[Heelios]].) True, there are other ancient writers guilty of like fallacious speculations -- Calisthenes, for instance, who assigns to the astronomical observations of the Chaldeans only 1,903 years, whereas Epigenes recognises 720,000 years (Pliny. Histor. Natur. Lib. VII. c. 56.) The whole of these hypotheses made by profane writers are based upon and due to a misunderstanding. The chronology of all the Western peoples, ancient Greeks and Romans, was borrowed from India. Now, it is said in the Tamil edition of Bagavadam that 15 solar days make a Paccham; two paccham (or 30 days) are a month of the mortals, adding that such a month is only one day of the Pitar Devata (Pitris). Again, two of these months constitute a roodoo, three roodoo make an ayanam, and two ayanams a year -- which year of the mortals is but a day of the gods. It is on such misunderstood teachings that some Greeks have imagined that all the initiated priests had transformed days into years!
This mistake of the ancient Greek and Latin writers became pregnant with results in Europe. At the close of the past and the beginning of this century, relying upon the purposely mutilated accounts of Hindu chronology, brought from India by certain too zealous and as unscrupulous missionaries, Bailly, Dupuis, and others built quite a fantastic theory upon the subject. Because the Hindus had made half a revolution of the moon, a measure of time; and because a month composed of only fifteen days -- of which Quint. Curtius speaks (Menses in quinos dies descriperunt dies. Quint. Curt. LVIII., c. 9) -- is found mentioned in Hindu literature, therefore, it is a verified fact that their year was only half a year, when it was not called a day. The Chinese, too, divided their Zodiac into twenty-four parts, hence their year into twenty-four fortnights, but such computation did not, nor does it prevent their having an astronomical year just the same as ours. And they have a period of sixty days -- the Southern Indian Roodoo, to this day in some provinces. Moreover, Diodorus Siculus (Lib. I. § 26, p. 30) calls "thirty days an Egyptian year," or that period during which the moon performs a complete revolution. Pliny and Plutarch both speak of it (Hist. Nat. Lib. VII., c. 48, Vol. III., p. 185, and Life of Numa, § 16); but does it stand to reason that the Egyptians, who knew astronomy as well as any other people did, made the lunar month consist of thirty days, when it is only twenty-eight days with fractions? This lunary period had an occult meaning surely as much as the Ayanam and the roodoo of the Hindus had. The year of two months' duration, and the period of sixty days also,
was a universal measure of time in antiquity, as Bailly himself shows in his Traite de l'Astronomie Orientale. The Chinamen, according to their own books, divided their year into two parts, from one equinox to the other (Mem. Acad. Ins. T. XVI., c. 48, Tom. III., p. 183); the Arabs anciently divided the year into six seasons, each composed of two months; in the Chinese astronomical work called Kioo-
tche, it is said that two moons make a measure of time, and six measures a year; and to this day the aborigines of Kamschatka have their years of six months, as they had when visited by Abbe Chappe (Voyage to Siberia, Vol. III., p. 19). But is all this a reason to say that when the Hindu Puranas say "a solar year" they mean one solar day! It is the knowledge of the natural laws that make of seven the root nature-number, so to say, in the manifested world -- at any rate in our present terrestrial life-cycle -
- and the wonderful comprehension of its workings, that unveiled to the ancients so many of the mysteries of nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the sidereal, terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old astronomers to calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respective effects on the march of events; to record beforehand (prophecy, it is called) the influence which they will have on the course and development of the human races. The Sun, Moon, and planets being the never-erring time measurers, whose potency and periodicity were well known, became thus the great Ruler and rulers of our little system in all its seven domains, or "spheres of action."*
This has been so evident and remarkable, that even many of the modern men of Science, Materialists as well as Mystics, had their attention called to this law. Physicians and theologians, mathematicians and psychologists have drawn the attention of the world repeatedly to this fact of periodicity in the behaviour of "Nature." These numbers are explained in the "Commentaries" in these words.
THE CIRCLE IS NOT THE "ONE" BUT THE ALL.
IN THE HIGHER [heaven] THE IMPENETRABLE RAJAH ["ad Mutant," see Atharva-Veda X., 105], IT [the Circle] BECOMES ONE, BECAUSE [it is] THE INDIVISIBLE, AND THERE CAN BE NO TAU IN IT.
IN THE SECOND [of the three "Rajamsi " (tritiye), or the three "Worlds"] THE ONE BECOMES TWO [male and female]; AND THREE [add the Son or logos]; AND THE SACRED FOUR ["tetractis," or the "Tetragrammaton."]
IN THE THIRD [the lower world or our earth] THE NUMBER BECOMES FOUR, AND THREE, AND TWO. TAKE THE FIRST TWO, AND THOU WILT
* The spheres of action of the combined Forces of Evolution and Karma are (1) the Super-spiritual or noumenal; (2) the Spiritual; (3) the Psychic; (4) the Astro-ethereal; (5) the Sub-astral; (6) the Vital; and (7) the purely physical spheres.
OBTAIN SEVEN, THE SACRED NUMBER OF LIFE; BLEND [the latter] WITH THE MIDDLE RAJAH, AND THOU WILT HAVE NINE, THE SACRED NUMBER OF BEING AND BECOMING."*
When the Western Orientalists have mastered the real meaning of the Rig Vedic divisions of the World -- the two-fold, three-fold, six and seven-fold, and especially the nine-fold division, the mystery of the cyclic divisions applied to heaven and earth, gods and men, will become clearer to them than it is now. For --
"THERE IS A HARMONY OF NUMBERS IN ALL NATURE; in the force of gravity, in the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light, electricity, and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and plants, in the perception of the mind. The direction, indeed, of modern natural and physical science, is towards a generalization which shall express the fundamental laws of all, by one simple numerical ratio. We would refer to Professor Whewell's 'Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,' and to Mr. Hay's researches into the laws of harmonious colouring and form. From these it appears that the number seven is distinguished in the laws regulating the harmonious Perception of forms, colours, and sounds, and probably of taste also, if we could analyse our sensations of this kind with mathematical accuracy." ("Medical Review," July, 1844).
So much so, indeed, that more than one physician has stood aghast at the periodical septenary return of the cycles in the rise and fall of various complaints, and naturalists have felt themselves at an utter loss to explain this law. "The birth, growth, maturity, vital functions . . . . change, diseases, decay and death, of insects, reptiles, fishes, birds, mammals, and even of man, are more or less controlled by a law of completion in weeks," or seven days.** Dr. Laycock (Lancet, 1842-3), writing on the Periodicity of Vital Phenomena, records a "most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in insects."***
* In Hinduism, as understood by the Orientalists from the Atharvaveda, the three rajamsi refer to the three strides of Vishnu; his ascending higher step, being taken in the highest world (A. V., VII., 99, 1, cf. I 155, 5). It is the divo rajah, or the "sky," as they take it. But it is something besides this in Occultism. The sentence pareshu, guhyeshu, vrateshu, cf. I, 155, 3, and IX., 75, 2; or again, verse X., 114, in Atharvaveda -- has yet to be explained.
** H. Grattan Guinness, F.R.G.S., in his "Approaching End of the Age."
*** Having given a number of illustrations from natural history, the doctor adds: "The facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts, and cannot happen day after day in so many millions of animals of every kind, FROM THE LARVA OR OVUM OF A MINUTE INSECT UP TO MAN, at definite periods, from a mere chance or coincidence . . . I think it impossible to come to any less general
conclusion than this, that in animals, changes occur every three and a half, seven, fourteen, twenty-
one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite number of weeks" or septenary cycles. Again, the same Dr. Laycock states that: -- "Whatever type the fever may exhibit, there will be a paroxysm on the seventh day . . . the fourteenth will be remarkable as a day of amendment . . . " (either cure or death taking place). "If the fourth (paroxysm) be severe, and the fifth less so, the disease will end at the seventh paroxysm, and . . . change for the better . . . will be seen on the fourteenth day , [[footnote continued on following page]]
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To all of which Mr. Grattan Guinness, the author of "The Approaching End of the Age," says very pertinently, as he defends Biblical Chronology, "And man's life . . . is a week, a week of decades. 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten.' Combining the testimony of all these facts, we are bound to admit that there prevails in organic mature a law of septiform periodicity, a law of completion in weeks" (p. 269). Without accepting the conclusions, and especially the premises of the learned Founder of "the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions," the writer accepts and welcomes his researches in the occult chronology of the Bible. Just as, while rejecting the theories and hypotheses of modern Science and its generalizations, we bow before its great achievements in the world of the physical, or in all the minor details of material nature.
There is most assuredly an occult "chronological system in Hebrew Scripture" -- the Kabala being its warrant; there is in it "a system of
[[Continued from previous page]] namely, about three or four o'clock a.m., when the system is most languid." (See "Approaching End of the Age," by Grattan Guinness, pp. 258 to 269, wherein this is quoted.)
This is pure "soothsaying" by cyclic calculations, and it is connected with Chaldean astrolatry and astrology. Thus materialistic Science -- medicine, the most materialistic of all -- applies our occult laws to diseases, studies natural history with its help, recognizes its presence as a fact in nature, and yet must needs pooh-pooh the same archaic knowledge when claimed by the Occultists. For if the mysterious Septenary Cycle is a law in nature, and it is one, as proven; if it is found controlling the evolution and involution (or death) in the realms of entomology, icthyology and ornithology, as in the Kingdom of the Animal, mammalia and man -- why cannot it be present and acting in Kosmos, in general, in its natural (though occult) divisions of time, races, and mental development? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient adepts have studied and thoroughly mastered these cyclic laws under all their aspects? Indeed, Dr. Stratton states as a physiological and pathological fact, that "in health the human pulse is more frequent in the morning than in the evening for six days out of seven; and that on the seventh day it is slower." (Ibid. Edinb. Med. and Surg. Journal, Jan. 1843.) Why, then, should not an Occultist show the same in cosmic and terrestrial life in the pulse of the planet and races? Dr. Laycock divides life by three great septenary periods; the first and last, each stretching over 21 years, and the central period or prime of life lasting 28 years, or four times seven.
He subdivides the first into seven distinct stages, and the other two into three minor periods, and says that "The fundamental unit of the greater periods is one week of seven days, each day being twelve hours"; and that "single and compound multiples of this unit, determine the length of these periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit of twelve hours determine the lesser periods. This law binds all periodic vital phenomena together, and links the periods observed in the lowest annulose animals, with those of man himself, the highest of the vertebrate." If Science does this, why should the latter scorn the Occult information, namely, that (speaking Dr. Laycock's language) "one week of the manvantaric (lunar) fortnight, of fourteen days (or seven manus), that fortnight of twelve hours in a day representing seven periods or seven races -- is now passed?" This language of science fits our doctrine admirably. We (mankind) have lived over "a week of seven days, each day being twelve hours," since three and a half races are now gone for ever, the fourth is submerged, and we are now in the Fifth Race.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 624 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
weeks" -- which is based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be found in the old Jyotisha.* And there are in it cycles of "the week of days," of the "week of months," of years, of centuries, and even of millenniums, decamillenniums, and more, or "the week of years of years."** But all this can be found in the archaic doctrine. And if this common source of the chronology in every Scripture, however veiled, is denied in the case of the Bible, then the six days, and a Sabbath, the seventh, can hardly disconnect Genesis from the Puranic Cosmogonies. For the first "Week of Creation" shows the septiformity of its chronology and thus connects it with Brahma's "Seven Creations." The able volume from the pen of Mr. Grattan Guinness, in which he has collected on some 760 pages every proof of that septiform calculation, is good evidence. For if the Bible chronology is, as he says, "regulated by the law of weeks," and if it is septenary, whatever the measures of the creation week and the length of its days; and if, finally, "the Bible system includes weeks on a great variety of scales," then this system is shown to be identical with all the pagan systems. Moreover, the attempt to show that 4,320 years (in lunar months) elapsed between "Creation" and the Nativity, is a clear and unmistakable connection with the 4,320,000 of the Hindu Yugas. Otherwise, why make such efforts to prove that these figures, which are pre-eminently Chaldean and Indo-Aryan, play such a part in the New Testament? We shall prove it now still more forcibly.
Let the impartial critic compare the two accounts -- the Vishnu Purana and the Bible -- and he will find that the "seven creations" of Brahma are at the foundation of the "week" of creation in Genesis i. The two allegories are different, but the systems are all built on the same foundation-stone. The Bible can be understood only by the light of the Kabala. Take the Zohar, the "Book of Concealed Mystery," however now disfigured, and compare. The seven Rishis and the fourteen Manus of the seven Manvantaras -- issue from Brahma's head; they are his "mind-born sons," and it is with them that begins the division of mankind and its races from the Heavenly man, "the Logos" (the manifested), who is Brahma Prajapati. Says (V. 70 in) the "Ha Idra Rabba Qadisha" (the Greater Holy Assembly) of the skull (head)
* See for the length of such cycles or Yugas in Vriddha Garga and other ancient astronomical Sections (Jyotisha). They vary from the cycle of five years -- which Colebrooke calls "the cycle of the Vedas," specified in the institutes of Parasara, "and the basis of calculation for larger cycles" (Miscell. Essays, Vol. I., pp. 106 and 108) -- up to the Mahayuga or the famous cycle of 4,320,000 years.
** The Hebrew word for "week" is Seven; and any length of time divided by Seven would have been a "week" in their day, even 49,000,000 years, as it is seven times seven millions. But their calculation is throughout septiform.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 625 THE HAIRY SYMBOL.
of Macroprosopus, the ancient One* (Sanat, an appellation of Brahma), that in every one of his hairs is a "hidden fountain issuing from the concealed brain." "And it shineth and goeth forth through that hair unto the hair of Microprosopus, and from it (which is the manifest QUATERNARY, the Tetragrammaton) his brain is formed; and thence that brain goeth into THIRTY and TWO paths" (or the triad and the duad, or again 432). And again: (V. 80) "Thirteen curls of hair exist on the one side and on the other of the skull" -- i.e., six on one and six on the other, the thirteenth being also the fourteenth, as it is male-female, "and through them commenceth the division of the hair" (the division of things, Mankind and Races).
"We six are lights which shine forth from a seventh (light)," saith Rabbi Abba; "thou art the seventh light" (the synthesis of us all, he adds, speaking of Tetragrammaton and his seven "companions," whom he calls "the eyes of Tetragrammaton.")
TETRAGRAMMATON is Brahma Prajapati, who assumed four forms, in order to create four kinds of supernal creatures, i.e., made himself fourfold, or the manifest Quaternary (see Vishnu Purana, Book I. ch. V.); and who, after that, is re-born in the seven Rishis, his Manasaputras, "mind-born sons," who became later, 9, 21 and so on, who are all said to be born from various parts of Brahma**
* Brahma creates in the first Kalpa (day one) various "sacrificial animals" pasu -- or the celestial bodies and the Zodiacal signs, and plants which he uses in sacrifices at the opening of Treta Yuga. The esoteric meaning of it shows him proceeding cyclically and creating astral prototypes on the descending spiritual arc and then on the ascending physical arc. The latter is the sub-division of a two-
fold creation, subdivided again into seven descending and seven ascending degrees of spirit falling, and of matter ascending -- the inverse of what takes place (as in a mirror which reflects the right on the left side) in this manvantara of ours. It is the same, esoterically, in the Elohistic Genesis (chap. i.), and in the Jehovistic copy, as in Hindu cosmogony.
** It is very surprising to see theologians and Oriental scholars express indignation at the "depraved taste of the Hindu mystics" who, not content with having invented the "Mind-born" Sons of Brahma, make the Rishis, Manus, and Prajapatis of every kind spring from various parts of the body of their primal Progenitor -- Brahma (see Wilson's footnote in his Vishnu Purana, Vol. I., p. 102). Because
the average public is unacquainted with the Kabala, the key to, and glossary of, the much veiled Mosaic Books, therefore, the clergy imagines the truth will never out. Let any one turn to the English, Hebrew, or Latin texts of the Kabala, now so ably translated by several scholars, and he will find that the Tetragrammaton, which is the Hebrew IHVH, is also both the "Sephirothal Tree"-- i.e., it contains all the Sephiroth except Kether, the crown -- and the united body of the "Heavenly man" (Adam Kadmon) from whose limbs emanate the Universe and everything in it. Furthermore, he will find that the idea in the Kabalistic Books (the chief of which in the Zohar are the "Books of Concealed Mystery," of the "Greater," and the "Lesser Holy Assembly") is entirely phallic and far more crudely expressed than is the four-fold Brahma in any of the Puranas. (See "Kabala Unveiled, " by Mr. S. L. Mathers, Chap. xxii., concerning the remaining members of Microprosopus).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 626 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There are two Tetragrammatons: the Macro and the Microprosopus. The first is the absolute perfect Square, or the TETRACTIS within the Circle, both abstract conceptions, and is therefore called AIN -- the Non-being, i.e., illimitable or absolute Be-ness. But when viewed as Microprosopus, or the "Heavenly man," the manifested Logos, he is the triangle in the square -- the sevenfold cube not the fourfold, or the plane Square. For it is written in the same "Greater Holy Assembly" -- (83): "And concerning this, the children of Israel wished to know in their minds, like as it is written (Exod. xvii. 7.): 'Is the Tetragrammaton in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?'* ( Where did they distinguish between Microprosopus, who is called Tetragrammaton, and between Macroprosopus, who is called AIN, Ain the negatively existent?) "**
Therefore, Tetragrammaton is the THREE made four and the FOUR made three, and is represented on this Earth by his seven "companions," or "Eyes" -- the "Seven eyes of the Lord." Microprosopus is, at best, only a secondary manifested Deity. For, verse 1,152 of the "Greater Holy Assembly" (Kabala) says --
"We have learned that there were ten (companions) who entered into the Sod, ('mysterious assembly or mystery'), and that seven only came forth"*** (i.e., 10 for the unmanifested, 7 for the manifested Universe.)
1,158. "And when Rabbi Shimeon revealed the Arcana there were found none present there save those (seven companions) . . . . 1,159. And Rabbi Shimeon called them the seven eyes of Tetragrammaton, like as it is written, Zach. iii., 9, 'These are the seven eyes (or principles) of Tetragrammaton," ' -- i.e., the four-fold Heavenly man, or pure spirit, is resolved into Septenary man, pure matter and Spirit.
Thus the Tetrad is Microprosopus, and the latter is the male-female Chochmah-Binah, the 2d and 3d Sephiroth. The Tetragrammaton is the very essence of number Seven, in its terrestrial significance. Seven stands between four and nine -- the basis and foundation (astrally) of our physical world and man, in the kingdom of Malkuth.
For Christians and believers, this reference to Zaccharias and
* [[Continued from previous page]] For, this "Tree of Life" is also the "tree of knowledge of good and evil," whose chief mystery is that of human procreation. It is a mistake to regard the Kabala as explaining the mysteries of Kosmos or Nature; it explains and unveils only a few allegories in the Bible, and is more esoteric than is the latter.
* Simplified in the English Bible to: "Is the Lord (! !) among us, or not?" (See Exodus xvii. 7.)
** See Kabala Denudata, by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers, F.T.S., p. 121.
*** Translators often render the word "companion" (angel, also adept) by "Rabbi, " as the Rishis are called gurus. The "Zohar" is, if possible, more occult than the Books of Moses; to read the "Book of Concealed Mystery" one requires the keys furnished by the genuine "Chaldean Book of Numbers," which is not extant.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 627 THE NUMBER SEVEN IN CHEMISTRY.
especially to the Epistle of Peter (I P. ii. 2-5) ought to be conclusive. In the old symbolism, man, chiefly the inner Spiritual man is called "a stone." Christ is the corner-stone, and Peter refers to all men as "lively" (living) stones. Therefore a "stone with seven eyes" on it can only mean what we say, i.e., a man whose constitution or ("principles,") is septenary.
To demonstrate more clearly the seven in Nature, it may be added that not only does the number seven govern the periodicity of the phenomena of life, but that it is also found dominating the series of chemical elements, and equally paramount in the world of sound and in that of colour as revealed to us by the spectroscope. This number is the factor, sine qua non, in the production of occult astral phenomena.
Thus, if the chemical elements are arranged in groups according to their atomic weights, they will be found to constitute a series of groups of seven; the first, second, etc., members of each group bearing a close analogy in all their properties to the corresponding members of the next group. The following table, copied from Hellenbach's Magie der Zahlen, exhibits this law and fully warrants the conclusion he draws in the following words: "We thus see that chemical variety, so far as we can grasp its inner nature, depends upon numerical relations, and we have further found in this variety a ruling law for which we can assign no cause; we find a law of periodicity governed by the number seven."
The eighth column in this list is, as it were, the octave of the first, containing elements almost identical in chemical and other properties with those in the first; a phenomenon which accentuates the septenary law of periodicity. For further details the reader is referred to Hellenbach's
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 628 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
work, where it is also shown that this classification is confirmed by the spectroscopic peculiarities of the elements.
It is needless to refer in detail to the number of vibrations constituting the notes of the musical scale; they are strictly analogous to the scale of chemical elements, and also to the scale of colour as unfolded by the spectroscope, although in the latter case we deal with only one octave, while both in music and chemistry we find a series of seven octaves represented theoretically, of which six are fairly complete and in ordinary use in both sciences. Thus, to quote Hellenbach: --
"It has been established that, from the standpoint of phenomenal law, upon which all our knowledge rests, the vibrations of sound and light increase regularly, that they divide themselves into seven columns, and that the successive numbers in each column are closely allied; i.e., that they exhibit a close relationship which not only is expressed in the figures themselves, but also is practically confirmed in chemistry as in music, in the latter of which the ear confirms the verdict of the figures. . . . . . The fact that this periodicity and variety is governed by the number seven is undeniable, and it far surpasses the limits of mere chance, and must be assumed to have an adequate cause, which cause must be discovered."
Verily, then, as Rabbi Abbas said: "We are six lights which shine forth from a seventh (light); thou (Tetragrammaton) art the seventh light (the origin) of us all;" (V. 1,160) and -- "For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save what they derive from the seventh. For ALL THINGS DEPEND FROM
THE SEVENTH." (V. 1,161. Kabala, "The Greater Holy Assembly.")
The (ancient and modern) Western American Zuni Indians seem to have entertained similar views. Their present-day customs, their traditions and records, all point to the fact that, from time immemorial, their institutions -- political, social and religious -- were (and still are) shaped according to the septenary principle. Thus all their ancient towns and villages were built in clusters of six, around a seventh. It is always a group of seven, or of thirteen, and always the six surround the seventh. Again, their sacerdotal hierarchy is composed of six "Priests of the House" seemingly synthesized in the seventh, who is a woman, the "PRIESTESS MOTHER." Compare this with the "seven great officiating priests" spoken of in Anugita, the name given to the "seven senses," exoterically, and to the seven human principles, esoterically. Whence this identity of symbolism? Shall we still doubt the fact of Arjuna going over to Patala (the Antipodes, America) and there marrying Ulupi, the daughter of the Naga (or rather Nargal) King? But to the Zuni priests.
These receive an annual tribute, to this day, of corn of seven colours. Undistinguished from other Indians during the whole year, on a certain day, they come out (the six priests and one priestess) arrayed in their
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 629 THE SEVEN PRIESTS OF THE ZUNIS.
priestly robes, each of a colour sacred to the particular God whom the priest serves and personifies; each of them representing one of the seven regions, and each receiving corn of the colour corresponding to that region. Thus, the white represents the East, because from the East comes the first Sun-light; the yellow, corresponds to the North, from the colour of the flames produced by the aurora borealis; the red, the South, as from that quarter comes the heat; the blue stands for the West, the colour of the Pacific Ocean, which lies to the West; black is the colour of the nether underground region -- darkness; corn with grains of all colours on one ear represents the colours of the upper region -- of the firmament, with its rosy and yellow clouds, shining stars, etc. The "speckled" corn -- each grain containing all the colours -- is that of the "Priestess-Mother": woman containing in herself the seeds of all races past, present and future; Eve being the mother of all living.
Apart from these was the Sun -- the Great Deity -- whose priest was the spiritual head of the nation. These facts were ascertained by Mr. F. Hamilton Cushing, who, as many are aware, became an Indian Zuni, lived with them, was initiated into their religious mysteries, and has learned more about them than any other man now living.
Seven is also the great magic number. In the occult records the weapon mentioned in the Puranas and the Mahabharata -- the Agneyastra or "fiery weapon" bestowed by Aurva upon his chela Sagara -- is said to be built of seven elements. This weapon -- supposed by some ingenious Orientalists to have been a "rocket" (!) -- is one of the many thorns in the side of our modern Sanskritists. Wilson exercises his penetration over it, on several pages in his Specimens of the Hindu Theatre, and finally fails to explain it. He can make nothing out of the Agneyastra.
"These weapons," he argues, "are of a very unintelligible character. Some of them are wielded as
missiles; but, in general, they appear to be mystical powers exercised by the individual -- such as those of paralysing an enemy, or locking his senses fast in sleep, or bringing down storm, and rain, and fire, from heaven. ( Vide supra, pp. 427 and 428.) . . . . They assume celestial shapes, endowed with human faculties. . . . . The Ramayana calls them the Sons of Krisaswa" (p. 297).
The Sastra-devatas, "gods of the divine weapons," are no more Agneyastra, the weapon, than the gunners of modern artillery are the cannon they direct. But this simple solution did not seem to strike the eminent Sanskritist. Nevertheless, as he himself says of the armiform progeny of Krisaswa, "the allegorical origin of the (Agneyastra) weapons is, undoubtedly, the more ancient."* It is the fiery javelin of Brahma.
* It is. But Agneyastra are fiery "missile weapons," not "edged" weapons, as there is some difference between Sastra and Astra in Sanskrit.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The seven-fold Agneyastra, like the seven senses and the "seven principles," symbolized by the seven priests, are of untold antiquity. How old is the doctrine believed in by Theosophists, the following section will tell.
If one turns to those wells of information, "The Natural Genesis" and the Lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey, the proofs of the antiquity of the doctrine under analysis become positively overwhelming. That the belief of the author differs from ours can hardly invalidate the facts. He views the symbol from a purely natural standpoint, one perhaps a trifle too materialistic, because too much that of an ardent Evolutionist and follower of the modern Darwinian dogmas. Thus he shows that "the student of Bohme's books finds much in them concerning these Seven Fountain Spirits and primary powers, treated as seven properties of nature in the alchemistic and astrological phase of the mediaeval mysteries;"* and adds --
"The followers of Bohme look on such matter as divine revelation of his inspired Seership. They know nothing of the natural genesis, the history and persistence of the Wisdom** of the past (or of the broken links), and are unable to recognise the physical features of the ancient Seven Spirits beneath their modern metaphysical or alchemist mask. A second connecting link between the Theosophy of Bohme and the physical origins of Egyptian thought, is extant in the fragments of Hermes Trismegistus.*** No matter whether these teachings are called Illuminatist, Buddhist, Kabalist, Gnostic, Masonic, or Christian, the elemental types can only be truly known in their beginnings.**** When the prophets or visionary showmen of cloudland come to us claiming original inspiration, and utter something new, we judge of its value by what it is in itself. But if we find they bring us the ancient matter which they cannot account for, and we can, it is natural that we should judge it by the primary significations rather than the latest pretensions.***** It is useless for us to read our
appearance of the work from which the above is quoted, namely in Isis Unveiled, a work full of such guiding links between ancient, mediaeval, and modern thought, but, unfortunately, too loosely edited.
**** Ay; but how can the learned writer prove that these "beginnings" were precisely in Egypt, and nowhere else; and only 50,000 years ago?
***** Precisely: and this is just what the Theosophists do. They have never claimed," (original inspiration," not even as mediums, but have always pointed, and do now point to the "primary signification" of the symbols, which they trace to other [[Continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 631 THE SIDEREAL SEVEN.
later thought into the earliest types of expression, and then say the ancients meant that.* Subtilized interpretations which have become doctrines and dogmas in theosophy have now to be tested by their genesis in physical phenomena, in order that we may explode their false pretensions to supernatural origin or supernatural knowledge.*
But the able author of the "Book of the Beginnings" and of "The Natural Genesis " does -- very fortunately, for us -- quite the reverse. He demonstrates most triumphantly our Esoteric (Buddhist) teachings, by showing them identical with those of Egypt. Let the reader judge from his learned lecture on "The Seven Souls of Man."** Says the author: --
"The first form of the mystical SEVEN was seen to be figured in heaven by the Seven large stars of the great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the Seven Elemental Powers."
Just so, for the Hindus place in the great Bear their seven primitive Rishis and call this constellation the abode of the Saptarishi, Riksha and Chitra-Sikhandinas. But whether it is only an astronomical myth or a primordial mystery, having a deeper meaning than it bears on its surface, is what their adepts claim to know. We are also told that "the Egyptians divided the face of the sky by night into seven parts. The primary Heaven was seven-fold." So it was with the Aryans. One has but read the Puranas about the beginnings of Brahma, and his "Egg" to see it. Have the Aryans taken the idea from the Egyptians? -- "The earliest forces," proceeds the lecturer, "recognized in nature were reckoned as seven in number. These became seven elementals, devils (?) or later, divinities. Seven properties were assigned to nature, as
[[Continued from previous page]] countries, older even than Egypt; significations, moreover, which emanate from a hierarchy (or hierarchies, if preferred) of living wise men, mortals, notwithstanding that Wisdom, who reject every approach to supernaturalism.
* But where is the proof that the ancients did not mean precisely that which the theosophists claim?
Records exist for what they say, just as other records exist for what Mr. G. Massey says. His interpretations are very correct, but equally one-sided. Surely nature has more than one physical aspect; for astronomy, astrology, and so on, are all on the physical, not the spiritual plane.
** It is to be feared that Mr. Massey has not succeeded. We have our followers as he has his followers, and materialistic Science steps in and takes little account of both his and our speculations!
The fact that this learned Egyptologist does not recognise in the doctrine of the "Seven Souls," as he terms our principles, or "metaphysical concepts," but "the primitive biology or physiology of the Soul," does not invalidate our argument. The lecturer touches on only two keys, those that unlock the astronomical and the physiological mysteries of esotericism, and leaves out the other five. Otherwise he would have promptly understood that what he calls the physiological divisions of the living Soul of man, are regarded by theosophists as also psychological and spiritual.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 632 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
matter, cohesion, fluxion, coagulation, accumulation, station, and division and seven elements or souls to man."
All this was taught in the esoteric doctrine, but it was interpreted and its mysteries unlocked, as already stated, with seven, not two, or at the utmost, three keys; hence the causes and their effects worked in invisible or mystic as well as psychic nature, and were made referable to metaphysics and psychology as much as to physiology. "The principle of sevening" -- as the author says -- "was introduced, and the number seven supplied a sacred type that could be used for manifold purposes"; and it was so used. For "the seven Souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. . . . Seven Souls or principles in man were identified by our British Druids. . . . . The Rabbins also ran the number of souls up to seven; so, likewise, do the Karens of India. . . ."
And then, the author tabulates the two teachings -- the Esoteric and the Egyptian, -- and shows that the latter had the same series and in the same order.
Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) souls, as (1) The Soul of Blood -- the formative ; (2) The Soul of Breath -- "that breathes"; (3) The Shade or Covering Soul -- "that envelopes"; (4) The Soul of Perception -- "that perceives ;" (5) The Soul of Pubescence "that procreates "; (6) The Intellectual Soul -- "that reproduces intellectually"; and (7) The Spiritual Soul --
From the exoteric and physiological standpoint this may be very correct; it becomes less so from the esoteric point of view. To maintain this, does not at all mean that the "Esoteric Buddhists" resolve men into a number of elementary Spirits, as Mr. G. Massey, in the same lecture, accuses them of maintaining. No "Esoteric Buddhist" has ever been guilty of any such absurdity. Nor has it been ever imagined that these shadows "become spiritual beings in another world," or "seven potential spirits or elementaries of another life." What is maintained is simply that every time the immortal Ego incarnates it becomes, as a total, a com-
* This is a great mistake made in the Esoteric enumeration. Manas is the fifth, not the fourth; and Manas corresponds precisely with Seb, the Egyptian fifth principle, for that portion of Manas, which follows the two higher principles, is the ancestral soul, indeed, the bright, immortal thread of the higher Ego, to which clings the Spiritual aroma of all the lives or births.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 633 THE "PRINCIPLES" IN THE EGYPTIAN METAPHYSICS.
pound unit of Matter and Spirit, which together act on seven different planes of being and consciousness. Elsewhere, Mr. G. Massey adds: -- "The seven souls (our "Principles") are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. The moon god, Taht-Esmun, or the later sun god, expressed the seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls (we say "principles") . . . . The seven stars in the hand of Christ in the Revelation, have the same significance," etc.
And a still greater one, as these stars represent also the seven keys of the Seven Churches or the SODALIAN MYSTERIES, cabalistically. However, we will not stop to discuss, but add that other Egyptologists have also found out that the septenary constitution of man was a cardinal doctrine with the old Egyptians. In a series of remarkable articles in the "Sphinx" (Munich) Herr Franz Lambert gives incontrovertible proof of his conclusions from the "Book of the Dead" and other Egyptian records. For details the reader must be referred to the articles themselves, but the following diagram, summing up the author's conclusions, is demonstrative evidence of the identity of Egyptian psychology with the septenary division in "Esoteric Buddhism."
On the left hand side the Kabalistic names of the corresponding human principles are placed, and on the right the hieroglyphic names with their renderings as in the diagram of F. Lambert.
* There seems a confusion -- lasting for many centuries -- in the minds of Western Kabalists. They call Ruach (Spirit) what we call Kama-rupa; whereas, with us Ruach would be the "Spiritual Soul" Buddhi, and Nephesh the 4th principle, the Vital, Animal Soul. Eliphas Levi falls into the same error.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 634 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This is a very fair representation of the number of the "principles" of Occultism, but much confused; and this is what we call the 7 principles in man, and what Mr. Massey calls "Souls," giving the same name to the Ego or the Monad which reincarnates and resurrects, so to speak, at each rebirth, as the Egyptians did, namely -- "the Renewed." But how can Ruach (Spirit) be lodged in Kama-rupa? What does Bohme, the Prince of all the mediaeval Seers, say?
"We find Seven especial properties in nature whereby this only Mother works all things" (which he calls -- fire, light, sound (the upper three) and desire, bitterness, anguish, and substantiality, thus analysing the lower in his own mystic way) . . . "whatever the six forms are spiritually, that the seventh, the body (or substantiality), is essentially." These are the seven forms of the Mother of all Beings from whence all that is in this world is generated,* and again in Aurora xxiv. p. 27 (quoted in Natural Genesis) -- "The Creator hath in the body of this world generated himself as it were creaturely in his qualifying Fountain Spirits, and all the stars are . . . God's powers, and the whole body of the world consisteth in the seven qualifying or Fountain Spirits."
This is rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine. . . But how can we agree with Mr. G. Massey when he states that --
"The Seven Races of men that have been sublimated and made Planetary (?) by Esoteric Buddhism,**
may be met with in the Bundahish as (1) the earth-men; (2) water-men; (3) breast-eared men; (4) breast-eyed men; (5) one-legged men; (6) bat-winged men; (7) men with tails." . . . Each of these descriptions, allegorical and even perverted in their later form -- is, nevertheless, an echo of the Secret Doctrine teaching. They all refer to the pre-Human evolution of the water-men "terrible and bad" by unaided Nature through millions of years, as previously described. But we deny point blank the assertion made that "these were never real races," and point to the Archaic Stanzas for our answer. It is easy to infer and to say that our "instructors have mistaken these shadows of the Past, for things human and spiritual"; but that "they are neither, and never were either," it is less easy to prove. The assertion must ever remain on a par with the Darwinian claim that man and the ape had a common pithecoid ancestor. What the Lecturer takes for a "mode of expression" and nothing more, in the Egyptian Ritual, we take as having quite another and an important meaning. Here is one instance. Says the Ritual, the "Book of the Dead" --
** This is indeed news! It makes us fear that the Lecturer had never read "Esoteric Buddhism" before criticising it, as there are too many such misconceptions in his notices of it.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 635 MAN, THE PARENT OF ALL THE MAMMALS.
"I am the mouse." "I am the hawk." "I am the ape." . . . "I am the crocodile whose Soul Comes FROM MEN." "I am the Soul of the Gods. " Of these last two sentences, one: "whose soul comes from men" -- is explained by the Lecturer, who says parenthetically, "that is, as a type of intelligence," and the other: "I am the Soul of the Gods, " as meaning, "the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of all."
The occult teaching answers: "It means far more." . . .
It gives first of all a corroboration of the teaching that, while the human monad has passed on globe A and others, in the First Round, through all the three kingdoms -- the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal -- in this our Fourth Round, every mammal has sprung from Man if the semi-ethereal, many-
shaped creature with the human Monad in it, of the first two races, can be regarded as Man. But it must be so called; for, in the esoteric language, it is not the form of flesh, blood, and bones, now referred to as Man, which is in any way the MAN, but the inner divine MONAD with its manifold principles or aspects.
The lecture referred to, however, much as it opposes "Esoteric Buddhism" and its teachings, is an eloquent answer to those who have tried to represent the whole as a newfangled doctrine. And there are many such, in Europe, America, and even India. Yet, between the esotericism of the old Arhats, and that which has now survived in India among the few Brahmins who have seriously studied their Secret Philosophy, the difference does not appear so very great. It seems centred in, and limited to, the question of the order of the evolution of cosmic and other principles, more than anything else. At all events it is no greater divergence than the everlasting question of the filioque dogma, which since the
XIIth. century has separated the Roman Catholic from the older Greek Eastern Church. Yet, whatever the differences in the forms in which the septenary dogma is presented, the substance is there, and its presence and importance in the Brahminical system may be judged by what one of India's learned metaphysicians and Vedantic scholars says of it: --
"The real esoteric seven-fold classification is one of the most important, if not the most important classification, which has received its arrangement from the mysterious constitution of this eternal type. I may also mention in this connection that the four-fold classification claims the same origin. The light of life, as it were, seems to be refracted by the treble-faced prism of Prakriti, having the three Gunams for its three faces, and divided into seven rays, which develop in course of time the seven principles of this classification. The progress of development presents some points of similarity to the gradual development of the rays of the spectrum. While the four-fold classification is amply
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 636 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
sufficient for all practical purposes, this real seven-fold classification is of great theoretical and scientific importance. It will be necessary to adopt it to explain certain classes of phenomena noticed by occultists; and it is perhaps better fitted to be the basis of a perfect system of psychology. It is not the peculiar property of 'the trans-Himalayan esoteric doctrine.' In fact, it has a closer connection with the Brahminical Logos than with the Buddhist Logos. In order to make my meaning clear I may point out here that the Logos has seven forms. In other words, there are seven kinds of Logoi in the Cosmos. Each of these has become the central figure of one of the seven main branches of the ancient Wisdom-religion. This classification is not the seven-fold classification we have adopted. I make this assertion without the slightest fear of contradiction. The real classification has all the requisites of a scientific classification. It has seven distinct principles, which correspond with seven distinct states of Pragna or consciousness. It bridges the gulf between the objective and subjective, and indicates the mysterious circuit through which ideation passes. The seven principles are allied to seven states of matter, and to seven forms of force. These principles are harmoniously arranged between two poles, which define the limits of human consciousness."*
The above is perfectly correct, save, perhaps, one point. The "sevenfold classification" in the esoteric system has never been claimed (to the writer's knowledge) by any one belonging to it, as "the peculiar property of the Trans-Himalayan esoteric doctrine"; but only as having survived in that old school alone. It is no more the property of the trans, than it is of the cis-Himalayan esoteric doctrine, but is simply the common inheritance of all such schools, left to the sages of the Fifth Root Race by the great Siddhas** of the Fourth. Let us remember that the Atlanteans became the terrible sorcerers, now celebrated in so many of the oldest MSS. of India, only toward their fall, the submersion of their continent having been brought on by it. What is claimed is simply the fact that the wisdom imparted by the "Divine Ones" -- born through the Kriyasakti powers of the Third Race before its Fall and Separation into sexes -- to the adepts of the early Fourth Race, has remained in all its pristine purity in a certain Brotherhood. The said
** According to Svetasvatara-Upanishad (357) the Siddhas are those who are possessed from birth of superhuman powers, as also of "knowledge and indifference to the world." According to the Occult teachings, however, Siddhas are the Nirmanakayas or the "spirits" (in the sense of an individual, or conscious spirit) of great sages from spheres on a higher plane than our own, who voluntarily incarnate in mortal bodies in order to help the human race in its upward progress. Hence their innate knowledge, wisdom and powers.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 637 AN ALLEGORY IN THE ANUGITA.
School or Fraternity being closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea, believed in by both Hindus and Buddhists, but called "mythical" by geographers and Orientalists, the less one talks of it, the wiser he will be. Nor can one accept the said "sevenfold classification" as having "a closer connection with the Brahminical Logos than with the Buddhist Logos," since both are identical, whether the one "Logos" is called Eswara or Avalokiteswara, Brahma or Padmapani. These are, however, very small differences, more fanciful than real, in fact. Brahmanism and Buddhism, both viewed from their orthodox aspects, are as inimical and as irreconcilable as water and oil. Each of these great bodies, however, has a vulnerable place in its constitution. While even in their esoteric interpretation both can agree but to disagree, once that their respective vulnerable points are confronted, every disagreement must fall, for the two will find themselves on common ground. The "heel of Achilles" of orthodox Brahmanism is the Adwaita philosophy, whose followers are called by the pious "Buddhists in disguise"; as that of orthodox Buddhism is Northern mysticism, as represented by the disciples of the philosophies of Aryasanga (the Yogacharya School) and Mahayana, who are twitted in their turn by their correligionists as "Vedantins in disguise." The esoteric philosophy of both these can be but one if carefully analysed and compared, as Gautama Buddha and Sankaracharya are most closely connected, if one believes tradition and certain esoteric teachings. Thus every difference between the two will be found one of form rather than of substance.
A most mystic discourse, full of septenary symbology, may be found in the Anugita.* There the Brahmana narrates the bliss of having crossed beyond the regions of illusion, "in which fancies are the gadflies and mosquitoes, in which grief and joy are cold and heat, in which delusion is the blinding darkness, avarice, the beasts of prey and reptiles, and desire and anger are the obstructors." . . . . The sage describes the entrance into and exit from the forest (a symbol for man's life-time) and also that forest itself:**
"In that forest are seven large trees (the Senses, Mind and Understanding, or Manas and Buddhi included), seven fruits and seven guests; seven hermitages, seven (forms of) concentration, and seven (forms of) initiation. This is the description of the forest. That forest is filled with trees producing splendid flowers and fruits of five colours."
** I propose to follow here the text and the editor's commentaries, who accepts Arjuna Misra and Nilakantha's dead-letter explanations. Our Orientalists never trouble to think that if a native commentator is a non-initiate, he could not explain correctly, and if an Initiate, would not.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 638 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The senses," says the commentator, "are called trees, as being producers of the fruits . . . . pleasures and pains; the guests are the powers of each sense personified -- they receive the fruits above described; the hermitages are the trees, in which the guests take shelter. The seven forms of concentration are the exclusion from the self of the seven functions of the seven senses, etc., already referred to; the seven forms of initiation refer to the initiation into the higher life . . . by repudiating as not one's own the actions of each member out of the group of seven." (See Khandagya, p. 219, and Com.)
The explanation is harmless, if unsatisfactory.
Says the Brahmana continuing his description: --
"That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of four colours. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of three colours, and mixed. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of two colours, and of beautiful colours. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of one colour and fragrant. That forest is filled (instead of seven) with two large trees producing numerous flowers and fruits of undistinguished colours (mind and understanding -- the two higher senses, or theosophically, 'Manas-Buddhi'). Here is one Fire (Self) here connected with the Brahman* and having a good mind (or true knowledge, according to Arjuna Misra). And there is fuel here, namely, the five senses (or human passions). The Seven (forms of ) emancipation from them are the Seven (forms of ) initiation. The qualities are the fruits. . . . There, the great Sages receive hospitality. And when they have been worshipped and have disappeared, another forest shines forth, in which intelligence is the tree, and emancipation the fruit, and which possesses shade (in the form of) tranquillity, which depends on Knowledge, which has contentment for its water, and the KSHETRAGNA (the "Supreme SELF," says Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, p. 102 et seq.) within for the Sun."
Now, all the above is very plain, and no theosophist, even among the least learned, could fail to understand the allegory. And yet, we see great Orientalists making a perfect mess of it in their explanations. The "great sages" who "receive hospitality" are explained as meaning the senses, "which, having worked as unconnected with the self are finally absorbed into it." But one fails to understand, if the senses are "unconnected" with the "Higher Self," in what manner can they be
poor devotion, indeed, in the accomplishment of the gradually emancipating process of Yoga. We venture to say that the "Fire" or Self is the higher real SELF "connected with," that is to say one with Brahma, the One Deity. The "Self" separates itself no longer from the universal Spirit.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 639 THE ALLEGORY EXPLAINED.
"absorbed into it." One would think, on the contrary, that just because the personal senses gravitate and strive to be connected with the impersonal Self, that the latter, which is FIRE, burns the lower five and purifies thereby the higher two, "mind and understanding" or the higher aspects of Manas* and Buddhi. This is quite apparent from the text. The "great sages" disappear after having "been worshipped." Worshipped by whom if they (the presumed senses) are "unconnected with the self"? By MIND, of course; by Manas (in this case merged in the sixth sense) which is not, and cannot be, the Brahman, the SELF, or Kshetragna -- the soul's spiritual sun. Into the latter, in time, Manas itself must be absorbed. It has worshipped "great sages" and given hospitality to terrestrial wisdom: but once that "another forest shone forth" upon it, it is Intelligence (Buddhi, the 7th sense, but 6th principle) which is transformed into the tree -- that tree whose fruit is emancipation -- which finally destroys the very roots of the Aswattha tree, the symbol of life and of its illusive joys and pleasures. And therefore, those who attain to that state of emancipation have, in the words of the above-cited sage, "no fear afterwards." In this state "the end cannot be perceived because it extends on all sides."
"There always dwell seven females there," he goes on to say, carrying out the imagery. These females, who, according to Arjuna Misra, are the Mahat, Ahamkara and five Tanmatras, have always their faces turned downwards, as they are obstacles in the way of spiritual ascension.
" . . . . In that same (Brahman, the 'Self') the Seven perfect Sages, together with their chiefs, abide and again emerge from the same. Glory, brilliance and greatness, enlightenment, victory, perfection and power -- these seven rays follow after this same Sun (Kshetragna, the Higher Self). . . . Those whose wishes are reduced (unselfish). . . . whose sins (passions) are burnt up by restraint, merging the Self in the Self,t**devote themselves to Brahman. Those people who understand the forest of Knowledge (Brahman, or SELF) praise tranquillity. And aspiring to that forest, they are (re-) born so as not to lose courage.
* As Mahat (universal intelligence) is first born, or manifests, as Vishnu, and then, when it falls into matter and develops self-consciousness, it becomes Egoism, Selfishness, so Manas is of a dual nature. It is respectively under the sun and moon, for as Sankaracharya says "The moon is the mind, and the sun the understanding." The sun and moon are the deities of our planetary Macrocosmos, and therefore Sankara adds that "the mind and the understanding are the respective deities of the (human) organs" (vide Brihadaranyaka, pp. 521, et seq.) This is perhaps why Arjuna Misra says that the moon and the Fire (the self, the sun) constitute the universe.
** "The body in the Soul," as Arjuna Misra is credited with saying, or rather the "Soul in the Spirit," and on a still higher plane of development: "the SELF or Atman in the Universal Self."
Such indeed, is this holy forest . . . . and understanding it, they (the Sages) act accordingly, being directed by the KSHETRAGNA. . . . "
No translator among the Western Orientalists has yet perceived in the foregoing allegory anything higher than mysteries connected with sacrificial ritualism, penance, or ascetic ceremonies, and Hatha Yoga. But he who understands symbolical imagery, and hears the voice of SELF WITHIN SELF, will see in this something far higher than mere ritualism, however often he may err in minor details of the philosophy.
And here, we must be allowed a last remark. No true theosophist, from the most ignorant up to the most learned, ought to claim infallibility for anything he may say or write upon occult matters. The chief point is to admit that, in many a way, in the classification of either cosmic or human principles, in addition to mistakes in the order of evolution, and especially on metaphysical questions, those of us who pretend to teach others more ignorant than ourselves -- are all liable to err. Thus mistakes have been made in "Isis Unveiled," in "Esoteric Buddhism," in "Man," in "Magic: White and Black," etc., etc.; and more than one mistake is likely to be found in the present work. This cannot be helped. For a large or even a small work on such abstruse subjects to be entirely exempt from error and blunder, it would have to be written from its first to its last page by a great adept, if not by an Avatar. Then only should we say, "This is verily a work without sin or blemish in it!" But, so long as the artist is imperfect, how can his work be perfect? "Endless is the search for truth!" Let us love it and aspire to it for its own sake, and not for the glory or benefit a minute portion of its revelation may confer on us. For who of us can presume to have the whole truth at his fingers' ends, even upon one minor teaching of Occultism?
Our chief point in the present subject, however, was to show that the Septenary doctrine, or division of the constitution of man, was a very ancient one, and was not invented by us. This has been successfully done, for we are supported in this, consciously and unconsciously, by a number of ancient, mediaeval, and modern writers. What the former said, was well said; what the latter repeated, was generally distorted. An instance: Read the "Pythagorean Fragments," and compare the Septenary man as given by the Rev. G. Oliver, the learned mason, in his "Pythagorean Triangle" (ch. on "Science of Numbers," p. 179).
He speaks as follows: --
"The Theosophic Philosophy counted SEVEN properties (or principles), in Man, viz.: --
(1.) The divine golden Man;
(2.) The inward holy body from fire and light, like pure silver;
(7.) The Solar man; a witness to and inspector of the wonders of the Universe. They had also seven fountain Spirits, or Powers of Nature."
Compare this jumbled account and distribution of Western theosophic philosophy with the latest theosophic explanations by the Eastern School of Theosophy, and then decide which is the more correct. Verily: --
"Wisdom hath builded her house,
She hath hewn out her seven pillars." -- (Prov. ix, 1.)
As to the charge that our School has not adopted the Seven-fold classification of the Brahmins, but has confused it, it is quite unjust. To begin with, the "School" is one thing, its exponents (to Europeans) quite another. The latter have first to learn the A B C of practical Eastern Occultism, before they can be made to understand correctly the tremendously abstruse classification based on the seven distinct states of Pragna (consciousness); and, above all, to realize thoroughly what Pragna is, in the Eastern metaphysics. To give a Western student that classification is to try to make him suppose that he can account for the origin of consciousness, by accounting for the process by which a certain knowledge, through only one of the states of that consciousness, came to him; in other words, it is to make him account for something he knows on this plane, by something he knows nothing about on the other planes; i.e., to lead him from the spiritual and the psychological, direct to the ontological. This is why the primary, old, classification was adopted by the Theosophists, of which classifications there are many.
To busy oneself, after such a tremendous number of independent witnesses and proofs have been brought before the public, with an additional enumeration from theological sources, would be quite useless. The seven capital sins and seven virtues of the Christian scheme are far less philosophical than even the Seven Liberal and the Seven Accursed Sciences -- or the Seven Arts of enchantment of the Gnostics. For one of the latter is now before the public, pregnant with danger in the present as for the future. The modern name for it is HYPNOTISM. In the ignorance of the seven principles, and used by scientific and ignorant materialists, it will soon become SATANISM in the full acceptation of the term.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
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IV. ON THE DURATION OF GEOLOGICAL PERIODS, RACE CYCLES, AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN ... 690
Modern Scientific Speculations thereon ... 694
On Chains of Planets and their Plurality ... 699
Esoteric Geological Chronology ... 709
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V. ORGANIC EVOLUTION -- CREATIVE CENTRES ... 731
The Origin and Evolution of the Mammalia ... 734
The European Palaeolithic Races ... 738
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VI. GIANTS, CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY ... 742
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VII. SCIENTIFIC AND GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS ... 778
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 645 THE NEW MASTERS OF PROTESTANTISM.
ADDENDA TO BOOK II.
§ I.
ARCHAIC, OR MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY?
WHENEVER the question of the origin of man is offered seriously to an unbiassed, honest, and earnest man of science, the answer comes invariably: -- "WE DO NOT KNOW." De Quatrefages, in his agnostic attitude, is one of such anthropologists.
This does not imply that the rest of the men of science are neither fair-minded nor honest, as in such case our remark would be questionably discreet. But, it is estimated that 75 per cent. of European Scientists are Evolutionists. Are these representatives of modern thought all guilty of flagrant misrepresentation of the facts? No one says this -- but there are a few very exceptional cases. However, the Scientists in their anti-clerical enthusiasm and despair of any alternative theory to
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
Darwinism, except that of "special creation," are unconsciously insincere in "forcing" a hypothesis the elasticity of which is inadequate, and which resents the severe strain to which it is now subjected. Insincerity on the same subject is, however, patent in ecclesiastical circles. Bishop Temple has come forward as a thorough-going supporter of Darwinism in his "Religion and Science." This clerical writer goes so far as to regard Matter -- after receiving its "primal impress" -- as the unaided evolver of all cosmic phenomena. This view only differs from that of Haeckel, in postulating a hypothetical deity at "the back of beyont," a deity which stands entirely aloof from the interplay of forces. Such a metaphysical entity is no more the Theological God than that of Kant. Bishop Temple's truce with Materialistic Science is, in our opinion, impolitic -- apart from the fact that it involves a total rejection of the Biblical cosmogony. In the presence of this display of flunkeyism before the materialism of our "learned" age, we Occultists can but smile. But how about loyalty to the Masters such theological truants profess to serve, Christ, and Christendom at large?
However, we have no desire, for the present, to throw down the gauntlet to the clergy, our business being now with materialistic Science alone. The latter answers to our question, in the person of its best representatives "We do not know;" -- yet the majority of these act as though Omniscience was their heirloom, and they knew all things.
For, indeed, this negative reply has not prevented the majority of Scientists from speculating on that question, each seeking to have his
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 646 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
own special theory accepted to the exclusion of all others. Thus, from Maillet in 1748 down to Haeckel in 1870, theories on the origin of the human Race have differed as much as the personalities of their inventors themselves. Buffon, Bory de St. Vincent, Lamarck, E. G. St. Hilaire, Gaudry, Naudin, Wallace, Darwin, Owen, Haeckel, Filippi, Vogt, Huxley, Agassiz, etc., etc., each evolved a more or less scientific hypothesis of genesis. De Quatrefages arranges them in two principal groups -- one holding to a rapid, and the other to a very gradual transmutation ; the former, favouring a new type (man) produced by a being entirely different; the latter teaching the evolution of man by progressive differentiation.
Strangely enough, it is from the most scientific of these authorities that the most unscientific of all the theories upon the subject of the origin of man has hitherto emanated. This is so evident, that the hour is rapidly approaching when the current teaching about the descent of man from an Ape-like mammal will be regarded with less respect than the formation of Adam out of clay, and of Eve out of Adam's rib. For --
"It is evident, especially after the most fundamental principles of Darwinism, that an organized being cannot be a descendant of another whose development is in an inverse order to his own. . . . Consequently, in accordance with these principles man cannot be considered as the descendant of any simian type whatever."*
Lucae's argument versus the Ape-theory, based on the different flexures of the bones constituting the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
axis of the skull in the cases of Man and the Anthropoids, is fairly discussed by Schmidt ("Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 290). He admits that "the ape as he grows becomes more bestial; man . . . more human," and seems, indeed, to hesitate a moment before he passes on: e.g., "This flexure of the cranial axis may, therefore, still be emphasized as a human character, in contradistinction to the apes; the peculiar characteristic of an order can scarcely be elicited from it; and especially as to the doctrine of descent, this circumstance seems in no way decisive." The writer evidently is not a little disquieted at the argument. He assures us that it upsets any possibility of the present apes having been the progenitors of mankind. But does it not also negative the bare possibility of the man and anthropoid having had a common -- though, so far, an absolutely theoretical -- ancestor.
* "The Human Species," p. 111, by de Quatrefages. The respective developments of the human and Simian brains are referred to. "In the ape the temporo-spheroidal convolutions, which form the middle lobe, make their appearance and are completed before the anterior convolutions which form the frontal lobe. In man, the frontal convolutions are, on the contrary, the first to appear, and those of the middle lobe are formed later." (Ibid.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 647 THE FALLACIES OF MODERN SCIENTISTS.
Even "Natural Selection" itself is with every day more threatened. The deserters from the Darwinian camp are many, and those who were at one time its most ardent disciples are, owing to new discoveries, slowly but steadily preparing to turn over a new leaf. In the "Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society" for October, 1886, one can read as follows: --
"PHYSIOLOGICAL SELECTION. -- Mr. G. J. Romanes finds certain difficulties in regarding natural selection as a theory for the origin of adaptive structures. He proposes to replace it by what he calls physiological selection, or the segregation of the fit. His view is based on the extreme sensitiveness of the reproductive system to small changes in the conditions of life, and he thinks that variations in the direction of greater or less sterility must frequently occur in wild species. If the variation be such that the reproductive system, while showing some degree of sterility with the parent form, continues to be fertile within the limits of the varietal form, the variation would neither be swamped by intercrossing nor die out on account of sterility. When a variation of this kind occurs, the physiological barrier must divide the species into two parts. . . . . The author, in fine, regards mutual sterility, not as one of the effects of specific differentiation, but as the cause of it."*
An attempt is made to show the above to be a complement of, and sequence to, the Darwinian theory. This is a clumsy attempt at best. The public will soon be made to believe that Mr. C. Dixon's "Evolution without Natural Selection " is also Darwinism -- expanded, as the author certainly claims it to be!
But it is like splitting the body of a man into three pieces or various portions of man, and then
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
maintaining that each portion is the identical man as he was before; only -- expanded. Yet the author states on p. 79: -- "Let it be clearly understood that not one single syllable in the foregoing pages has been written antagonistic to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. All I have done is to explain certain phenomena . . . . the more one studies Darwin's works, the more one is convinced of the truth of his hypothesis." (!!)
And before this, on p. 48, he alludes to: -- "the overwhelming array of facts which Darwin gave in support of his hypothesis, and which triumphantly carried the theory of Natural Selection over all obstacles and objections."
This does not prevent the learned author, however, from upsetting this theory as "triumphantly," and from even openly calling his work
* To this an editorial remark adds that an "F.J.B.," in the Athenaeum -- (No. 3069, Aug. 21, 1886, pp. 242-3) points out that naturalists have long recognised that there are "morphological" and "physiological" species. The former have their origin in men's minds, the latter in a series of changes sufficient to affect the internal as well as the external organs of a group of allied individuals. The "physiological selection" of morphological species is a confusion of ideas; that of physiological species "a redundancy of terms."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 648 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"Evolution without a Natural Selection," or, in so many words, with Darwin's fundamental idea knocked to atoms in it.
As to Natural Selection itself, the utmost misconception prevails among many present-day thinkers who tacitly accept the conclusions of Darwinism. It is, for instance, a mere device of rhetoric to credit "Natural Selection" with the power of originating species. "Natural Selection" is no Entity; but a convenient phrase for describing the mode in which the survival of the fit and the elimination of the unfit among organisms is brought about in the struggle for existence. Every group of organisms tends to multiply beyond the means of subsistence, the constant battle for life -- the "struggle to obtain enough to eat and to escape being eaten" added to the environmental conditions -- necessitating a perpetual weeding out of the unfit. The elite of any stock thus sorted out, propagate the species and transmit their organic characteristics to their descendants. All useful variations are thus perpetuated, and a progressive improvement is effected. But Natural Selection, in the writer's humble opinion, "Selection, as a Power," is in reality a pure myth; especially when resorted to as an explanation of the origin of species. It is merely a representative term expressive of the manner in which "useful variations" are stereotyped when produced. Of itself, "it" can produce nothing, and only operates on the rough material presented to "it." The real question at issue is: what CAUSE -- combined with other secondary causes -- produces the "variations" in the organisms themselves. Many of these secondary causes are purely physical, climatic, dietary, etc., etc. Very well. But beyond the secondary aspects of organic evolution, a deeper principle has to be sought for. The materialist's "spontaneous variations,"
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
and "accidental divergencies" are self-contradictory terms in a universe of "Matter, Force and NECESSITY." Mere variability of type, apart from the supervisory presence of a quasi-intelligent impulse, is powerless to account for the stupendous complexities and marvels of the human body for instance. The insufficiency of the Darwinists' mechanical theory has been exposed at length by Dr. Von Hartmann among other purely negative thinkers. It is an abuse of the reader's intelligence to write, as does Haeckel, of blind indifferent cells, "arranging themselves into organs." The esoteric solution of the origin of animal species is given elsewhere.
Those purely secondary causes of differentiation, grouped under the head of sexual selection, natural selection, climate, isolation, etc., etc., mislead the Western Evolutionist and offer no real explanation whatever of the "whence" of the "ancestral types" which served as the starting point for physical development. The truth is that the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 649 THE OCCULT AND THE MODERN DOCTRINES.
differentiating "causes" known to modern science only come into operation after the physicalization of the primeval animal root-types out of the astral. Darwinism only meets Evolution at its midway point -- that is to say when astral evolution has given place to the play of the ordinary physical forces with which our present senses acquaint us. But even here the Darwinian Theory, even with the "expansions" recently attempted, is inadequate to meet the facts of the case. The underlying physiological variation in species -- one to which all other laws are subordinate and secondary -- is a sub-conscious intelligence pervading matter, ultimately traceable to a REFLECTION of the Divine and Dhyan-
Chohanic wisdom.* A not altogether dissimilar conclusion has been arrived at by so well known a thinker as Ed. von Hartmann, who, despairing of the efficacy of unaided Natural Selection, regards evolution as intelligently guided by the UNCONSCIOUS (the Cosmic Logos of Occultism). But the latter acts only mediately through FOHAT, or Dhyan-Chohanic energy, and not quite in the direct manner which the great pessimist describes.
It is this divergence among men of Science, their mutual, and often their self-contradictions, that gave the writer of the present volumes the courage to bring to light other and older teachings -- if only as hypotheses for future scientific appreciation. Though not in any way very learned in modern sciences, so evident, even to the humble recorder of this archaic clearing, are the said scientific fallacies and gaps, that she determined to touch upon all these, in order to place the two teachings on parallel lines. For Occultism, it is a question of self-defence, and nothing more.
So far, the "Secret Doctrine" has concerned itself with metaphysics, pure and simple. It has now landed on Earth, and finds itself within the domain of physical science and practical anthropology, or those branches of study which materialistic Naturalists claim as their rightful domain, coolly asserting, furthermore, that the higher and more perfect the working of the Soul, the more amenable it is to the analysis and explanations of the zoologist and the physiologist alone. (Haeckel on "Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells.") This stupendous pretension comes from one, who, to prove his pithecoid descent, has not hesitated to include among the ancestors of man the Lemuridae ; which have been promoted by him to the rank of Prosimiae, indeciduate mammals, to which he very incorrectly attributes a decidua
* The "principle of perfectibility " of Nageli; von de Baer's "striving towards the purpose"; Braun's "Divine breath as the inward impulse in the evolutionary history of Nature"; Professor Owen's "tendency to perfectibility, etc.," are all veiled manifestations of the universal guiding FOHAT, rich with the Divine and Dhyan-Chohanic thought.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and a discoidal placenta.* For this Haeckel was taken severely to task by de Quatrefages, and criticised by his own brother materialists and agnostics, as great, if not greater, authorities than himself, namely, by Virchow and du Bois-Reymond.**
Such opposition notwithstanding, Haeckel's wild theories are, to this day, called scientific and logical by some. The mysterious nature of Consciousness, of Soul, Spirit in Man being now explained as a mere advance on the functions of the protoplasmic molecules of the lively Protista, and the gradual evolution and growth of human mind and "social instincts" toward civilization having to be traced back to their origin in the civilization of ants, bees, and other creatures, the chances left for an impartial hearing of the doctrines of archaic Wisdom, are few indeed. The educated profane is told that "the social instincts of the lower animals have, of late, been regarded as being clearly the origin of morals, even of those of man" (!) and that our divine consciousness, our soul, intellect, and aspirations have "worked their way up from the lower stages of the simple cell-soul" of the gelatinous Bathybius -- (See Haeckel's "Present Position of Evolution " Notes), -- and he seems to believe it. For such men, the metaphysics of Occultism must produce the effect that our grandest orchestral and vocal oratorios produce on the Chinaman: a sound that jars upon their nerves.
Yet, are our esoteric teachings about "angels," the first three pre -animal human Races, and the downfall of the Fourth, on a lower level of fiction and self-delusion than the Haeckelian "plastidular," or the inorganic "molecular Souls of the Protista "? Between the evolution of the spiritual nature of man from the above Amoebian Souls, and the alleged development of his physical frame from the protoplastic dweller in the Ocean slime, there is an abyss which will not be easily crossed by any man in the full possession of his intellectual faculties. Physical evolution, as modern Science teaches it, is a subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral development on the same lines is the insane dream of a crass materialism.
Furthermore, past as well as present daily experience teaches that no truth has ever been accepted by the learned bodies unless it dovetailed
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vehemently against the materialistic doctrine, which affirms mental phenomena to be merely the product of molecular motion. The most accurate physiological knowledge of the structure of the brain leaves us "nothing but matter in motion," he asserts; "we must go further, and admit the utterly incomprehensible nature of the psychical principle which it is impossible to regard as a mere outcome of material causes."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 651 AN EXCHANGE OF MUTUAL COMPLIMENTS.
with the habitual preconceived ideas of their professors. "The crown of the innovator is a crown of thorns": -- said G. St. Hilaire. It is only that which fits in with popular hobbies and accepted notions that as a general rule gains ground. Hence the triumph of the Haeckelian ideas, notwithstanding their being proclaimed by Virchow, du Bois-Reymond, and others as the "testimonium paupertatis of natural Science."
Diametrically opposed as may be the materialism of the German Evolutionists to the spiritual conceptions of Esoteric philosophy, radically inconsistent as is their accepted anthropological system with the real facts of nature, -- the pseudo-idealistic bias now colouring English thought is almost more pernicious. The pure materialistic doctrine admits of a direct refutation and appeal to the logic of facts. The idealism of the present day, not only contrives to absorb, on the one hand, the basic negations of Atheism, but lands its votaries in a tangle of unreality, which culminates in a practical Nihilism. Argument with such writers is almost out of the question. Idealists, therefore, will be still more antagonistic to the Occult teachings now given than even the Materialists. But as no worse fate can befall the exponents of Esoteric Anthropo-Genesis than being openly called by their foes by their old and time-honoured names of "lunatics" and "ignoramuses," the present archaic theories may be safely added to the many modern speculations, and bide their time for their full or even partial recognition. Only, as the existence itself of these "archaic theories" will probably be denied, we have to give our best proofs and stand by them to the bitter end.
In our race and generation the one "temple in the Universe" is in rare cases -- within us; but our body and mind have been too defiled by both Sin and Science to be outwardly now anything better than a fane of iniquity and error. And here our mutual position -- that of Occultism and Modern Science -- ought to be once for all defined.
We, Theosophists, would willingly bow before such men of learning as the late Prof. Balfour Stewart, Messrs. Crookes, Quatrefages, Wallace, Agassiz, Butlerof, and several others, though we may not agree, from the stand-point of esoteric philosophy, with all they say. But nothing could make us consent to even a show of respect for the opinions of other men of science, such as Haeckel, Carl Vogt, or Ludwig Buchner, in Germany; or even of Mr. Huxley and his co-thinkers in materialism in England -- the colossal erudition of the first named, notwithstanding. Such men are simply the intellectual and moral murderers of future generations; especially Haeckel, whose crass materialism often rises to the height of idiotic naivetes in his reasonings. One has but to read his "Pedigree of Man, and Other Essays" (Aveling 's transl.) to feel a desire, in the words of Job, that his
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remembrance should perish from the earth, and that he "shall have no name in the streets." Hear him deriding the idea of the origin of the human race "as a supernatural (?) phenomenon," as one "that could not result from simple mechanical causes, from physical and chemical forces, but requires the direct intervention of a creative personality. . . "
. . . . "Now the central point of Darwin's teaching," . . goes on the creator of the mythical Sozura, "lies in this, that it demonstrates the simplest mechanical causes, purely physico-chemical phenomena of nature, as wholly sufficient to explain the highest and most difficult problems. Darwin puts in the place of a conscious creative force, building and arranging the organic bodies of animals and plants on a designed plan, a series of natural forces working blindly (or we say) without aim, without design. In place of an arbitrary act of operation, we have a necessary law of Evolution . . . . " (So had Manu and Kapila, and, at the same time, guiding, conscious and intelligent Powers). . . "Darwin had very wisely . . . put on one side the question as to the first appearance of life. But very soon that consequence, so full of meaning, so wide reaching, was openly discussed by able and brave scientific men, such as Huxley, Carl Vogt, Ludwig Buchner. A mechanical origin of the earliest living form, was held as the necessary sequence to Darwin's teaching . . and we are at present concerned with a single consequence of the theory, the natural origin of the human race through ALMIGHTY EVOLUTION" (pp. 34, 37).
To which, unabashed by this scientific farrago, Occultism replies: in the course of Evolution, when the physical triumphed over, and nearly crushed under its weight, spiritual and mental evolutions, the great gift of Kriyasakti* remained the heirloom of only a few elect men in every age . . . . Spirit strove vainly to manifest itself in its fulness in purely organic forms (as has been explained in Part I. of this Volume), and the faculty, which had been a natural attribute in the early humanity of the Third Race, became one of the class regarded as simply phenomenal by the Spiritualists and Occultists, and as scientifically impossible by the materialists.
In our modern day the mere assertion that there exists a power which can create human forms -- ready-
made sheaths for the "conscious monads" or Nirmanakayas of past Manvantaras to incarnate within -- is, of course, absurd, ridiculous! That which is regarded as quite natural, on the other hand, is the production of a Frankenstein's monster, plus moral consciousness, religious aspirations, genius, and a feeling of one's own immortal nature within one's self -- by "physico-chemical forces, guided by blind Almighty Evolution" ("Pedigree of Man").
* For explanation of the term Kriyasakti, see Com. 2 in Stanza 26.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 653 SCIENCE IS SILENT ON EVERY PROBLEM.
As to the origin of that man, not ex-nihilo, cemented by a little red clay, but from a living divine Entity consolidating the astral body with surrounding materials -- this conception is too absurd even to be
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
mentioned in the opinion of the materialists. Nevertheless, Occultists and Theosophists are ready to have their claims and theories -- however unscientific and superstitious at first glance -- compared as to their intrinsic value and probability, with those of the modern evolutionists. Hence the esoteric teaching is absolutely opposed to the Darwinian evolution, as applied to man, and partially so with regard to other species.
It would be interesting to obtain a glimpse of the mental representation of Evolution in the Scientific brain of a materialist. What is EVOLUTION? If asked to define the full and complete meaning of the term, neither Huxley nor Haeckel will be able to do it any better than Webster does: "the act of unfolding; the process of growth, development; as the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg." Yet the bud must be traced through its parent-plant to the seed, and the egg to the animal or bird that laid it; or at any rate to the speck of protoplasm from which it expanded and grew. And both the seed and the speck must have the latent potentialities in them for the reproduction and gradual development, the unfolding of the thousand and one forms or phases of evolution, through which they must pass before the flower or the animal are fully developed? Hence, the future plan, if not a DESIGN, must be there. Moreover, that seed has to be traced, and its nature ascertained. Have the Darwinists been successful in this? Or will the Moneron be cast in our teeth? But this atom of the Watery Abysses is not homogeneous matter; and there must be something or somebody that had moulded and cast it into being.
Here Science is once more silent. But since there is no Self-consciousness as yet in either speck, seed, or germ, according to both Materialists and Psychologists of the modern school -- Occultists agreeing in this for once with their natural enemies -- what is it that guides the force or forces so unerringly in this process of evolution? Blind force? As well call blind the brain which evolved in Haeckel his "Pedigree of Man" and other lucubrations. We can easily conceive that the said brain lacks an important centre or two. For, whoever knows anything of the anatomy of the human, or even of any animal, body, and is still an atheist and a materialist, must be "hopelessly insane," according to Lord Herbert, who rightly sees in the frame of man's body and the coherence of its parts, something so strange and paradoxical that he holds it "to be the greatest miracle of nature." Blind forces, "and no design" in anything under the Sun; when no sane man of Science would hesitate to say that, even from the little he knows and has hitherto discovered of the forces at work in Kosmos, he sees very plainly
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that every part, every speck and atom are in harmony with their fellow atoms, and these with the whole, each having its distinct mission throughout the life-cycle. But, fortunately, the greatest, the most eminent thinkers and Scientists of the day are now beginning to rise against this "Pedigree," and even Darwin's natural selection theory, though its author had never, probably, contemplated such widely stretched conclusions. The remarkable work of the Russian Scientist N. T. Danilevsky -- "Darwinism, a Critical Investigation of the Theory" -- upsets it completely and without appeal, and so does de Quatrefages in his last work. Our readers are recommended to examine the learned paper by Dr. Bourges -- read by its author, a member of the Paris Anthropological Society at a recent official meeting of the latter -- called "Evolutionary Psychology ; the Evolution of Spirit, etc." in which he reconciles entirely the two teachings -- namely, those of the physical and spiritual evolutions. He
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
explains the origin of the variety of organic forms, made to fit their environments with such evident intelligent design, by the existence and the mutual help and interaction of two principles in (manifest) nature, the inner Conscious Principle adapting itself to physical nature and the innate potentialities in the latter. Thus the French Scientist has to return to our old friend -- Archaeus, or the life-Principle -- without naming it, as Dr. Richardson has done in England in his "Nerve-Force," etc. The same idea was recently developed in Germany by Baron Hellenbach, in his remarkable work, "Individuality in the light of Biology and modern Philosophy."
We find the same conclusions arrived at in still another excellent volume of another Russian deep thinker, N. N. Strachof -- who says in his "Fundamental Conceptions of Psychology and Physiology": -- "The most clear, as the most familiar, type of development may be found in our own mental or physical evolution, which has served others as a model to follow . . . . If organisms are entities . . . then it is only just to conclude and assert that the organic life strives to beget psychic life; but it would be still more correct and in accordance with the spirit of these two categories of evolution to say, that the true cause of organic life is the tendency of spirit to manifest in substantial forms, to clothe itself in substantial reality. It is the highest form which contains the complete explanation of the lowest, never the reverse." This is admitting, as Bourges does in the Memoire above quoted, the identity of this mysterious, integrally acting and organizing Principle with the Self-Conscious and Inner Subject, which we call the EGO and the world at large -- the Soul. Thus, gradually, all the best Scientists and Thinkers are approaching the Occultists in their general conclusions.
But such metaphysically inclined men of Science are out of court and will hardly be listened to. Schiller, in his magnificent poem on
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 655 THE ONE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
the Veil of Isis, makes the mortal youth who dared to lift the impenetrable covering fall down dead after beholding naked Truth in the face of the stern goddess. Have some of our Darwinians, so tenderly united in natural selection and affinity, also gazed at the Saitic Mother bereft of her veils? One might almost suspect it after reading their theories. Their great intellects must have collapsed while gauging too closely the uncovered face of Nature, leaving only the grey matter and ganglia in their brain, to respond to blind physico-chemical forces. At any rate Shakespeare's lines apply admirably to our modem Evolutionist who symbolizes that "proud man," who --
"Dress'd in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence -- like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the Angels weep! . . . . "
These have nought to do with the "angels." Their only concern is the human ancestor, the pithecoid Noah who gave birth to three sons -- the tailed Cynocephalus, the tailless Ape, and the "arboreal" Palaeolithic man. On this point, they will not be contradicted. Every doubt expressed is immediately set down as an attempt to cripple scientific inquiry. The insuperable difficulty at the very foundation of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 1
the evolution theory, namely, that no Darwinian is able to give even an approximate definition of the period at which, and the form in which, the first man appeared, is smoothed down to a trifling impediment, which is "really of no account." Every branch of knowledge is in the same predicament, we are informed. The chemist bases his most abstruse calculations simply "upon a hypothesis of atoms and molecules, of which not one has ever been seen isolated, weighed, or defined. The electrician speaks of magnetic fluids which have never tangibly revealed themselves. No definite origin can be assigned either to molecules or magnetism. Science cannot and does not pretend to any knowledge of the beginnings of law, matter or life, . . ." etc., etc. (Knowledge, January, 1882.)
And, withal, to reject a scientific hypothesis, however absurd, is to commit the one unpardonable sin! We risk it.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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§ II.
THE ANCESTORS MANKIND IS OFFERED BY SCIENCE.
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"The question of questions for mankind -- the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other -- is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in Nature, and of his relations to the Universe of things." -- HUXLEY.
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THE world stands divided this day, and hesitates between divine progenitors -- be they Adam and Eve or the lunar Pitris -- and Bathybius Haeckelii, the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained the occult theory, it may now be compared with that of the modem Materialism. The reader is invited to choose between the two after having judged them on their respective merits.
We may derive some consolation for the rejection of our divine ancestors, in finding that the Haeckelian speculations receive no better treatment at the hands of strictly exact Science than do our own. Haeckel's phylogenesis is no less laughed at by the foes of his fantastic evolution, by other and greater Scientists, than our primeval races will be. As du Bois-Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily when he says that "ancestral trees of our race sketched in the 'Schopfungs-geschichte' are of about as much value as are the pedigrees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of the historical critic."
This settled, everyone will see that one hypothesis is as good as another. And as we find that German naturalist (Haeckel) himself confessing that neither geology (in its history of the past) nor the ancestral history of organisms will ever "rise to the position of a real exact Science,"* a large margin is thus left to Occult Science to make its annotations and lodge its protests. The world is left to choose between the teachings of Paracelsus, the "Father of Modern Chemistry," and those of Haeckel, the Father of the mythical Sozura. We demand no more.
Without presuming to take part in the quarrel of such very learned naturalists as du Bois-Reymond and Haeckel a propos of our blood relationship to "those ancestors (of ours) which have led up from the unicellular classes, Vermes, Acrania, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia to the Aves" -- one may put in a few words, a question or two, for the information of our readers. Availing ourselves of the opportunity, and bearing
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
* "Pedigree of Man." -- "The Proofs of Evolution," p. 273.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 657 AN UNVERIFIED CHARGE AGAINST THE ANCIENTS.
in mind Darwin's theories of natural selection, etc., we would ask Science -- with regard to the origin of the human and animal species -- which theory of evolution of the two herewith described is the more scientific, or the more unscientific, if so preferred.
(1). Is it that of an Evolution which starts from the beginning with sexual propagation?
(2). Or that teaching which shows the gradual development of organs; their solidification, and the procreation of each species, at first by simple easy separation from one into two or even several individuals. Then follows a fresh development -- the first step to a species of separate distinct sexes -- the hermaphrodite condition; then again, a kind of Parthenogenesis, "virginal reproduction," when the egg-cells are formed within the body, issuing from it in atomic emanations and becoming matured outside of it; until, finally, after a definite separation into sexes, the human beings begin procreating through sexual connection?
Of these two, the former "theory," -- rather, a "revealed fact" -- is enunciated by all the exoteric Bibles (except the Puranas), preeminently by the Jewish Cosmogony. The last one, is that which is taught by the Occult philosophy, as explained all along.
An answer is found to our question in a volume just published by Mr. S. Laing -- the best lay exponent of Modern Science.* In chapter viii. of his latest work, "A Modern Zoroastrian," the author begins by twitting "all ancient religions and philosophies" for "assuming a male and female principle for their gods." At first sight, he says "the distinction of sex appears as fundamental as that of plant and animal." . . . . "The Spirit of god brooding over Chaos and producing the world," he goes on to complain, "is only a later edition, revised according to monotheistic ideas, of the far older Chaldean legend which describes the creation of Kosmos out of Chaos by the co-operations of great gods, male and female . . " Thus, in the orthodox Christian creed we are taught to repeat "begotten, not made," a phrase which is absolute nonsense, an instance of using words like counterfeit notes, which have no solid value of an idea behind them. For "begotten" is a very definite term which "implies the conjunction of two opposite sexes to produce a new individual."
However we may agree with the learned author as to the inadvisability of using wrong words, and the terrible anthropomorphic and phallic element in the old Scriptures -- especially in the orthodox Christian Bible -- nevertheless, there may be two extenuating circumstances in the case. Firstly, all these "ancient philosophies" and "modern
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religions" are -- as sufficiently shown in these two volumes -- an exoteric veil thrown over the face of esoteric truth; and -- as the direct result of this -- they are allegorical, i.e., mythological in form; but still they are immensely more philosophical in essence than any of the new scientific theories, so-
called. Secondly, from the Orphic theogony down to Ezra's last remodelling of the Pentateuch, every old Scripture having in its origin borrowed its facts from the East, it has been subjected to constant alterations by friend and foe, until of the original version there remained but the name, a dead shell from which the Spirit had been gradually eliminated.
This alone ought to show that no religious work now extant can be understood without the help of the Archaic wisdom, the primitive foundation on which they were all built.
But to return to the direct answer expected from Science to our direct question. It is given by the same author, when, following his train of thought on the unscientific euhemerization of the powers of Nature in ancient creeds, he pronounces a condemnatory verdict upon them in the following terms: --
"Science, however, makes sad havoc with this impression of sexual generation being the original and only mode of reproduction,* and the microscope and dissecting knife of the naturalist introduce us to new and altogether unsuspected (?) worlds of life. . . ."
So little "unsuspected," indeed, that the original a-sexual "modes of reproduction" must have been known -- to the ancient Hindus, at any rate -- Mr. Laing's assertion to the contrary, notwithstanding. In view of the statement in the Vishnu Purana, quoted by us elsewhere, that Daksha "established sexual intercourse as the means of multiplication," only after a series of other "modes," which are all enumerated therein, ( Vol. II., p. 12, Wilson's Transl.), it becomes difficult to deny the fact. This assertion, moreover, is found, note well, in an EXOTERIC work. Then, Mr. S. Laing goes on to tell us that: --
. . . . "By far the larger proportion of living forms, in number . . . . have come into existence, without the aid of sexual propagation." He then instances Haeckel's monera . . . . "multiplying by self-
division." The next stage the author shows in the nucleated cell, "which does exactly the same thing." The following stage is that in "which the organism does not divide into two equal parts, but a small portion of it swells out . . . . and finally parts company and starts on separate existence, which grows to the size of the parent by its inherent faculty of manufacturing fresh protoplasm from surrounding inorganic materials."**
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 659 VARIOUS MODES OF REPRODUCTION.
This is followed by a many-celled organism which is formed by "germ-buds reduced to spores, or single cells, which are emitted from the parent". . . . when "we are at the threshold of that system of sexual propagation, which has (now) become the rule in all the higher families of animals" . . . . It is when an "organism, having advantages in the struggle for life, established itself permanently" . . . . that special organs developed to meet the altered condition . . . . . when a distinction "would be firmly established of a female organ or ovary containing the egg or primitive cell from which the new being was to be developed." . . . . "This is confirmed by a study of embryology, which shows that in the HUMAN and higher animal species the distinction of sex is not developed until a considerable progress has been made in the growth of the embryo . . . . " In the great majority of plants, and in some lower families of animals . . . the male and female organs are developed within the same being . . . . . a hermaphrodite. Moreover, in the "virginal reproduction -- germ-cells apparently similar in all respects to egg-cells, develop themselves into new individuals without any fructifying element," etc., etc. (pp. 103-107).
Of all which we are as perfectly well aware as of this -- that the above was never applied by the very learned English popularizer of Huxleyo-Haeckelian theories to the genus homo. He limits this to specks of protoplasm, plants, bees, snails, and so on. But if he would be true to the theory of descent, he must be as true to ontogenesis, in which the fundamental biogenetic law, we are told, runs as follows: "the development of the embryo (ontogeny) is a condensed and abbreviated repetition of the evolution of the race (phylogeny). This repetition is the more complete, the more the true original order of evolution (palingenesis) has been retained by continual heredity. On the other hand, this repetition is the less complete, the more by varying adaptations the later spurious development (caenogenesis) has obtained." (Anthrop. 3rd edition, p. 11.)
This shows to us that every living creature and thing on earth, including man, evolved from one common primal form. Physical man must have passed through the same stages of the evolutionary process in the various modes of procreation as other animals have: he must have divided himself; then, hermaphrodite, have given birth parthenogenetically (on the immaculate principle) to his young ones; the next stage would be the oviparous -- at first "without any fructifying element," then "with the help of the fertilitary spore"; and only after the final and definite evolution of both sexes, would he become a distinct "male and female," when reproduction through sexual union would grow into universal law. So far, all this is scientifically proven. There remains but one thing to be ascertained: the plain and comprehensively described
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processes of such ante-sexual reproduction. This is done in the Occult books, a slight outline of which was attempted by the writer in Part I. of this Volume.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
Either this, or -- man is a distinct being. Occult philosophy may call him that, because of his distinctly dual nature. Science cannot do so, once that it rejects every interference save mechanical laws, and admits of no principle outside matter. The former -- the archaic Science --allows the human physical frame to have passed through every form, from the lowest to the very highest, its present one, or from the simple to the complex -- to use the accepted terms. But it claims that in this cycle (the fourth), the frame having already existed among the types and models of nature from the preceding Rounds -- that it was quite ready for man from the beginning of this Round.* The Monad had but to step into the astral body of the progenitors, in order that the work of physical consolidation should begin around the shadowy prototype.**
What would Science say to this? It would answer, of course, that as man appeared on earth as the latest of the mammalians, he had no need, no more than those mammals, to pass through the primitive stages of procreation as above described. His mode of procreation was already established on Earth when he appeared. In this case, we may reply: since to this day not the remotest sign of a link between man and the animal has yet been found, then (if the Occultist doctrine is to be repudiated) he must have sprung miraculously in nature, like a fully armed Minerva from Jupiter's brain. And in such case the Bible is right, along with other national "revelations." Hence the scientific scorn, so freely lavished by the author of "A Modern
* Theosophists will remember that, according to Occult teaching, Cyclic pralayas so-called are but obscurations, during which periods Nature, i.e., everything visible and invisible on a resting planet -- remains in statu quo. Nature rests and slumbers, no work of destruction going on on the globe even if no active work is done. All forms, as well as their astral types, remain as they were at the last moment of its activity. The "night" of a planet has hardly any twilight preceding it. It is caught like a huge mammoth by an avalanche, and remains slumbering and frozen till the next dawn of its new day -- a very short one indeed in comparison to the "Day of Brahma."
** This will be pooh-poohed, because it will not be understood by our modern men of science; but every Occultist and theosophist will easily realize the process. There can be no objective form on Earth (nor in the Universe either), without its astral prototype being first formed in Space. From Phidias down to the humblest workman in the ceramic art -- a sculptor has had to create first of all a model in his mind, then sketch it in one and two dimensional lines, and then only can he reproduce it in a three dimensional or objective figure. And if human mind is a living demonstration of such successive stages in the process of evolution -- how can it be otherwise when NATURE'S MIND and creative powers are concerned?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 661 WHERE ARE THE "MISSING LINKS"?
Zoroastrian" upon ancient philosophies and exoteric creeds, becomes premature and uncalled for. Nor would the sudden discovery of a "missing-link" -- like fossil mend matters at all. For neither one such solitary specimen nor the scientific conclusions thereupon, could insure its being the long-sought-for relic, i.e., that of an undeveloped, still a once speaking MAN. Something more would be required as a
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
final proof (vide infra, Note). Besides which, even Genesis takes up man, her Adam of dust, only where the Secret Doctrine leaves her "Sons of God and Wisdom" and picks up the physical man of the THIRD Race. Eve is not "begotten," but is extracted out of Adam on the manner of "Amoeba, A," contracting in the middle and splitting into Amoeba B -- by division. (See p. 103, in "The Modern Zoroastrian.") Nor has human speech developed from the various animal sounds.
Haeckel's theory that "speech arose gradually from a few simple, crude animal sounds . . . ." as such "speech still remains amongst a few races of lower rank" (Darwinian theory in "Pedigree of Man, " p. 22) is altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Muller, among others. He contends that no plausible explanation has yet been given as to how the "roots" of language came into existence. A human brain is necessary for human speech. And figures relating to the size of the respective brains of man and ape show how deep is the gulf which separates the two. Vogt says that the brain of the largest ape, the gorilla, measures no more than 30.51 cubic inches; while the average brains of the flat-headed Australian natives -- the lowest now in the human races -- amount to 99.35 cubic inches! Figures are awkward witnesses and cannot lie. Therefore, as truly observed by Dr. F. Pfaff, whose premises are as sound and correct as his biblical conclusions are silly: -- "The brain of the apes most like man, does not amount to quite a third of the brain of the lowest races of men: it is not half the size of the brain of a new-born child." ("The Age and Origin of Man.") From the foregoing it is thus very easy to perceive that in order to prove the Huxley-Haeckelian theories of the descent of man, it is not one, but a great number of "missing links" -- a true ladder of progressive evolutionary steps -- that would have to be first found and then presented by Science to thinking and reasoning humanity, before it would abandon belief in gods and the immortal Soul for the worship of Quadrumanic ancestors. Mere myths are now greeted as "axiomatic truths." Even Alfred Russel Wallace maintains with Haeckel that primitive man was a speechless ape-creature. To this Joly answers: -- "Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus alalus whose portrait Haeckel has drawn as if he had seen and known him, whose singular and completely hypothetical genealogy he has even given, from the mere mass of living protoplasm to the man endowed with speech and a civilization analo-
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gous to that of the Australians and Papuans." ("Man before Metals," p. 320, N. Joly. Inter. Scient. Series.)
Haeckel, among other things, often comes into direct conflict with the Science of languages. In the course of his attack on Evolutionism (1873, "Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language"), Prof. Max Muller stigmatized the Darwinian theory as "vulnerable at the beginning and at the end." The fact is, that only the partial truth of many of the secondary "laws" of Darwinism is beyond question -- M. de Quatrefages evidently accepting "Natural Selection," the "struggle for existence" and transformation within species, as proven not once and for ever, but pro. tem. But it may not be amiss, perhaps, to condense the linguistic case against the "Ape ancestor" theory: --
Languages have their phases of growth, etc., like all else in nature. It is almost certain that the great linguistic families pass through three stages.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
(1) All words are roots and merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical languages).
(2) One root defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element (Agglutinative).
(3) The determinative element (the determinating meaning of which has long lapsed) unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).
The problem then is: Whence these ROOTS? Max Muller argues that the existence of these ready-
made materials of speech is a proof that man cannot be the crown of a long organic series. This potentiality of forming roots is the great crux which materialists almost invariably avoid.
Von Hartmann explains it as a manifestation of the "Unconscious," and admits its cogency versus mechanical Atheism. Hartmann is a fair representative of the Metaphysician and Idealist of the present age.
The argument has never been met by the non-pantheistic Evolutionists. To say with Schmidt: "Forsooth are we to halt before the origin of language?" is an avowal of dogmatism and of speedy defeat. (Cf. his "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 304.)
We respect those men of science who, wise in their generation, say: "Prehistoric Past being utterly beyond our powers of direct observation, we are too honest, too devoted to the truth -- or what we regard as truth -- to speculate upon the unknown, giving out our unproven theories along with facts absolutely established in modern Science." . . . . "The borderland of (metaphysical) knowledge is best left to time, which is the best test as to truth" (A Modern Zoroastrian, p. 136).
This is a wise and an honest sentence in the mouth of a materialist. But when a Haeckel, after just saying that "historical events of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 663 PROOFS OF OUR "NOBLE DESCENT."
past time . . " having "occurred many millions of years ago,* . . . are for ever removed from direct observation," and that neither geology nor phylogeny** can or will "rise to the position of a real exact science," then insists on the development of all organisms -- "from the lowest vertebrate to the highest, from Amphioxus to man" -- we ask for a weightier proof than he can give. Mere "empirical sources of knowledge," so extolled by the author of "Anthropogeny " -- when he has to be satisfied with the qualification for his own views -- are not competent to settle problems lying beyond their domain; nor is it the province of exact science to place any reliance on them.*** If "empirical" -- and Haeckel declares so himself repeatedly -- then they are no better, nor any more reliable, in the sight of exact research, when extended into the remote past, than our Occult teachings of the East, both having to be placed on quite the same level. Nor are his phylogenetic and palingenetic speculations treated in any better way by the real scientists, than are our cyclic repetitions of the evolution of the Great in the minor races, and the original order of evolutions. For the province of exact, real Science, materialistic though it be, is to carefully avoid anything like guess-work, speculation which cannot be verified; in
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
short, all suppressio veri and all suggestio falsi. The business of the man of exact Science is to observe, each in his chosen department, the phenomena of nature; to record, tabulate, compare and classify the facts, down to the smallest minutiae which are presented to the observation of the senses with the help of all the exquisite mechanism that modern invention supplies, not by the aid of metaphysical flights of fancy. All that he has a legitimate right to do, is to correct by the assistance of physical instruments the
* It thus appears that in its anxiety to prove our noble descent from the catarrhine "baboon," Haeckel's school has pushed the times of pre-historic man millions of years back. (See "Pedigree of Man, " p. 273.) Occultists, render thanks to science for such corroboration of our claims!
** This seems a poor compliment to pay Geology, which is not a speculative but as exact a science as astronomy -- save, perhaps its too risky chronological speculations. It is mainly a "Descriptive" as opposed to an "Abstract" Science.
*** Such newly-coined words as "perigenesis of plastids ," "plastidule Souls" (!), and others less comely, invented by Haeckel, may be very learned and correct in so far as they may express very graphically the ideas in his own vivid fancy. As a fact, however, they remain for his less imaginative colleagues painfully caenogenetic -- to use his own terminology; i.e., for true Science they are spurious speculations so long as they are derived from "empirical sources." Therefore, when he seeks to prove that "the origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine ape, is a deductive law that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the theory of descent" ("Anthropogeny, " p. 392) -- his no less learned foes (du Bois-Reymond -- for one) have a right to see in this sentence a mere jugglery of words; a "testimonium paupertatis of natural science" -- as he himself complains, calling them, in return, ignoramuses (see "Pedigree of Man," Notes).
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defects or illusions of his own coarser vision, auditory powers, and other senses. He has no right to trespass on the grounds of metaphysics and psychology. His duty is to verify and to rectify all the facts that fall under his direct observation; to profit by the experiences and mistakes of the Past in endeavouring to trace the working of a certain concatenation of cause and effects, which, but only by its constant and unvarying repetition, may be called A LAW. This it is which a man of science is expected to do, if he would become a teacher of men and remain true to his original programme of natural or physical sciences. Any side-way path from this royal road becomes speculation.
Instead of keeping to this, what does many a so-called man of science do in these days? He rushes into the domains of pure metaphysics, while deriding it. He delights in rash conclusions and calls it "a deductive law from the inductive law" of a theory based upon and drawn out of the depths of his own consciousness: that consciousness being perverted by, and honeycombed with, one-sided materialism. He attempts to explain the "origin" of things, which are yet embosomed only in his own conceptions. He attacks spiritual beliefs and religious traditions millenniums old, and denounces everything, save
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
his own hobbies, as superstition. He suggests theories of the Universe, a Cosmogony developed by blind, mechanical forces of nature alone, far more miraculous and impossible than even one based upon the assumption of fiat lux out of nihil -- and tries to astonish the world by such a wild theory; which, being known to emanate from a scientific brain, is taken on blind faith as very scientific and the outcome of SCIENCE.
Are those the opponents Occultism would dread? Most decidedly not. For such theories are no better treated by real (not empirical) Science than our own. Haeckel, hurt in his vanity by du Bois-Reymond, never tires of complaining publicly of the latter's onslaught on his fantastic theory of descent. Rhapsodizing on "the exceedingly rich storehouse of empirical evidence," he calls those "recognised physiologists" who oppose every speculation of his drawn from the said "storehouse" -- ignorant men. "If many men," he declares -- "and among them even some scientists of repute -- hold that the whole of phylogeny is a castle in the air, and genealogical trees (from monkeys?) are empty plays of phantasy, they only in speaking thus demonstrate their ignorance of that wealth of empirical sources of knowledge to which reference has already been made" ("Pedigree of Man," p. 273).
We open Webster's Dictionary and read the definitions of the word "empirical": "Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to modern science and theory." This applies to the Occultists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., etc. Again, "an Empiric -- One who confines himself to applying the results of his own observations" (only)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 665 MR. HUXLEY APPLIES AN "EXTINGUISHER."
(which is Haeckel's case); "one wanting Science . . . . an ignorant and unlicensed practitioner; a quack; a CHARLATAN."
No Occultist or "magician," has ever been treated to any worse epithets. Yet the Occultist remains on his own metaphysical grounds, and does not endeavour to rank his knowledge, the fruits of his personal observation and experience, among the exact sciences of modern learning. He keeps within his legitimate sphere, where he is master. But what is one to think of a rank materialist, whose duty is clearly traced before him, who uses such an expression as this: --
"The origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine ape, is a deductive law, that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the THEORY OF DESCENT." ("Anthropogeny, " p. 392).
A "theory" is simply a hypothesis, a speculation, and no law. To say otherwise is only one of the many liberties taken now-a-days by scientists. They enunciate an absurdity, and then hide it behind the shield of Science. Any deduction from theoretical speculation is no better than a speculation on a speculation. Now Sir W. Hamilton has already shown that the word theory is now used "in a very loose and improper sense" . . . . "that it is convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is commonly used as another term for conjecture, whereas the terms 'theory' and 'theoretical' are properly used in opposition to the term practice and practical."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
But modern Science puts an extinguisher on the latter statement, and mocks at the idea. Materialistic philosophers and Idealists of Europe and America may be agreed with the Evolutionists as to the physical origin of man -- yet it will never become a general truth with the true metaphysician, and the latter defies the materialists to make good their arbitrary assumptions. That the ape-theory theme* of Vogt and Darwin, on which the Huxley-Haeckelians have composed of late such extraordinary variations, is far less scientific -- because clashing with the fundamental laws of that theme itself -- than ours can ever be
* The mental barrier between man and ape, characterized by Huxley as an "enormous gap, a distance practically immeasurable "! ! is, indeed, in itself conclusive. Certainly it constitutes a standing puzzle to the materialist, who relies on the frail reed of "natural selection." The physiological differences between Man and the Apes are in reality -- despite a curious community of certain features -- equally striking. Says Dr. Schweinfurth, one of the most cautious and experienced of naturalists: --
"In modern times there are no animals in creation that have attracted more attention from the scientific student than the great quadrumana (the anthropoids), bearing such a striking resemblance to the human form as to have justified the epithet of anthropomorphic being conferred on them. . . . But all investigation at present only leads human intelligence to a confession of its insufficiency; and nowhere is caution more to be advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to be deprecated than in the attempt to bridge over the MYSTERIOUS CHASM which separates man and beast." "Heart of Africa " i., 520.
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shown to be, is very easy of demonstration. Let the reader only turn to the excellent work on "Human Species" by the great French naturalist de Quatrefages, and our statement will at once be verified.
Moreover, between the esoteric teaching concerning the origin of man and Darwin's speculations, no man, unless he is a rank materialist, will hesitate. This is the description given by Mr. Darwin of "the earliest ancestors of man."
"They were without doubt once covered with hair; both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles. Their limbs and bodies were acted on by many muscles which now only occasionally reappear in man, but which are still normally present in the quadrumana. . . . The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm forest-clad land, and the males were provided with canine teeth which served as formidable weapons. . . ."*
Darwin connects him with the type of the tailed catarrhines, "and consequently removes him a stage backward in the scale of evolution. The English naturalist is not satisfied to take his stand upon the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
ground of his own doctrines, and, like Haeckel, on this point places himself in direct variance with one of the fundamental laws which constitute the principal charm of Darwinism . . . " And then the learned French naturalist proceeds to show how this fundamental law is broken. "In fact," he says, "in the theory of Darwin, transmutations do not take place, either by chance or in every direction. They are ruled by certain laws which are due to the organization itself. If an organism is once modified in a given direction, it can undergo secondary or tertiary transmutations, but will still preserve the impress of the original. It is the law of permanent characterization, which alone permits Darwin to explain the filiation of groups, their characteristics, and their numerous relations. It is by virtue of this law that all the descendants of the first mollusc have been molluscs; all the descendants of the first vertebrate have been vertebrates. It is clear that this constitutes one of the foundations of the doctrine. . . . It follows that two beings belonging to two distinct types can be referred to a common ancestor, but the one cannot be the descendant of the other"; (p . 106).
"Now man and ape present a very striking contrast in respect to type. Their organs . . . correspond almost exactly term for term: but these
* A ridiculous instance of evolutionist contradictions is afforded by Schmidt ("Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," on page 292). He says, "Man's kinship with the apes is not impugned by the bestial strength of the teeth of the male orang or gorilla." Mr. Darwin, on the contrary, endows this fabulous being with teeth used as weapons!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 667 A WALKER OR A CLIMBER.
organs are arranged after a very different plan. In man they are so arranged that he is essentially a walker, while in apes they necessitate his being a climber. . . . There is here an anatomical and mechanical distinction. . . . A glance at the page where Huxley has figured side by side a human skeleton and the skeletons of the most highly developed apes is a sufficiently convincing proof."
The consequence of these facts, from the point of view of the logical application of the law of permanent characterizations, is that man cannot be descended from an ancestor who is already characterized as an ape, any more than a catarrhine tailless ape can be descended from a tailed catarrhine. A walking animal cannot be descended from a climbing one.
"Vogt, in placing man among the primates, declares without hesitation that the lowest class of apes have passed the landmark (the common ancestor), from which the different types of this family have originated and diverged." (This ancestor of the apes, occult science sees in the lowest human group during the Atlantean period, as shown before.) . . . "We must, then, place the origin of man beyond the last apes," goes on de Quatrefages, thus corroborating our Doctrine, "if we would adhere to one of the laws most emphatically necessary to the Darwinian theory. We then come to the prosimiae of Haeckel, the loris, indris, etc. But those animals also are climbers; we must go further, therefore, in search of our first direct ancestor. But the genealogy by Haeckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. . . . From men to the Kangaroo the distance is certainly great. Now neither living nor
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
extinct fauna show the intermediate types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.* We know that he considers the want of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Haeckel doubtless is as little embarrassed. He admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man."
"Thus, since it has been proved that, according to Darwinism itself, the origin of man must be placed beyond the eighteenth stage, and since it becomes, in consequence, necessary to fill up the gap between marsupials and man, will Haeckel admit the existence of four unknown intermediate groups instead of one?" asks de Quatrefages. "Will he complete his genealogy in this manner? It is not for me to answer." ("The Human Species," p. 107-108.)
But see Haeckel's famous genealogy, in "The Pedigree of Man," called by him "Ancestral Series of Man." In the "Second Division"
* According even to a fellow-thinker, Professor Schmidt, Darwin has evolved "a certainly not flattering, and perhaps in many points an incorrect, portrait of our presumptive ancestors in the dawn of humanity." ("Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 284.)
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(Eighteenth Stage) he describes "Prosimiae, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur) as without marsupial bones and cloaca, but with placenta. " And now turn to de Quatrefages' "The Human Species, " pp. 109, 110, and see his proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that "the prosimiae of Haeckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta." They cannot be the ancestors of the apes even, let alone man, according to a fundamental law of Darwin himself, as the great French Naturalist shows. But this does not dismay the "animal theorists" in the least, for self-contradiction and paradoxes are the very soul of modern Darwinism. Witness -- Mr. Huxley. Having himself shown, with regard to fossil man and the "missing link," that "neither in quaternary ages nor at the present time does any intermediary being fill the gap which separates man from the Troglodyte"; and that to "deny the existence of this gap would be as reprehensible as absurd," the great man of Science denies his own words in actu by supporting with all the weight of his scientific authority that most "absurd" of all theories -- the descent of man from an ape!
"This genealogy," says de Quatrefages, "is wrong throughout, and is founded on a material error." Indeed, Haeckel bases his descent of man on the 17th and 18th stages (See Aveling's "Pedigree of Man, " p. 77), the marsupialia and prosimiae -- (genus Haeckelii?). Applying the latter term to the Lemuridae -- hence making of them animals with a placenta -- he commits a zoological blunder. For after having himself divided mammals according to their anatomical differences into two groups: the indeciduata, which have no decidua (or special membrane uniting the placentae), and the deciduata, those who possess it: he includes the prosimiae in the latter group. Now we have shown elsewhere what other men of science had to say to this. As de Quatrefages says, "The anatomical investigations of . . . Milne Edwards and Grandidier upon these animals . . . place it beyond all doubt that the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
prosimiae of Haeckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They are indeciduata. Far from any possibility of their being the ancestors of the apes, according to the principles laid down by Haeckel himself, they cannot be regarded even as the ancestors of the zonoplacental mammals . . . and ought to be connected with the pachydermata, the edentata, and the cetacea"; (p . 110). And yet Haeckel's inventions pass off with some as exact science!
The above mistake, if indeed, one, is not even hinted at in Haeckel's "Pedigree of Man," translated by Aveling. If the excuse may stand good that at the time the famous "genealogies" were made, "the embryogenesis of the prosimiae was not known," it is familiar now. We shall see whether the next edition of Aveling's translation will have this important error rectified, or if the 17th and 18th stages remain
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 669 A PITHECOID MAN WANTED.
as they are to blind the profane, as one of the real intermediate links. But, as the French naturalist observes -- "their (Darwin's and Haeckel's) process is always the same, considering the unknown as a proof in favour of their theory." (Ibid.)
It comes to this. Grant to man an immortal Spirit and Soul; endow the whole animate and inanimate creation with the monadic principle gradually evolving from the latent and passive into active and positive polarity -- and Haeckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.
But there are important divergences even between Darwin and Haeckel. While the former makes us proceed from the tailed catarrhine, Haeckel traces our hypothetical ancestor to the tailless ape, though, at the same time, he places him in a hypothetical "stage" immediately preceding this: "Menocerca with tails" (19th stage).
Nevertheless, we have one thing in common with the Darwinian school: it is the law of gradual and extremely slow evolution, embracing many million years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with regard to the nature of the primitive "Ancestor." We shall be told that the Dhyan Chohan, or the "progenitor" of Manu, is a hypothetical being unknown on the physical plane. We reply that it was believed in by the whole of antiquity, and by nine-tenths of the present humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid man, or "ape-man," a purely hypothetical creature of Haeckel's creation, unknown and untraceable on this earth, but further its genealogy -- as invented by him -- clashes with scientific facts and all the known data of modern discovery in Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages demonstrates in a few words, Haeckel "admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man" -- a hundred times more difficult to accept than any Deva ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he proceeds in a similar manner in order to complete his genealogical table; and he admits very naively his inventions himself. Does he not confess the non-existence of his sozura (14th stage) -- a creature entirely unknown to science -- by confessing over his own signature, that -- "The proof of its existence arises from the necessity of an intermediate type between the 13th and the 14th stages"!
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
If so, we might maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of the existence of our three ethereal races, and the three-eyed men of the Third and Fourth Root-Races "arises also from the necessity of an intermediate type" between the animal and the gods. What reason would the Haeckelians have to protest in this special case?
Of course there is a ready answer: "Because we do not grant the presence of the monadic essence." The manifestation of the Logos as individual consciousness in the animal and human creation is not accepted
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by exact science, nor does it cover the whole ground, of course. But the failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions are far greater on the whole than* any "extravagant" esoteric doctrine can ever furnish. Even thinkers of the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general epidemic. They accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though they also postulate the individual Ego as a manifestation of the Unconscious (the Western presentation of the Logos or Primeval Divine Thought). They say the evolution of the physical man is from the animal, but that mind in its various phases is altogether a thing apart from material facts, though organism (as an upadhi) is necessary for ITS manifestation.
-------
PLASTIDULAR SOULS, AND CONSCIOUS NERVE-CELLS.
But one can never see the end of such wonders with Haeckel and his school, whom the Occultists and Theosophists have every right to consider as materialistic tramps trespassing on private metaphysical grounds. Not satisfied with the paternity of Bathybius (Haeckelii), "plastidule souls,"** and "atom-
souls" are now invented by them, on the basis of purely blind mechanical forces of matter. We are informed that "the study of the evolution of soul-life shows that this has worked its way up from the lower stages of the simple cell-soul, through an astonishing series of gradual stages in evolution, up to the soul of man." ("Present Position of Evolution, " p. 266.)
"Astonishing" -- truly, based as this wild speculation is on the Consciousness of the "nerve cells." For as he tells us, "Little as we are in a position, at the present time, to explain fully the nature of consciousness,*** yet the comparative and genetic observation of it clearly shows that it is only a higher and more complex function of the nerve cells. " (Ibid, note 22.)
* Of course the Esoteric system of Fourth Round Evolution is much more complex than the paragraph and quotations referred to categorically assert. It is practically a reversal -- both in embryological inference and succession in time of species -- of the current Western conception.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
** According to Haeckel, there are also cell-souls; "an inorganic molecular soul" without, and a "plastidular soul with (or possessing) memory". What are our esoteric teachings to this? The divine and human soul of the seven principles in man must, of course, pale and give away before such a stupendous revelation!
*** A valuable confession, this. Only it makes the attempt to trace the descent of Consciousness in man as well as of his physical body from Bathybius Haeckelii still more humorous and empirical, in the sense of Webster's second definition.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 671 HAECKEL CREATES SOULS.
Mr. Herbert Spencer's song on Consciousness -- is sung, it seems, and may henceforth be safely stored up in the lumber room of obsolete speculations. Where, however, do Haeckel's "complex functions" of his scientific "nerve-cells" land him? Once more right into the Occult and mystic teachings of the Kabala about the descent of souls as conscious and unconscious atoms; among the Pythagorean MONAD and the monads of Leibnitz -- and the "gods, monads, and atoms" of our esoteric teaching;* into the dead letter of Occult teachings, left to the amateur Kabalists and professors of ceremonial magic. For this is what he says, while explaining his newly-coined terminology: --
"Plastidule-Souls; the plastidules or protoplasmic molecules, the smallest, homogeneous parts of the protoplasm are, on our plastic theory, to be regarded as the active factors of all life-functions. The plastidular soul differs from the inorganic molecular soul in that it possesses memory. " ("Pedigree of Man, " Note, p. 296.)
This he develops in his mirific lecture on the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule, or the wave-motions of living particles." It is an improvement on Darwin's theory of "Pangenesis," and a further approach, a cautious move towards "magic." The former is a conjecture that certain of the actual and identical atoms which had belonged to ancestral bodies "are thus transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation, so that we are literally 'flesh of the flesh' of the primeval creature who has developed into man in the later . . . period" -- explains the author of "The Modern Zoroastrian" (in "Primitive Polarities, " etc.). The latter (Occultism) teaches that -- (a) the life-atoms of our (Prana) life-
principle are never entirely lost when a man dies. That the atoms best impregnated with the life-
principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor) are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity, and partially are drawn once more together and become the animating principle of the new body in every new incarnation of
* Those who take the opposite view and look upon the existence of the human soul, -- "as a supernatural, a spiritual phenomenon, conditioned by forces altogether different from ordinary physical forces," . . . "mock," he thinks, "in consequence, all explanation that is simply scientific." They have no right it seems, to assert that "psychology is, in part, or in whole, a spiritual science, not a physical one." . . . The new discovery by Haeckel (one taught for thousands of years in all the Eastern religions, however), that the animals have souls, will, and sensation, hence soul-functions, leads him
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
to make of psychology the science of the zoologists. The archaic teaching that the "Soul" (the animal and human souls, or Kama and Manas) "has its developmental history" -- is claimed by Haekel as his own discovery and innovation on an "untrodden (?) path"! He (Haeckel) will work out the comparative evolution of the soul in man and in other animals. . . . "The comparative morphology of the soul-organs, and the comparative physiology of the soul-functions, both founded on Evolution, thus become the psychological (really materialistic) problem of the scientific man." (Cell-souls and Soul-cells, p. 137, "Pedigree of Man. ")
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the Monads. Because (b), as the individual Soul is ever the same, so are the atoms of the lower principles (body, its astral, or life double, etc.), drawn as they are by affinity and Karmic law always to the same individuality in a series of various bodies, etc., etc.*
To be just, and, to say the least, logical, our modern Haeckelians ought to pass a resolution that henceforth the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule," and like lectures, should be bound up with those on "Esoteric Buddhism," and "The Seven Principles in Man." Thus the public will have a chance, at any rate, of judging after comparison which of the two teachings is the most or the least ABSURD, even from the standpoint of materialistic and exact Science!
Now the Occultists, who trace every atom in the universe, whether an aggregate or single, to One Unity, or Universal Life ; who do not recognize that anything in Nature can be inorganic; who know of no such thing as dead matter -- the Occultists are consistent with their doctrine of Spirit and Soul when speaking of memory in every atom, of will and sensation. But what can a materialist mean by the qualification? The law of biogenesis, in the sense applied to it by the Haeckelians -- "is the result of the ignorance on the part of the man of science of occult physics." We know and speak of "life-
atoms" -- and of "sleeping-atoms" -- because we regard these two forms of energy -- the kinetic and the potential -- as produced by one and the same force or the ONE LIFE, and regard the latter as the source and mover of all. But what is it that furnished with energy, and especially with memory, the "plastidular souls" of Haeckel? The "wave motion of living particles" becomes comprehensible on the theory of a Spiritual ONE LIFE, of a universal Vital principle independent of our matter, and manifesting as atomic energy only on our plane of consciousness. It is that which, individualized in the human cycle, is transmitted from father to son.
Now Haeckel, modifying Darwin's theory, suggests "most plausibly," as the author of the "Modern Zoroastrian" thinks, "that not the identical atoms, but their peculiar motions and mode of aggregation have been thus transmitted" (by heredity).
If Haeckel, or any other Scientist, knew more than any of them does of the nature of the atom, he would not have improved the occasion in this way. For he only states, in a more metaphysical language than Darwin, one and the same thing. The life-principle, or life energy,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
* (See "Transmigration of the Life Atoms," "Five years of Theosophy, " p. 533-539). The collective aggregation of these atoms forms thus the Anima Mundi of our Solar system, the soul of our little universe, each atom of which is of course a soul, a monad, a little universe endowed with consciousness, hence with memory ( Vol. I., Part III., "Gods, Monads and Atoms.")
[[Vol. 2, Page 673]] THE MEANING OF SOUL WITH HAECKEL.
which is omnipresent, eternal, indestructible, is a force and a PRINCIPLE as noumenon, atoms, as phenomenon. It is one and the same thing, and cannot be considered as separate except in materialism.*
Further, Haeckel enunciates concerning the Atom Souls that which, at first sight, appears as occult as a Monad of Leibnitz. "The recent contest as to the nature of atoms, which we must regard as in some form or other the ultimate factors in all physical and chemical processes," he tells us -- "seems to be capable of the easiest settlement, by the conception that these very minute masses possess, as centres of force, a persistent soul, that every atom has sensation and the power of movement."
He does not say a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz's theory, and one pre-eminently occult. Nor does he understand the term "Soul" as we do; for, with Haeckel it is simply, along with consciousness, the production of the grey matter of the brain, a thing which, as the "cell-soul, is as indissolubly bound up with the protoplasmic body as is the human soul with the brain and spinal cord." (Ibid.) He rejects the conclusions of Kant, Herbert Spencer, of du Bois-Reymond and Tyndall. The latter expresses the opinion of all the great men of science, as of the greatest thinkers of this and the past ages, in saying that "the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of Consciousness is unthinkable. Were our minds and senses so . . . illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings . . . electric discharges . . . we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem . . . The chasm between the two classes of Phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable." But the complex function of the nerve-cells of the great German EMPIRIC, or, in other words, his Consciousness, will not permit him to follow the conclusions of the greatest thinkers of our globe. He is greater than they. He asserts this, and protests against all. "No one has the right
* In "The Transmigration of the Life-Atoms," we say, to explain better a position which is but too often misunderstood: -- "It is omnipresent . . . . though (on this plane of manifestation) often in a dormant state -- as in stone. The definition which states that when this indestructible force is disconnected with one set of atoms (molecules ought to have been said) it becomes immediately attracted by others, does not imply that it entirely abandons the first set (because the atoms themselves would then disappear), but only that it transfers its vis viva, or life power -- the energy of motion, to another set. But because it manifests itself in the next set as what is called Kinetic energy, it does not follow that the first set is deprived of it altogether; for it is still in it, as potential energy or life latent," etc., etc. Now what can Haeckel mean by his "not identical atoms but their peculiar motion and mode
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 2
of aggregation," if it is not the same Kinetic energy we have been explaining? He must have read Paracelsus and studied "Five Years of Theosophy," without properly digesting the teachings, before evolving such theories.
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to hold that in the future we (Haeckel) shall not be able to pass beyond those limits of our knowledge that to day seem impassable"; and he quotes from Darwin's introduction to the "Descent of Man" these words, which he modestly applies to his scientific opponents and himself: "It is always those who know little, and not those who know much, that positively affirm that this or that problem will never be solved by Science."
The world may rest satisfied. That day is not far off when the "thrice great" Haeckel will have shown (to his own satisfaction) that the consciousness of Sir I. Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the reflex action (or minus consciousness) caused by the peri-genesis of the plastidules of our common ancestor and old friend, the Moneron Haeckelii. The fact that the said "Bathybius" has been found out and exposed as a pretender simulating the organic substance it was not; and since, among the children of men, Lot's wife alone (and even this, only after her disagreeable metamorphosis into a salt pillar) could claim the pinch of salt it is, as her forefather -- will not dismay him at all. He will go on asserting, as coolly as he has always done, that it was no more than the peculiar mode and motion of the ghost of the long-vanished atoms of our "Father Bathybius," which, transmitted across aeons of time into the cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man, caused Sophocles and AEschylus, as well as Shakespeare, to write their tragedies, Newton, his "Principia," Humboldt, his "Cosmos," etc. etc. It prompted Haeckel to invent Graeco-Latin names three inches long, pretending to mean a good deal, and meaning -- nothing.
Of course we are quite aware that the true, honest evolutionist agrees with us; and that he is the first to say that not only is the geological record imperfect, but that there are enormous gaps in the series of hitherto discovered fossils, which can never be filled. He will tell us, moreover, that "no evolutionist assumes that man is descended from any existing ape or any extinct ape either, " but that man and apes originated probably aeons back, in some common root stock. Still, as de Quatrefages points out, he will claim as an evidence corroborating his (the evolutionist's) claim, even this wealth of absent proofs, saying that "all living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the chances of preservation being few and far between," even primitive man "burying or burning his dead" (A. Wilson). This is just what we ourselves claim. It is just as possible that future should have in store for us the discovery of the giant skeleton of an Atlantean, 30ft. high, as the fossil of a pithecoid "missing link": only the former is more probable.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 675 DRYOPITHECUS, THE MISSING LINK.
§ III.
THE FOSSIL RELICS OF MAN AND THE
ANTHROPOID APE.
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A.
GEOLOGICAL FACTS BEARING ON THE QUESTION OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP.
THE data derived from scientific research as to "primeval man" and the ape lend no countenance to theories deriving the former from the latter. "Where, then, must we look for primeval man?" still queries Mr. Huxley, after having vainly searched for him in the very depths of the quaternary strata. "Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any yet known, await the researches of some unborn palaeontologist? Time will show . . . ." ("Man's Place in Nature," p. 159).
It will -- undeniably -- and thus vindicate the anthropology of the Occultists. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin's Descent of Man, Mr. Boyd Dawkins believes he has all but found the "missing link" -- in theory. It was due to theologians more than to geologists that, till nearly 1860, man had been considered a relic no older than the Adamic orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma would have it though, it was left to a French Abbe -- l'abbe Bourgeois -- to give this easy-going theory even a worse blow than had been given to it by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Everyone knows that the Abbe discovered and brought to light good evidence that man already existed during the Miocene period; for flints of undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene strata. In the words of the author of "Modern Science and Modern Thought": --
"They must either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, by the Dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla, or chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools. But in this case the problem would be solved and the missing link discovered, for such an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palaeolithic man."
Or -- the descendant of Eocene Man, which is a variant offered to the theory. Meanwhile, the Dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even Palaeolithic man having become an absolute certainty, -- and, as the same author justly observes: "If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since
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the earth became sufficiently solidified to support vegetable and animal life, the Tertiary period may have lasted for 5,000,000; or for 10,000,000 years, if the life-sustaining order of things has lasted, as Lyell supposes, for at least 200,000,000 years" -- why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as an hypothesis, to the close of Mesozoic times -- admitting argumenti causa that the (much more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow ample time to man and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical "ape more anthropoid," and even for the latter to have degenerated into those that are found mimicking man in using "branches of trees as clubs, and cracking cocoa-nuts with hammer and stones."* Some savage tribes of hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas build their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting Mr. Boyd Dawkins' theory. The fanciful character of his hypothesis, is, however, generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and Miocene periods there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably contemporaneous with the former of those times -- though as we see orthodox anthropology still hesitates in the teeth of facts to place him in the era of the Dryopithecus, which latter "has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla" -- yet, in the Eocene there have been no other fossil primates unearthed and no pithecoid stocks found save a few extinct lemurian forms. And we find it also hinted that the Dryopithecus may have been the "missing link," though the brain of the creature no more warrants the theory than does the brain of the modern gorilla. ( Vide also Gaudry's speculations.)
Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence in the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence any farther back than 6, or 7,000 years was indignantly denied. Now he is refused admission into the Eocene age. Next century it may become a question whether man was not contemporary with the "flying Dragons;" the pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon, etc., etc. Let us listen, however, to the echo of Science.
* This the way primitive man must have acted? We do not know of men, not even of savages, in our age, who are known to have imitated the apes who live side by side with them in the forests of America and the islands. We do know of large apes who, tamed and living in houses, will mimic men to the length of donning hats and coats. The writer had personally a chimpanzee who, without being taught, opened a newspaper and pretended to read in it. It is the descending generations, the children, who mimic their parents -- not the reverse.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 677 INSURMOUNTABLE DIFFICULTIES.
"Now wherever anthropoid apes lived, it is clear that, whether as a question of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
anatomical structure, or of climate and surroundings, man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they resemble, bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, and the physical animal man is simply an instance of the quadrumanous type specialised for erect posture and a larger brain* . . . . If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why he might not have lived in the semi-tropical climate of the Miocene period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen . . . " ("Modern Science and Modern Thought, " p. 152.)
While most of the men of Science, who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of man from an "extinct anthropoid mammal," will not accept even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the Dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the circumstances, i.e., without immediate danger of getting knocked off one's feet by the tidal wave of "science-adulation." Believing that the difficulty of accounting "for the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure** between man and the highest animal," the same author says: --
"But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the
* It is asked, whether it would change one iota of the scientific truth and fact contained in the above sentence if it were to read: "the ape is simply an instance of the biped type specialized for going on all fours, generally, and a smaller brain." Esoterically speaking, this is the real truth, and not the reverse.
** We cannot follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley point to "the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and the highest man in intellectual power," the "enormous gulf . . . between them," the "immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human from the Simian stirps" (Man's Place in Nature, pp. 102-3); when even the physical basis of mind -- the brain -- so vastly exceeds in size that of the highest existing apes; when men like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of extra-terrestrial intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature as the Pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Haeckel, to the level of the large-brained and moral man of to-day -- it is idle to dismiss Evolutionist puzzles so lightly. If the structural evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as a whole, so hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the "how" of the Evolution of the human mind by natural selection are tenfold greater.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 678 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
average European man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or cretin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape."
"If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated . . . . But to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it . . . . in other words . . . . the missing link! Now it must be admitted that, hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human sculls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon,* is that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance . . . . It may well make us hesitate before we admit that man . . . is alone an exception. . . . This is more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man (?) so closely resembles . . . . contains numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different species of ape and monkeys which are all built on the same lines?" (p. 182, "Modern Science, etc.")
There was a "special creation" for man, and a "special creation" for the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded as the crown of an ape-stock. When one finds that not only was the "primeval savage" (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the Dryopithecus, alone of the anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very manlike Gibbon is still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it co-
existed with Man at the close of the Glacial Period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to choose between the Dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids -- gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all-sufficient, how are we to "explain" the evolution of this
* A race which MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy regard as a branch of the same stock whence the Canary Island Guanches sprung -- offshoots of the Atlanteans, in short.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 679 MATERIALISM IS PUZZLED.
ape into Man during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable -- more especially on the Natural Selection hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal anthropoid, is too much to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period. Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both Man and Dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of Haeckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to be found by an appeal to the "unknown," and a reference with Darwin to the "imperfection of the geological record"? So be it; but the same right of appeal must be accorded equally to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of puzzled materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary Age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a period when the Haeckelian man-ape is conceived to have roamed through the primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen's putative ancestor to have swung himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean giants, "blurred copies" of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man (Huxley), now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science.
Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some in Southern Asia, others, again, believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a Simian ancestry (Vogt). Haeckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his "prosimiae" . . . "the ancestor common to all other catarrhini, including man" -- a "link" now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries! -- he endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval Pithecanthropus alalus. "In all probability it (the transformation of animal into man) occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of men. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but LEMURIA, a continent that lay to the south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. ( Vide infra, "Scientific and geological proofs of the former existence of several
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submerged continents.") "The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into apelike men took place was probably the last part of the tertiary period, the Pliocene Age, and perhaps the Miocene, its forerunner." (Pedigree of Man, p. 73.)
Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind -- of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long aeons out of the ethereal
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Haeckel the "dumb ape-men," just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, some of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Haeckelian doctrines "abominable, revolutionary, immoral" -- though materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape-ancestor myth -- they are simply too absurd to demand disproof.
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B.
WESTERN EVOLUTIONISM: THE COMPARATIVE ANATOMY OF MAN AND
THE ANTHROPOID IN NO WAY A CONFIRMATION OF DARWINISM.
We are told that while every other heresy against modern science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to Man, will be the one "unpardonable" sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and the man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.
Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Ramayana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanuman, the monkey-God, "whose feats were great and Wisdom never rivalled," must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Haeckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes were written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new whatever given to the world or to philosophy, in such volumes as Mivart's "Man and Apes," or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one -- we are told -- if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we are called upon to explain the reason of: --
(I.) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the
[[Vol. 2, Page 681]] HUXLEY CALLS THE DARWINISTS TO ORDER.
higher animal world -- man and beast -- is physically of one type or pattern.
(II.) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except for a semi-
animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in Man those "rudimentary" organs (as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the Apteryx of Australia), the vermiform appendix of the coecum, the ear muscles,* the "rudimentary tail" (with which children are still sometimes born), etc., etc.?
Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves!
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
Furthermore, the latter themselves -- with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others -- while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, of Owen, Pruner-Bey, and finally, at the last great work of de Quatrefages, "Introduction a l'Etude des Races humaines, Questions generales, " to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning such similarity of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley found himself forced to protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great anatomist personally who called the "smaller fry" to order, by declaring in one of his articles that the differences in the structure of the human body and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive: "each of the bones of the gorilla has its own specific impress on it that distinguishes it from a similar human bone." Among the existing creatures there is not one single intermediate form that could fill the gap between man and the ape. To ignore that gap, he added, "was as uncalled-for as it was absurd."**
* Professor Owen believes that these muscles -- the attollens, retrahens, and attrahens aurem -- were actively functioning in men of the Stone Age. This may or may not be the case. The question falls under the ordinary "occult" explanation, and involves no postulate of an "animal progenitor" to solve it.
** Quoted in the Review of the "Introduction a l'Etude des Races Humaines, " by de Quatrefages. We have not Mr. Huxley's work at hand to quote from. Or to cite another good authority: -- "We find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon), in the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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Finally, the absurdity of such an unnatural descent of man is so palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence of the skull of the pithecoid as compared to that of man, that even de Quatrefages resorted unconsciously to our esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes that can claim descent from man than vice versa. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids, in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development of the said organs in the apes -- the size of the human skull and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus being more and more spiritualized: whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far more intelligent and good-natured, while with age it becomes duller; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely back, to make with every day more room for the animal type. The organ of thought -- the brain -- recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced by that of the wild beast -- the jaw apparatus.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla would have a perfect right to address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from himself. It would say to him, "We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from a human-like to an animal-like structure of organism; but in what way could you, men, descend from us -- how can you form a continuation of our genus? For, to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms of a higher organization than our own."
This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatre-
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] tertiary period, and this species is still in the same low grade, and side by side with it at the end of the Ice-period, man is found in the same high grade as to-
day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to the man, and modern man not having become further removed from the ape than the first (fossil) man . . . these facts contradict a theory of constant progressive development." (Pfaff.) When, according to Vogt, the the average Australian brain = 99.35 cub. inches; that of the gorilla 30.51 cub. in., and that of the chimpanzee only 25.45, the giant gap to be bridged by the advocate of "Natural" Selection becomes apparent.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 683 THE DARWINISTS AND THEIR OPPONENTS.
fages. Owing to the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an ancestor common to both, but shows his origin from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the "Heavenly man" -- the Dhyan Chohans, or the Pitris so-called, as shown in the first Part of this volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal -- whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality -- which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the "Mind-less" races of the middle Third Race period.
When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the earth, are so many variations on basic types originally thrown off by the MAN of the Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the "unity of structural plan" characterising all vertebrates, loses its edge. The basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a general unity of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. The economy of Nature does not sanction the co-existence of several utterly opposed "ground plans" of organic evolution on one planet. Once, however, that the general drift of the occult explanation is formulated, inference as to detail may well be left to the intuitive reader.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
Similarly with the important question of the "rudimentary" organs discovered by anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded by Darwin and Haeckel against their European adversaries, proved of great weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of gill-clefts, with the "tail" problem, and so on. Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary data.
The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate. In this postulate we find a true "Evolution " or "Unfolding" -- a sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of natural selection. Criticising Darwin's inference from "rudiments," an able writer remarks: "Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that Man was created with the rudimentary sketches in his organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man degenerated, as to suppose that these parts existed in full development in the lower animals out of which man was generated?" ("Creation or Evolution?" Geo. T. Curtis, p. 76.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 684 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Read for "into which Man degenerated," "the prototypes which man shed in the course of his astral developments," and an aspect of the true esoteric solution is before us. But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.
So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks. "Evolution" has to deal with the progressive modifications, which palaeontology shows to have affected the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time. It does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of the pre-physical types which served as the basis for future differentiation. Tabulate the general laws controlling the development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has acquitted itself ably of the task.
To return to the immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary Period, were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race. They are thus post-Human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief. "But how to account for the presence of the gill-clefts in the human foetus, which represent the stage through which the branchiae of the fish are developed;* for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the foetal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the 'gastrula' stage, with corresponding stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for the various types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth?" "How comes it to pass
* "At this period," writes Darwin, "the arteries run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiae which are not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking their former (?) position."
It is noteworthy that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the foetal development of vertebrates. Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 685 REVERSION FROM THE WRONG END.
-- "in the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the 'epitomized history' of human foetal development?"
This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round man, as that new importation into our planet's area -
- the mammalian stock -- is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root-race. The process of human foetal growth epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life. The diapason of type is run through in brief. Occultists are thus at no loss to "account for" the birth of children with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human foetus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs. The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man -- the microcosm of the Macrocosm -- and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as "reversion to ancestral features."* Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists!
-------
C
DARWINISM AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN: THE ANTHROPOIDS
AND THEIR ANCESTRY.
The public has been notified by more than one eminent modern geologist and man of science, that "all estimate of geological duration is not merely impossible, but necessarily imperfect; for we are ignorant of the causes, though they must have existed, which quickened or retarded the progress of the sedimentary deposits."** And now another man of Science, as well known (Croll), calculating that the tertiary age began either 15 or 2 1/2 million of years ago -- the former being a more correct calculation, according to Esoteric doctrine, than the latter there -- seems in this case, at least, no very great disagreement. Exact Science, refusing to see in man "a special creation" (to a certain degree the
* Those who with Haeckel regard the gill-clefts with their attendant phenomena as illustrative of an active function in our amphibian and piscine ancestors (Vide his XII. and XIII. stages), ought to explain why the " Vegetable with leaflets" (Lefevre) represented in foetal growth, does not appear in his 22 stages through which the monera have passed in their ascent to Man. Haeckel does not postulate a vegetable ancestor. The embryological argument is thus a two-edged sword and here cuts its possessor.
** "Physiology," Lefevre, p. 480.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 686 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
semi-human -- of our teachings. But it can hardly do the same in the case of the Third at its closing period, the Fourth, and the Fifth Races, since it already divides mankind into Palaeolithic and Neolithic man.* The geologists of France place man in the mid-miocene age (Gabriel de Mortillet), and some even in the Secondary period, as de Quatrefages suggests; while the English savants do not generally accept such antiquity for their species. But they may know better some day. For "If we consider," says Sir Charles Lyell in "Antiquity of Man," p. 246 --
"the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether marine or fresh water, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by millions of human beings, we shall be prepared for the general dearth of human memorials in glacial formations, whether recent, Pleistocene, or of more ancient date. If there were a few wanderers over lands covered with glaciers, or over seas infested with icebergs, and if a few of them left their bones or weapons in moraines or in marine drifts, the chances, after the lapse of thousands of years, of a geologist meeting with one of them must be infinitesimally small."
The men of Science avoid pinning themselves down to any definite statement concerning the age of man, as indeed they hardly could, and thus leave enormous latitude to bolder speculations. Nevertheless, while the majority of the Anthropologists carry back the existence of man only into the period of the post -glacial drift, or what is called the Quaternary period, those of them who, as Evolutionists, trace man to a common origin with that of the monkey, do not show great consistency in their speculations. The Darwinian hypothesis demands, in reality, a far greater antiquity for man, than is even dimly suspected by superficial thinkers. This is proven by the greatest authorities on the question -- Mr. Huxley, for instance. Those, therefore, who accept the Darwinian evolution, ipso facto hold very tenaciously to an antiquity
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
* We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E. Clodd's certain statement in Knowledge. Speaking of the men of Neolithic times, "concerning whom Mr. Grant Allen has given . . . a vivid and accurate sketch," and who are "the direct ancestors of peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in out-of-the-way corners of Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded," he adds to this: "but the men of Palaeolithic times can be identified with no existing races; they were savages of a more degraded type than any extant; tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees, with prognathous, that is, projecting ape-like jaws, and small brains. Whence they come we cannot tell, and their 'grave knoweth no man to this day.' "
Besides the possibility that there may be men who know whence they came and how they perished -- it is not true to say that the Palaeolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with "small brains." The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the "Neanderthal skull," is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to that of the "missing link." There are aboriginal tribes in India whose brains are far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any hitherto found among the skulls of Palaeolithic man.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 687 GRANT ALLEN'S ILLUSIONS.
of man so very great, indeed, that it falls not so far short of the Occultist's estimate.* The modest thousands of years of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 100,000 years, to which Anthropology in general limits the age of Humanity, seem quite microscopical when compared with the figures implied in Mr. Huxley's bold speculations. The former, indeed, makes of the original race of men ape-like cave-
dwellers. The great English biologist, in his desire to prove man's pithecoid origin, insists that the transformation of the primordial ape into a human being must have occurred millions of years back. For in criticising the excellent average cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, notwithstanding his assertion that it is overlaid with "pithecoid bony walls," coupled with Mr. Grant Allen's assurances that this skull "possesses large bosses on the forehead, strikingly (?) suggestive of those which give the gorilla its peculiarly fierce appearance,"** (Fortnightly Review, 1882,) still Mr. Huxley is forced to admit that, in the said skull, his theory is once more defeated by the "completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the fair development of the Engis skull." In consequence of all this we are notified that those skulls, "clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has proceeded, need no longer be sought by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development in the newest Tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS than that is from us"*** (Huxley).
* The actual time required for such a theoretical transformation is necessarily enormous. "If," says Professor Pfaff, "in the hundreds of thousands of years which you (the Evolutionists) accept between the rise of palaeolithic man and our own day, a greater distance of man from the brute is not demonstrable, (the most ancient man was just as far removed from the brute as the now living man), what reasonable ground can be advanced for believing that man has been developed from the brute, and has receded further from it by infinitely small gradations." . . . . "The longer the interval of time placed between our times and the so-called palaeolithic men, the more ominous and destructive for the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
theory of the gradual development of man from the animal kingdom is the result stated." Huxley states ("Man's Place in Nature," p. 159) that the most liberal estimates for the antiquity of Man must be still further extended.
** The baselessness of this assertion, as well as that of many other exaggerations of the imaginative Mr. Grant Allen, was ably exposed by the eminent anatomist, Professor R. Owen, in "Longman's Magazine," No. 1. Must it be repeated, moreover, that the Cro-Magnon Palaeolithic type is superior to a very large number of existing races?
*** It thus stands to reason that science would never dream of a pre -tertiary man, and that de Quatrefages' secondary man makes every Academician and "F.R.S." faint with horror because, TO PRESERVE THE APE-THEORY, SCIENCE MUST MAKE MAN POST-SECONDARY. This is just what de Quatrefages has twitted the Darwinists with, adding, that on the whole there were more scientific reasons to trace the ape from man than man from the anthropoid. With this exception science has not one single valid argu- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 688 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
An untold antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific sine qua non in the question of Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palaeolithic man shows as yet no appreciable differentiation from his modern descendant. It is only of late that modern Science began to widen with every year the abyss that now separates her from old Science, that of the Plinies and Hippocrateses, none of whom would have derided the archaic teachings with respect to the evolution of the human races and animal species, as the present day Scientist -- geologist or anthropologist -- is sure to do.
Holding, as we do, that the mammalian type was a post-human Fourth Round product, the following diagram -- as the writer understands the teaching -- may make the process clear: --
The unnatural union was invariably fertile, because the then mammalian types were not remote enough from their Root-type* -- Primeval Astral
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] ment to offer against the antiquity of man. But in this case modern Evolution demands far more than the fifteen million years of Croll for the Tertiary period, for two very simple but good reasons: (a) No anthropoid ape has been found before the Miocene period: (b) man's flint relics have been traced to the Pliocene and their presence suspected, if not accepted by all, in the Miocene strata. Again, where is the "missing link" in such case? And how could even a Palaeolithic Savage, a "Man of Canstadt," evolve into thinking men from the brute Dryopithecus of the Miocene in so short a time. One sees now the reason why Darwin rejected the theory that only 60,000,000 years had elapsed since the Cambrian period. "He judges from the small amount of organic changes since the glacial epoch, and adds that the previous 140 million years can hardly be considered as sufficient for the development of the varied forms of life which certainly existed toward the close of the Cambrian period." (Ch. Gould.)
* Let us remember in this connection the esoteric teaching which tells us of Man having had in the Third Round a GIGANTIC APE-LIKE FORM on the astral plane. And similarly at the close of the Third Race in this Round. Thus it accounts for the human features of the apes, especially of the later anthropoids -- apart from the fact that these latter preserve by Heredity a resemblance to their Atlanto-
Lemurian sires.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 689 THE INCUBUS OF ETHNOLOGY.
Man -- to develop the necessary barrier. Medical science records such cases of monsters, bred from human and animal parents, even in our own day. The possibility is, therefore, only one of degree, not of fact. Thus it is that Occultism solves one of the strangest problems presented to the consideration of the anthropologist.
The pendulum of thought oscillates between extremes. Having now finally emancipated herself from the shackles of theology, Science has embraced the opposite fallacy; and in the attempt to interpret Nature on purely materialistic lines, she has built up that most extravagant theory of the ages -- the derivation of man from a ferocious and brutal ape. So rooted has this doctrine, in one form or another, now become, that the most Herculean efforts will be needed to bring about its final rejection. The Darwinian anthropology is the incubus of the ethnologist, a sturdy child of modem Materialism, which has grown up and acquired increasing vigour, as the ineptitude of the theological legend of Man's "creation" became more and more apparent. It has thriven on account of the strange delusion that -- as a scientist of repute puts it -- "All hypotheses and theories with respect to the rise of man can be reduced to two (the Evolutionist and the Biblical exoteric account) . . . There is no other hypothesis conceivable . . . " !! The anthropology of the secret volumes is, however, the best possible answer to such a worthless contention.
The anatomical resemblance between Man and the higher Ape, so frequently cited by Darwinists as pointing to some former ancestor common to both, presents an interesting problem, the proper solution of which is to be sought for in the esoteric explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid stocks. We have given it as far as was useful, by stating that the bestiality of the primeval mindless races resulted in the production of huge man-like monsters -- the offspring of human and animal parents. As time rolled on,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 3
and the still semi-astral forms consolidated into the physical, the descendants of these creatures were modified by external conditions, until the breed, dwindling in size, culminated in the lower apes of the Miocene period. With these the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the "Mindless" -- this time with full responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the species of apes now known as Anthropoid.
It may be useful to compare this very simple theory -- and we are willing to offer it even as a hypothesis to the unbelievers -- with the Darwinian scheme, so full of insurmountable obstacles, that no sooner is one of these overcome by a more or less ingenious hypothesis, than ten worse difficulties are forthwith discovered behind the one disposed of.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 690 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ IV.
DURATION OF THE GEOLOGICAL PERIODS, RACE CYCLES, AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
MILLIONS of years have dropped into Lethe, leaving no more recollection in the memory of the profane than the few millenniums of the orthodox Western chronology as to the origin of Man and the history of the primeval races.
All depends on the proofs found for the antiquity of the Human Race. If the still-debated man of the Pliocene or even the Miocene period was the Homo primigenius, then science may be right (argumenti causa) in basing its present anthropology -- as to the date and mode of origin of "Homo sapiens" -- on the Darwinian theory.* But if the skeletons of man should, at any time, be discovered in the Eocene strata, but no fossil ape, thereby proving the existence of man prior to the anthropoid -- then Darwinians will have to exercise their ingenuity in another direction. And it is said in well-informed quarters that the XXth century will be yet in its earliest teens, when such undeniable proof of Man's priority will be forthcoming.
Even now evidence is brought forward that the dates for the foundations of cities, civilizations and various other historical events have been absurdly curtailed. This was done as a peace-offering to Biblical chronology. "No date," writes the well-known Palaeontologist, Ed. Lartet, "is to be found in Genesis, which assigns a time for the birth of primitive humanity"; but chronologists have for fifteen centuries endeavoured to force the Bible facts into agreement with their systems. Thus, no less than one hundred and forty different opinions have been formed about the single date of "Creation"; "and between the extreme variations there is a discrepancy of 3,194 years, in the reckoning of the period between the beginning of the world and the birth of Christ.** Within the last few years, archaeologists have had to throw back by nearly 3,000 years also the beginnings of Babylonian civilization. On the
* It may here be remarked that those Darwinians, who with Mr. Grant Allen, place our "hairy arboreal" ancestors so far back as the Eocene Age, are landed in rather an awkward dilemma. No fossil anthropoid ape -- much less the fabulous common ancestor assigned to Man and the Pithecoid -- appears in Eocene strata. The first presentment of an anthropoid ape is Miocene.
** Ed. Lartet, "Nouvelles Recherches sur la co-existence de l'homme et des Grands Mammiferes Fossils de la derniere periode Geologique." Annales des Soc. Nat., t. XV., p. 256.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 691 PROFESSOR SAYCE SKETCHES OUT CHRONOLOGY.
foundation cylinder deposited by Nabonidus, the Babylonian king, conquered by Cyrus -- are found the records of the former, in which he speaks of his discovery of the foundation stone that belonged to the original temple built by Naram-Sin, son of Sargon, of Accadia, the conqueror of Babylonia, who, says Nabonidus, lived 3,200 years before his own time."
We have shown in Isis that those who based history on the Jewish Chronology (a race which had none of its own and rejected the Western till the XIIth century) would lose themselves, for the Jewish account could only be followed through Kabalistic computation, and with a key to it in the hand. . . We had characterised the late George Smith's chronology of the Chaldeans and Assyrians, made by him to fit in with that of Moses, as quite fantastic. And now, in this respect at least, later Assyriologists have corroborated our denial. For, whereas G. Smith makes Sargon I. (the prototype of Moses in his legend) reign in the city of Akkad about 1600 B.C. -- probably out of a latent respect for Moses, whom the Bible makes to flourish 1571 B.C. -- we now learn from the first of the six Hibbert lectures delivered by Professor A. H. Sayce, of Oxford, in 1887, that: "Old views of the early annals of Babylonia and its religions have been much modified by recent discovery. The first Semitic Empire, it is now agreed, was that of Sargon of Accad, who established a great library, patronized literature, and extended his conquests across the sea into Cyprus. It is now known that he reigned as early as B.C. 3750." "The Accadian monuments found by the French at Tel-loh must be even older, reaching back to about B.C. 4,000," in other words, to the fourth year of the World's creation agreeably with Bible chronology, and when Adam was in his swaddling clothes. Perchance, in a few years more, the 4,000 years may be further extended. The well-known Oxford lecturer remarked during his disquisitions upon "The origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Babylonian Religion " that: "The difficulties of systematically tracing the origin and history of the Babylonian Religion were considerable. The sources of our knowledge of the subject were almost wholly monumental, very little help being obtainable from classical or Oriental writers. Indeed, it was an undeniable fact that the Babylonian priesthood intentionally swaddled up the study of the religious texts in coils of almost insuperable difficulty." That they have confused the dates, and especially the order of events "intentionally," is undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings and records were all esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the Priests of other ancient nations. Their records were meant only for the Initiates and their disciples, and it is only the latter who were furnished with the keys to the true meaning. But Professor
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Sayce's remarks are promising. For he explains the difficulty by saying that as -- "the Nineveh library contained mostly copies of older Babylonian texts, and the copyists pitched upon such tablets only as were of special interest to the Assyrian conquerors, belonging to a comparatively late epoch, this added much to the greatest of all our difficulties -- namely, our being so often left in the dark as to the age of our documentary evidence, and the precise worth of our materials for history." Thus one has a right to infer that some still fresher discovery may lead to a new necessity for pushing the Babylonian
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
dates so far beyond the year 4,000 B.C., as to make them pre-Kosmic in the judgment of every Bible worshipper.
How much more would paleontology have learned had not millions of works been destroyed! We talk of the Alexandrian literary lore, which has been thrice destroyed, namely, by Julius Caesar B.C. 48, in A.D. 390, and lastly in the year 640, A.D., by the general of Kaliph Omar. What is this in comparison with the works and records destroyed in the primitive Atlantean Libraries, wherein records are said to have been traced on the tanned skins of gigantic antediluvian monsters? Or again the destruction of the countless Chinese books by command of the founder of the Imperial Tsin dynasty, Tsin Shi Hwang-ti, in 213 B.C.? Surely the brick-clay tablets of the Imperial Babylonian Library, and the priceless treasures of the Chinese collections could have never contained such information as one of the aforesaid "Atlantean" skins would have furnished to the ignorant world.
But even with the extremely meagre data at hand, Science has been able to see the necessity of throwing back nearly every Babylonian date, and has done so quite generously. We learn from Professor Sayce that even the archaic statues at Tel-loh, in Lower Babylonia, have suddenly been assigned a date contemporary with the fourth dynasty in Egypt. Unfortunately, dynasties and Pyramids have the fate of geological periods; their dates are arbitrary, and depend on the respective whims of the men of science. Archaeologists know now, it is said, that the afore-mentioned statues are fashioned out of green diorite, that can only be got in the Peninsula of Sinai; and "they accord in the style of art, and in the standard of measurement employed, with the similar diorite statues of the pyramid builders of the third and fourth Egyptian dynasties. . . . . Moreover, the only possible period for a Babylonian occupation of the Sinaitic quarries must be placed shortly after the close of the epoch at which the pyramids were built; and thus only can we understand how the name of Sinai could have been derived from that of Sin, the primitive Babylonian moon-god." This is very logical, but what is the date fixed for these "dynasties"? Sanchoniathon's and Manetho's Synchronistic tables and their figures have been rejected, or whatever
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 693 NO AGREEMENT BETWEEN SCIENTISTS.
remained of these after holy Eusebius' handling of them; and still we have to remain satisfied with the four or five thousand years B.C. so liberally allotted to Egypt. At all events one point is gained. There is, at last, a city on the face of the earth which is allowed, at least, 6,000 years, and it is Eridu. Geology has found it out. According to Professor Sayce again, --
"They are now also able to obtain time for the silting up of the head of the Persian Gulf, which demands a lapse of between 5,000 and 6,000 years since the period when Eridu, now twenty-five miles inland, was the seaport at the mouth of the Euphrates, and the seat of Babylonian commerce with Southern Arabia and India. More than all, the new chronology gives time for the long series of eclipses recorded in the great astronomical work called 'The Observations of Bel'; and we are also enabled to understand the otherwise perplexing change in the position of the vernal equinox, which has occurred since our present zodiacal signs were named by the Earliest Babylonian astronomers. When the Accadian calendar was arranged and the Accadian months were named, the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
sun at the vernal equinox was not, as now, in Pisces, or even in Aries, but in Taurus. The rate of the precession of the equinoxes being known, we learn that at the vernal equinox the sun was in Taurus from about 4,700 years B.C., and we thus obtain astronomical limits of date which cannot be impugned."*
It may make our position plainer if we state at once that we use Sir C. Lyell's nomenclature for the ages and periods, and that when we talk of the Secondary and Tertiary age, of the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene periods -- this is simply to make our facts more comprehensible. Since these ages and periods have not yet been allowed fixed and determined durations, 2 1/2 and 15 million years being assigned at different times to one and the same age (the Tertiary) -- and since no two geologists and naturalists seem to agree on this point -- Esoteric teachings may remain quite indifferent to whether man is shown to appear in the Secondary or the Tertiary age. If the latter age may be allowed even so much as 15 million years' duration -- well and good; for the Occult doctrine, jealously guarding its real and correct figures as far as concerns the First, Second, and two-thirds of the Third Root-Race -- gives clear information upon one point only -- the age of "Vaivasvata Manu's humanity." ( Vide Part I., Vol. II., "Chronology of the Brahmins.")
Another definite statement is this: It is during the so-called Eocene period that the continent to which the Fourth Race belonged, and on which it lived and perished, showed the first symptoms of sinking. And it was in the Miocene age, that it was finally destroyed -- save the little island mentioned by Plato. It is these points that have to be checked by the scientific data.
* From a Report of the "Hibbert Lectures, 1887. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, and Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians." By A. H. Sayce. (London: Williams and Norgate.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 694 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
A.
MODERN SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE AGES OF THE GLOBE,
ANIMAL EVOLUTION, AND MAN.
May we not be permitted to throw a glance at the works of Specialists? The work on "Comparative Geology: the World-Life," by Prof. A. Winchell, furnishes us with curious data. Here we find an opponent of the Nebular theory, a reverend gentleman, smiting with all the force of the hammer of his odium theologicum on the rather contradictory hypothesis of the great stars of Science, in the matter of sidereal and cosmical phenomena based on their respective relations to terrestrial durations. The "too imaginative physicists and naturalists" do not fare very easily under this shower of their own speculative figures when placed side by side, and cut rather a sorry figure. Thus he shows: --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
"Sir William Thomson, on the basis of the observed principles of cooling, concludes that no more than ten million years (elsewhere he makes it 100,000,000) can have elapsed since the temperature of the Earth was sufficiently reduced to sustain vegetable life.* Helmholz calculates that twenty million years would suffice for the original nebula to condense to the present dimensions of the sun. Prof. S. Newcomb requires only ten millions to attain a temperature of 212 [[degrees]] Fahr.** Croll estimates seventy million years for the diffusion of the heat, etc.*** Bischof calculates that 350 million years would be required for the earth to cool from a temperature of 2,000 [[degrees]] to 200 [[degrees]] Centigrade. Read, basing his estimate on observed rates of denudation, demands 500 million years since sedimentation began in Europe.**** Lyell ventured a rough guess of 240 million years; Darwin thought 300 million years demanded by the organic transformations which his theory contemplates, and Huxley is disposed to demand a 1,000 millions" (!!).
To this Prof. Winchell observes that "some biologists . . . . seem to close their eyes tight and leap at one bound into the abyss of millions of years, of which they have no more adequate estimate than of infinity."***** Then he proceeds to give what he takes to be more correct geological figures: a few will suffice.
According to Sir W. Thomson "the whole incrusted age of the world is 80,000,000 years"; and agreeably with Prof. Houghton's calculations of a minimum limit for the time since the elevation of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 695 MATERIALISTS AT LOGGER-HEADS.
Europe and Asia, three hypothetical ages for three possible and different modes of upheaval are given: varying from the modest figures of 640,730 years, through 4,170,000 years to the tremendous figures of 27,491,000 years!!
This is enough, as one can see, to cover our claims for the four continents and even the figures of the Brahmins.
Further calculations, the details of which the reader may find in Prof. Winchell's work,* bring Houghton to an approximation of the sedimentary age of the globe -- 11,700,000 years. These figures
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
are found too small by the author, who forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.
Again, according to Croll,** 2,500,000 years "represents the time since the beginning of the Tertiary age" in one work; and according to another modification of his view, 15,000,000 only have elapsed since the beginning of the Eocene period;*** which, being the first of the three Tertiary periods, leaves the student suspended between 2 1/2 and 15 millions. But if one has to hold to the former moderate figures, then the whole incrusted age of the world would be 131,600,000 years.****
As the last glacial period extended from 240,000 to 80,000 years ago (Prof. Croll's view), therefore, man must have appeared on earth from 100 to 120,000 years ago. But, as says Prof. Winchell, with reference to the antiquity of the Mediterranean race, "it is generally believed to have made its appearance during the later decline of the continental glaciers." Yet, he adds, this "does not concern, however, the antiquity of the Black and Brown races, since there are numerous evidences of their existence in more southern regions, in times remotely pre-glacial" (p. 379).
As a specimen of geological certainty and agreement, these figures also may be added. Three authorities -- Messrs. T. Belt, F.G.S.; J. Croll, F.R.S.; and Robert Hunt, F.R.S., -- in estimating the time that has elapsed since the Glacial epoch, give absolutely different figures, namely: --
*** Quoted in Mr. Ch. Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 84.
**** According to Bischof, 1,004,177 years -- according to Chevandier's calculations 672,788 years -- were required for the so-called coal formation. "The tertiary strata, about 1,000 feet in thickness, required for their development about 350,000 years." See "Force and Matter," Buchner, J. F. Collingwood's edition.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 696 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(But see "The Ice-Age Climate and Time," Popular Science Review, Vol. xiv., p. 242.)
No wonder if Mr. Pengelly confesses that "it is at present and perhaps always will be IMPOSSIBLE to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even into millenniums" ( Vide supra, foot-
note). A wise word of advice from the Occultists to the gentlemen geologists: they ought to imitate the
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cautious example of Masons. As chronology, they say, cannot measure the era of the creation, therefore, their "Antient and Primitive Rite" uses 000,000,000 as the nearest approach to reality.
The same uncertainty, contradictions and disagreement reign on all other subjects.
The scientific authorities on the Descent of Man are again, for all practical purposes, a delusion and a snare. There are many anti-Darwinists in the British Association, and "Natural Selection" begins to lose ground. Though at one time the saviour, which seemed to rescue the learned theorists from a final intellectual collapse into the abyss of fruitless hypothesis, it begins to be distrusted. Even Mr. Huxley is showing signs of truancy to "Selection," and thinks "natural selection not the sole factor": --
"We greatly suspect that she (Nature) does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms" (Review of Kolliker's Criticisms).
Again, in "Fallacies of Darwinism," (p. 160), C. R. Bree, M.D., argues in this wise in considering the fatal gaps in Mr. Darwin's theory: --
"It must be again called to mind that the intermediate forms must have been vast in numbers. . . . . Mr. St. George Mivart believes that change in evolution may occur more quickly than is generally believed; but Mr. Darwin sticks manfully to his belief, and again tells us 'natura non facit saltum' " -- wherein the Occultists are at one with Mr. Darwin.
Esoteric teaching fully corroborates the idea of nature's slowness and dignified progression. "Planetary impulses" are all periodical. Yet this Darwinian theory, correct as it is in minor particulars, agrees no more with Occultism than with Mr. Wallace, who, in his "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," shows pretty conclusively that something more than "natural selection" was requisite to produce physical man.
Let us, meanwhile, examine the scientific objections to this scientific theory, and see what they are.
Mr. St. George Mivart is found arguing that --
. . . . ". . . . it will be a moderate computation to allow 25,000,000 for the deposition of the strata down to and including the Upper Silurian. If,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 697 MIVART'S BILLIONS OF YEARS.
then, the evolutionary work done during this deposition only represents a hundredth part of the sum total, we shall require 2,500,000,000 years for the complete development of the whole animal Kingdom to its present state. Even one quarter of this, however, would far exceed the time which physics and astronomy seem able to allow for the completion of this process. Finally, a difficulty exists as to the reason of the absence of
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rich fossiliferous deposits in the oldest strata -- if life was then as abundant and varied, as on the Darwinian theory it must have been. Mr. Darwin himself admits 'the case at present must remain inexplicable'; and this may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views entertained in his own work. . . . .
"Thus, then, we find a wonderful (and on Darwinian principles all but inexplicable) absence of minutely transitional forms. All the most marked groups . . . . . appear at once upon the scene. Even the horse, the animal whose pedigree has been probably best preserved, affords no conclusive evidence of specific origin by infinitesimal fortuitous variations; while some forms, as the labyrinthodonts and trilobites, which seemed to exhibit gradual change, are shown by further investigation to do nothing of the sort. . . . All these difficulties are avoided if we admit that new forms of animal life of all degrees of complexity appear from time to time with comparative suddenness, being evolved according to laws in part depending on surrounding conditions, in part internal -
- similar to the way in which crystals (and perhaps from recent researches the lowest forms of life) build themselves up according to the internal laws of their component substance and in harmony and correspondence with all environing influences and conditions." ("Genesis of Species," p. 142.)
"The internal laws of their component substance." These are wise words, and the admission of the possibility, a prudent one. But how can these internal laws be ever recognized, if Occult teaching is discarded? As a friend writes, while drawing our attention to the above speculations: "In other words, the doctrine of Planetary Life-Impulses must be admitted. Otherwise, why are species now stereotyped, and why do even domesticated breeds of pigeons and many animals relapse into their ancestral types when left to themselves?" But the teaching about planetary life-impulses has to be clearly defined and as clearly understood if present confusion would not be made still more perplexing. All these difficulties would vanish as the shadows of night disappear before the light of the rising Sun, if the following esoteric axioms were admitted: (a) the enormous antiquity (and the existence) of our planetary chain; (b) the actuality of the Seven Rounds; (c) the separation of human races (outside the purely anthropological division) into Seven distinct Root-Races, of which our present European Humanity is the fifth ; (d) the antiquity of Man in this (Fourth) Round; and finally (e) that as these Races evolve from ethereality to materiality, and from the latter back again into relative physical tenuity of texture, so every living (so-called) organic species of animals with vegetation included, changes with every new Root-Race. Were this admitted, if even only
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 698 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
along with other, and surely, on maturer consideration, no less absurd, suppositions, if Occult theories have to be considered "absurd" at present, then every difficulty would be made away with. Surely, Science ought to try and be more logical than it now is, as it can hardly maintain the theory of man's descent from an anthropoidal ancestor, and deny in the same breath any reasonable antiquity to that man! Once Mr. Huxley talks of "the vast intellectual chasm between the man and ape," and "the present enormous gulf between the two,"* and if he admits the necessity of extending Scientific allowances for the age of man on earth for such slow and progressive development, then all those men
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of Science, who are of his way of thinking, at any rate, ought to come to some approximate figures, at least, and agree upon the probable duration of those Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene periods of which so much is said, and about which nothing definite is known -- if they dare not venture beyond. But no two scientists seem to agree. Every period seems to be a mystery in its duration, and a thorn in the side of the geologists; and, as just shown, they are unable to harmonize their conclusions even with regard to the comparatively recent geological formations. Thus, no reliance can be placed on their figures when they do give any, for with them it is all either millions or simply thousands of years!
That which is said may be strengthened by the confessions made by themselves and the synopsis of it, found in that "Circle of Sciences," the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which shows the mean accepted in the geological and anthropological riddles. In that work the cream of the most authoritative opinions is skimmed off; nevertheless, we find in it the refusal to assign any definite chronological date, even to such, comparatively speaking, late epochs as the Neolithic era, though, for a wonder, an age is established for the beginnings of certain geological periods; at any rate of some few, the duration of which could hardly be shortened any more, without an immediate conflict with facts.
Thus, it is surmised in the great Encyclopaedia (Vol. X., art. "Geology," p. 227), that "100 million years have passed . . . . . since the solidification of our Earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon it.**"
But it seems quite as hopeless to try to convert the modern Geologists and Ethnologists as it is to make Darwinian Naturalists perceive their mistakes. About the Aryan Root-Race and its origins,
** "100,000,000 of years is probably amply sufficient for all the requirements of Geology," says the text. In France, some savants do not find it nearly "sufficient." Le Couturier claims for the same 350 million years; Buffon was satisfied with 34 millions -- but there are those in the more modern schools who will not be content under 500 million years.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 699 THE ADEPT-ASTRONOMER.
Science knows as little as of the men from other planets. With the exception of Flammarion and a few mystics among astronomers, even the habitableness of other planets is mostly denied. Yet such great adept astronomers were the Scientists of the earliest races of the Aryan stock, that they seem to have known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern Anthropologist knows of those of the early stages of the Earth.
Let us leave modern Science aside for a moment and turn to ancient knowledge. As we are assured by Archaic Scientists that all such geological cataclysms -- from the upheaval of oceans, deluges, and shifting of continents, down to the present year's cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic
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eruptions, tidal waves, and even the extraordinary weather and seeming shifting of seasons which perplexes all European and American meteorologists -- are due to, and depend on the moon and planets; aye, that even modest and neglected constellations have the greatest influence on the meteorological and cosmical changes, over, and within our earth, let us give one moment's attention to our sidereal despots and rulers of our globe and men. Modern Science denies any such influence; archaic Science affirms it. We may see what both say with regard to this question.
-------
B.
ON CHAINS OF PLANETS AND THEIR PLURALITY.
Did the Ancients know of worlds besides their own? What are the data of the Occultists in affirming that every globe is a septenary chain of worlds -- of which only one member is visible -- and that these are, were, or will be, "man-bearing," just as every visible star or planet is? What do they mean by "a moral and physical influence" of the sidereal worlds on our globes?
Such are the questions often put to us, and they have to be considered from every aspect. To the first of the two queries the answer is: -- We believe it because the first law in nature is uniformity in diversity, and the second -- analogy. "As above, so below." That time is gone by for ever, when, although our pious ancestors believed that our earth was in the centre of the universe, the church and her arrogant servants could insist that we should regard as a blasphemy the supposition that any other planet could be inhabited. Adam and Eve, the Serpent, and the Original Sin followed by atonement through blood, have been too long in the way, and thus was universal truth sacrificed to the insane conceit of us little men.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 700 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Now what are the proofs thereof? Except inferential evidence and logical reasoning, there are none for the profane. To the Occultists, who believe in the knowledge acquired by countless generations of Seers and Initiates, the data offered in the Secret Books are all-sufficient. The general public needs other proofs, however. There are some Kabalists and even some Eastern Occultists, who, failing to find uniform evidence upon this point in all the mystic works of the nations, hesitate to accept the teaching. Even such "uniform evidence" will be forthcoming presently. Meanwhile, we may approach the subject from its general aspect, and see whether belief in it is so very absurd, as some scientists along with other Nicodemuses would have it. Unconsciously, perhaps, in thinking of a plurality of inhabited " Worlds," we imagine them to be like the globe we inhabit and peopled by beings more or less resembling ourselves. And in so doing we are only following a natural instinct. Indeed, so long as the enquiry is confined to the life-history of this globe we can speculate on this question with some profit, and ask ourselves what were the " Worlds" spoken of in all the ancient scriptures of Humanity, with some hope of at least asking an intelligible question. But how do we know (a) what kind of Beings inhabit the globes in general; and (b) whether those who rule planets superior to our own, do
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not exercise the same influence on our earth consciously, that we may exercise unconsciously -- say on the small planets (planetoids or asteroids) in the long run, by our cutting the Earth to pieces, opening canals, and thereby entirely changing our climates. Of course, like Caesar's wife, the planetoids cannot be affected by our suspicion. They are too far, etc., etc. Believing in esoteric astronomy, however, we are not so sure of that.
But when, extending our speculations beyond our planetary chain, we try to cross the limits of the solar system, then indeed we act as do presumptuous fools. For -- while accepting the old Hermetic axiom: "As above, so below" -- we may well believe that as Nature on Earth displays the most careful economy, utilizing every vile and waste thing in her marvellous transformations, and withal never repeating herself -- we may justly conclude that there is no other globe in all her infinite systems so closely resembling this earth that the ordinary powers should be able to imagine and reproduce its semblance and containment.*
* We are taught that the highest Dhyan Chohans, or Planetary Spirits (beyond the cognizance of the law of analogy), are in ignorance of what lies beyond the visible planetary systems, since their essence cannot assimilate itself to that of worlds beyond our solar system. When they reach a higher stage of evolution these other universes will be open to them; meanwhile they have complete knowledge of all the worlds within and beneath the limits of our solar system.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 701 STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
And indeed we find in the romances as in all the so-called scientific fictions and spiritistic revelations from moon, stars, and planets, merely fresh combinations or modifications of the men and things, the passions and forms of life with which we are familiar, when even on the other planets of our own system nature and life are entirely different from ours. Swedenborg was pre-eminent in inculcating such an erroneous belief.
But even more. The ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than that to which the physical senses link him. Men dream; they sleep the profound sleep which is too deep for dreams to impress the physical brain; and in these states there must still be consciousness. How, then, while these mysteries remain unexplored, can we hope to speculate with profit on the nature of globes which, in the economy of nature, must needs belong to states of consciousness other and quite different from any which man experiences here?
And this is true to the letter. For even great adepts (those initiated of course), trained seers though they are, can claim thorough acquaintance with the nature and appearance of planets and their inhabitants belonging to our solar system only. They know that almost all the planetary worlds are inhabited, but can have access to -- even in spirit -- only those of our system; and they are also aware how difficult it is, even for them, to put themselves into full rapport even with the planes of consciousness within our system, but differing from the states of consciousness possible on this globe; i.e., on the three planes of the chain of spheres beyond our earth. Such knowledge and intercourse are possible to them
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because they have learned how to penetrate to planes of consciousness which are closed to the perceptions of ordinary men; but were they to communicate their knowledge, the world would be no wiser, because it lacks that experience of other forms of perception which alone could enable them to grasp what was told them.
Still the fact remains that most of the planets, as the stars beyond our system, are inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of science themselves. Laplace and Herschell believed it, though they wisely abstained from imprudent speculation; and the same conclusion has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific considerations by C. Flammarion, the well-known French Astronomer. The arguments he brings forward are strictly scientific, and such as to appeal even to a materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such thoughts as those of Sir David Brewster, the famous physicist, who writes: --
"Those 'barren spirits' or 'base souls,' as the poet calls them, who might be led to believe that the Earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, would have no difficulty in conceiving the earth also to
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have been destitute of inhabitants. What is more, if such minds were acquainted with the deductions of geology, they would admit that it was uninhabited for myriads of years; and here we come to the impossible conclusion that during these myriads of years there was not a single intelligent creature in the vast domains of the Universal King, and that before the protozoic formations there existed neither plant nor animal in all the infinity of space"!*
Flammarion shows, in addition, that all the conditions of life -- even as we know it -- are present on some at least of the planets, and points to the fact that these conditions must be much more favourable on them than they are on our Earth.
Thus scientific reasoning, as well as observed facts, concur with the statements of the seer and the innate voice in man's own heart in declaring that life -- intelligent, conscious life -- must exist on other worlds than ours.
But this is the limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot carry him. Many are the romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others bristling with scientific knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and describe life on other globes. But one and all, they give but some distorted copy of the drama of life around us. It is either, with Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope, or, with de Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find that at bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. So strong is this tendency that even great natural, though non-initiated seers, when untrained, fall a victim to it; witness Swedenborg, who goes so far as to dress the inhabitants of Mercury, whom he meets with in the spirit-world, in clothes such as are worn in Europe.
Commenting on this tendency, Flammarion in his work "Sur la Pluralite des Mondes habites," says: --
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"It seems as if in the eyes of those authors who have written on this subject, the Earth were the type of the Universe, and the Man of Earth, the type of the inhabitants of the heavens. It is, on the contrary, much more probable, that, since the nature of other planets is essentially varied, and the surroundings and conditions of existence essentially different, while the forces which preside over the creation of beings and the substances which enter into their mutual constitution are essentially distinct, it would follow that our mode of existence cannot be regarded as in any way applicable to other globes.
* Since no single atom in the entire Kosmos is without life and consciousness, how much more then its mighty globes? -- though they remain sealed books to us men who can hardly enter even into the consciousness of the forms of life nearest us?
We do not know ourselves, then how can we, if we have never been trained to it and initiated, fancy that we can penetrate the consciousness of the smallest of the animals around us?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 703 WORLDS MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE.
Those who have written on this subject have allowed themselves to be dominated by terrestrial ideas, and fell therefore into error." ("Pluralite des Mondes, " p. 439.)
But Flammarion himself falls into the very error which he here condemns, for he tacitly takes the conditions of life on earth as the standard by which to determine the degree to which other planets are adapted for habitation by "other Humanities."
Let us, however, leave these profitless and empty speculations, which, though they seem to fill our hearts with a glow of enthusiasm and to enlarge our mental and spiritual grasp, do but in reality cause a factitious stimulation, and blind us more and more to our ignorance not only of the world we inhabit, but even of the infinitude contained within ourselves.
When, therefore, we find in the Bibles of Humanity "other worlds" spoken of, we may safely conclude that they not only refer to other states of our planetary chain and Earth, but also to other inhabited globes -- stars and planets; withal, that the latter were never speculated upon. The whole of antiquity believed in the Universality of life. But no really initiated seer of any civilized nation has ever taught that life on other stars could be judged by the standard of terrestrial life. That which is generally meant by "earths" and worlds, relates (a) to the "rebirths" of our globe after each manvantara and a long period of "obscuration"; and (b) to the periodical and entire changes of the Earth's surface, when Continents disappear, to make room for Oceans, and Oceans and Seas are violently displaced and sent rolling to the poles, to cede their emplacements to new Continents.
We may begin with the Bible -- the youngest of the World-Scriptures. In Ecclesiastes, chap. i., we read these words of the King-Initiate: -- "One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever," and again, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4
and that which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." Under these words it is not easy to see the reference to the successive cataclysms by which the Races of mankind are swept away, or, going further back, to the various transitions of the globe during the process of its formation. But if we are told that this refers only to our world as we now see it, -- then we shall refer the reader to the New Testament, where St. Paul speaks (in Hebrews i.) of the Son (the manifested Power) whom (God) hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds (plural.)*
* This relates to the Logos of every Cosmogony. The unknown Light -- with which he is said to be co-
eternal and coeval -- is reflected in the "First-Born," the Protogonos ; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 704 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This "Power" is Hokhmah or (Chochmah) the Wisdom and the Word. We shall probably be told that by this term "worlds," the stars, heavenly bodies, etc., were meant. But apart from the fact that "stars" were not known as "worlds" to the ignorant editors of the Epistles, if even they must have been known to Paul, who was an Initiate ("a Master-Builder"), we can quote on this point an eminent theologian, Cardinal Wiseman. In Vol. I, p. 309, of his work treating of the indefinite period of the six days -- or shall we say "too definite" -- period of the six days of creation and the 6,000 years, he confesses that we are in total darkness upon the meaning of that statement of St. Paul, unless we are permitted to suppose that allusion is made in it, i.e., the period which elapsed between the first and second verses of chapter i. of Genesis -- to those primitive revolutions, i.e., the destructions and the re-productions (of the world) indicated in chapter i. of Ecclesiastes ; or, to accept, with so many others, and in its literal sense, the passage (Hebrews i. 1,) that speaks of the creation of worlds -- in plural. . . . . It is very singular, he adds, that all the cosmogonies should agree to suggest the same idea, and preserve the tradition of a first series of revolutions, owing to which the world was destroyed and again renewed.
Had the Cardinal studied the Zohar his doubts would have changed to certitude. Thus saith Idra Suta (in the "Zohar," iii., 292, c.): "There were old worlds which perished as soon as they came into existence; worlds with and without form called Scintillas -- for they were like the sparks under the Smith's hammer, flying in all directions. Some were the primordial worlds which could not continue long, because the 'aged' -- his name be sanctified -- had not as yet assumed his form,* the workman was not yet the 'Heavenly man.' "** Again in the Midrash, written long before the Kabala of Simeon Ben Iochai, Rabbi Abahu explains: -- "The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and destroyed sundry worlds before this one*** . . . Now this refers both to the first races (the "Kings of Edom") and to the worlds destroyed."**** "Destroyed" means here what we call
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Divine Thought into the Chaos that under the fashioning of minor gods will be divided into the seven oceans -- Sapta samudras. It is Purusha, Ahura Mazda, Osiris, etc., and finally the gnostic Christos, who is in the Kabala, Hokhmah or Wisdom the "Word."
* The form of Tikkun or the Protogonos, the "first-born," i.e., the universal form and idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.
** The "Heavenly man" is Adam Kadmon -- the synthesis of the Sephiroth, as "Manu Swayambhuva" is the synthesis of the Prajapatis.
*** Bereshith Rabba, Parsha IX.
**** This refers to the three Rounds that preceded our fourth Round.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 705 WHO ARE THE KINGS OF EDOM?
"obscurations." This becomes evident when one reads further on the explanation given: -- "Still when it is said that they (the worlds) perished, it is only meant thereby that they (their humanities) lacked the true form, till the human (our) form came into being, in which all things are comprised and which contains all forms. . . . * -- it does not mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from their status . . ." (that of worlds in activity).**
When, therefore, we read of the destruction of the worlds, this word has many meanings, which are very clear in several of the Commentaries on the Zohar and Kabalistic treatises. As said elsewhere, it means not only the destruction of many worlds which have ended their life-career, but also that of the several continents which have disappeared, as also their decline and geographical change of place.
The mysterious "Kings of Edom" are sometimes referred to as the "Worlds" that had been destroyed; but it is a "cloak." The Kings who reigned in Edom before there reigned a King in Israel, or the "Edomite Kings," could never symbolize the "prior worlds," but only the "attempts at men" on this globe: the "pre-Adamite races," of which the Zohar speaks, and which we explain as the First Root-
Race. For, as, speaking of the six Earths (the six "limbs" of Microprosopus) it is said that the Seventh (our Earth) came not into the computation when the Six were created (the six spheres above our globe in the terrestrial chain), so the first seven Kings of Edom are left out of calculation in Genesis. By the law of analogy and permutation, in the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," as also in the "Books of Knowledge" and of "Wisdom," the "seven primordial worlds" mean also the "seven primordial" races (sub-races of the First Root-Race of the Shadows); and, again, the Kings of Edom are the sons of "Esau the father of the Edomites" (Gen. xxxvi. 43); i.e., Esau represents in the Bible the race which stands between the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the Aryan. "Two nations are in thy womb," saith the Lord to Rebekah; and Esau was red and hairy. From verse 24 to 34, ch. xxv. of Genesis contains the allegorical history of the birth of the Fifth Race.
"And the Kings of ancient days died and their chiefs (crowns) were found no more," says Siphrah
* This sentence contains a dual sense and a profound mystery in the occult sciences the secret of which if, and when, known -- confers tremendous powers on the Adept to change his visible form.
** Idra Suta, Zohar, iii. 136, c. "A sinking down from their status" -- is plain; from active worlds they have fallen into a temporary obscuration -- they rest, and hence are entirely changed.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 706 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
White Head: its people is not from this Form," states the Zohar (iii.). . . . "Before it (the White Head, the Fifth Race or Ancient of the Ancients) arranged itself in its (own, or present) Form . . . all worlds have been destroyed; therefore it is written: And Bela, the Son of Beor, reigned in Edom" (Gen. xxxvi.). Here the "worlds" stand for races. "And he (such or another King of Edom) died, and another reigned in his stead" (ibid 31 et seq.).
No Kabalist who has hitherto treated of the symbolism and allegory hidden under these "Kings of Edom" seems to have perceived more than one aspect of it. They are neither the "worlds that were destroyed," nor the "Kings that died" -- alone; but both, and much more, to treat of which there is no space at present. Therefore, leaving the mystic parables of the Zohar, we will return to the hard facts of materialistic science; first, however, citing a few from the long list of great thinkers who have believed in the plurality of inhabited worlds in general, and in worlds that preceded our own. These are, the great mathematicians Leibnitz and Bernouilli, Isaac Newton himself, as can be read in his "Optics"; Buffon, the naturalist; Condillac, the sceptic; Bailly, Lavater, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and, as a contrast to the two last named -- suspected at least of mysticism -- Diderot and most of the writers of the Encyclopaedia. Following these come Kant, the founder of modern philosophy; the poet philosophers, Goethe, Krause, Schelling; and many astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and Herschell to Lalande and Laplace, with their many disciples in more recent years.
A brilliant list of honoured names indeed; but the facts of physical astronomy speak even more strongly in favour of the presence of life, even organised life, on other planets. Thus in four meteorites which fell respectively at Alais in France, the Cape of Good Hope, in Hungary, and again in France, there was found, on analysis, graphite, a form of carbon known to be invariably associated with organic life on this earth of ours. And that the presence of this carbon is not due to any action occurring within our atmosphere is shown by the fact that carbon has been found in the very centre of a meteorite; while in one which fell at Argueil, in the south of France, in 1857, there was found water and turf, the latter being always formed by the decomposition of vegetable substances.
And further, examining the astronomical conditions of the other planets, it is easy to show that several are far better adapted for the development of life and intelligence -- even under the conditions with which men are acquainted -- than is our earth. For instance, on the planet Jupiter the seasons, instead
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of varying between wide limits as do ours, change by almost imperceptible degrees, and last twelve times
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 707 WHAT FLAMMARION TELLS US.
as long as ours. Owing to the inclination of its axis the seasons on Jupiter are due almost entirely to the eccentricity of its orbit, and hence change slowly and regularly. We shall be told, that no life is possible on Jupiter, as it is in an incandescent state. But not all astronomers agree with this. For instance what we say, is said by M. Flammarion: and he ought to know.
On the other hand Venus would be less adapted for human life such as exists on earth, since its seasons are more extreme and its changes of temperature more sudden; though it is curious that the duration of the day is nearly the same on the four inner planets, Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars.
On Mercury, the Sun's heat and light are seven times what they are on the Earth, and astronomy teaches that it is enveloped in a very dense atmosphere. And as we see that life appears more active on earth in proportion to the light and heat of the sun, it would seem more than probable that its intensity is far, far greater on Mercury than here.
Venus, like Mercury, has a very dense atmosphere, as also has Mars and the snows which cover their poles, the clouds which hide their surface, the geographical configuration of their seas and continents, the variations of seasons and climates, are all closely analogous -- at least to the eye of the physical astronomer. But such facts and the considerations to which they give rise, have reference only to the possibility of the existence on these planets of human life as known on earth. That some forms of life such as we know are possible on these planets, has been long since abundantly demonstrated, and it seems perfectly useless to go into detailed questions of the physiology, etc., etc., of these hypothetical inhabitants, since after all the reader can arrive only at an imaginary extension of his familiar surroundings. It is better to rest content with the three conclusions which M. C. Flammarion, whom we have so largely quoted, formulates as rigorous and exact deductions from the known facts and laws of science.
I. The various forces which were active in the beginning of evolution gave birth to a great variety of beings on the several worlds; both in the organic and inorganic kingdoms.
II. The animated beings were constituted from the first according to forms and organisms in correlation with the physiological state of each inhabited globe.
III. The humanities of other worlds differ from us, as much in their inner organization as in their external physical type.
Finally the reader who may be disposed to question the validity of these conclusions as being opposed to the Bible, may be referred to an Appendix in M. Flammarion's work dealing in detail with this question; since in a work like the present it seems unnecessary to point out the
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logical absurdity of those churchmen, who deny the plurality of worlds on such grounds.
In this connection we may well recall those days when the burning zeal of the Primitive Church opposed the doctrine of the earth's rotundity, on the ground that the nations at the Antipodes would be outside the pale of salvation; and again how long it took for a nascent science to break down the idea of a solid firmament, in whose grooves the stars moved for the special edification of terrestrial humanity.
The theory of the earth's rotation was met by a like opposition -- even to the martyrdom of its discoverers -- because, besides depriving our orb of its dignified central position in space, this theory produced an appalling confusion of ideas as to the Ascension -- the terms "up" and "down" being proved to be merely relative, thus complicating not a little the question of the precise locality of heaven.*
According to the best modern calculations, there are no less than 500,000,000 of stars of various magnitudes, within the range of the best telescopes. As to the distances between them, they are incalculable. Is, then, our microscopical Earth -- a "grain of sand on an infinite sea-shore" -- the only centre of intelligent life? Our own Sun, itself 1,300 times larger than our planet, sinks into insignificance beside that giant Sun -- Sirius, -- and the latter in its turn is dwarfed by other luminaries in infinite Space. The self-centred conception of Jehovah as the special guardian of a small and obscure semi-nomadic tribe, is tolerable beside that which confines sentient existence to our microscopical globe. The primary reasons were without doubt: (1) Astronomical ignorance on the part of the early Christians, coupled with an exaggerated appreciation of man's own importance -- a crude form of selfishness; and (2) the dread that, if the hypothesis of millions of other inhabited globes was accepted, the crushing rejoinder would ensue -- "Was there then a Revelation to each world?" involving the idea of the Son of God eternally "going the rounds" as it were. Happily it is now unnecessary to waste time and energy in proving the possibility of the existence of such worlds. All intelligent persons admit it. That which now remains to be demonstrated is, that if it is once proven that there are inhabited worlds besides our own with humanities entirely different from each other as from our own -- as maintained in the Occult
* In that learned and witty work, "God and his Book," by the redoubtable "Saladin" of Agnostic repute, the amusing calculation that, if Christ had ascended with the rapidity of a cannon ball, he would not have reached even Sirius yet, reminds one vividly of the past. It raises, perhaps, a not ill-
founded suspicion that even our age of scientific enlightenment may be as grossly absurd in its materialistic negations, as the men of the middle ages were absurd and materialistic in their religious affirmations.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 709 SCIENCE AND OCCULTISM MAY YET AGREE.
Sciences -- then the evolution of the preceding races is half proved. For where is that physicist or geologist who is prepared to maintain that the Earth has not changed scores of times, in the millions of years which have elapsed in the course of its existence; and changing its "skin," as it is called in Occultism, that the Earth has not had each time her special humanities adapted to such atmospheric and climatic conditions as were entailed. And if so, why should not our preceding four and entirely different mankinds have existed and thrived before our Adamic (Fifth Root) Race?
Before closing our debates, however, we have to examine the so-called organic evolution more closely. Let us search well and see whether it is quite impossible to make our Occult data and chronology agree up to a certain point with those of Science.
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 709 SCIENCE AND OCCULTISM MAY YET AGREE.
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C.
SUPPLEMENTARY REMARKS ON ESOTERIC GEOLOGICAL CHRONOLOGY.
It seems, however, possible to calculate the approximate duration of the geological periods from the combined data of Science and Occultism now before us. Geology is, of course, able to determine almost with certainty one thing -- the thickness of the several deposits. Now, it also stands to reason that the time required for the deposition of any stratum on a sea-bottom must bear a strict proportion to the thickness of the mass thus formed. Doubtless the rate of erosion of land and the sorting out of matter on to ocean beds has varied from age to age, and cataclysmic changes of various kinds break the "uniformity" of ordinary geological processes. Provided, however, we have some definite numerical basis on which to work, our task is rendered less difficult than it might at first sight appear to be. Making due allowance for variations in the rate of deposit, Professor Lefevre gives us the relative figures which sum up geological time. He does not attempt to calculate the lapse of years since the first bed of the Laurentian rocks was deposited, but postulating that time as = X, he presents us with the relative proportions in which the various periods stand to it. Let us premise our estimate by stating that, roughly speaking, the Primordial rocks are 70,000 ft., the Primary 42,000 ft., the Secondary 15,000 ft., the Tertiary 5,000 ft., and the Quaternary some 500 ft. in thickness: --
"Dividing into an hundred parts the time, whatever its actual length, that has passed since the dawn of life on this earth (lower Laurentian strata), we shall be led to attribute to the primordial age more than half of the whole duration, say 53.5; to the Primary 32.2; to the
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Secondary 11.5; to the Tertiary 2.3; to the Quaternary 0.5 or one-half per cent." ("Philosophy," p. 481.)
Now, as it is certain, on occult data, that the time which has elapsed since the first sedimentary deposits = 320,000,000 years, we are able to infer that the: --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
Primordial lasted 171,200,000 years.
Laurentian
Cambrian
Silurian
Primary lasted 103,040,000 years
Devonian
Coal
Permian
Secondary lasted 36,800,000 years
Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
Tertiary lasted 7,360,000 years (probably in excess)
Eocene
Miocene
Pliocene
Quaternary lasted 1,600,000 years (probably in excess).
Such estimates harmonise with the statements of Esoteric Ethnology in almost every particular. The Tertiary Atlantean part-cycle, from the "apex of glory" of that Race in the early Eocene to the great mid-Miocene cataclysm, would appear to have lasted some 3 1/2 to four million years. If the duration of the Quaternary is not rather (as seems likely) overestimated, the sinking of Ruta and Daitya would be post-Tertiary. It is probable that the results here given allow somewhat too long a period to both the Tertiary and Quaternary, as the Third Race goes very far back into the Secondary Age. Nevertheless, the figures are most suggestive.
But the argument from geological evidence being only in favour of 100,000,000 years, let us compare our claims and teachings with those of exact science.
Mr. Edward Clodd,* in reviewing M. de Mortillet's work "Materiaux pour l'Histoire de Homme, " which places man in the mid-Miocene period,** remarks that "it would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolu-
** And who yet, in another work, "La Prehistorique Antiquite de l'Homme, " some twenty years ago, generously allowed only 230,000 years to our mankind. Since we learn now that he places man "in the mid-Miocene period," we must say that the much respected Professor of Prehistoric Anthropology (in Paris) is somewhat contradictory and inconsistent, if not naif in his views.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 711 SECEDERS FROM DARWINISM.
tion teaches, and moreover, win no support from believers in special creation and the fixity of species, to seek for so highly specialized a mammalian as man at an early stage in the life-history of the globe." To this, one could answer: (a) the doctrine of evolution, as inaugurated by Darwin and developed by later evolutionists, is not only the reverse of infallible, but it is repudiated by several great men of science, e.g., de Quatrefages, in France, and Dr. Weismann, an ex-evolutionist in Germany, and many others, the ranks of the anti-Darwinists growing stronger with every year;* and (b) truth to be worthy of its name, and remain truth and fact, hardly needs to beg for support from any class or sect. For were it to win support from believers in special creation, it would never gain the favour of the evolutionists, and vice versa. Truth must rest upon its own firm foundations of facts, and take its chances for recognition, when every prejudice in the way is disposed of. Though the question has been already fully considered in its main aspects, it is, nevertheless, advisable to combat every so-called "scientific" objection as we go along, when making what are regarded as heretical and "anti-scientific" statements.
Let us briefly glance at the divergences between orthodox and esoteric science, on the question of the age of the globe and of man. With the two respective synchronistic tables before him, the reader will be enabled to see at a glance the importance of these divergences; and to perceive, at the same time, that it is not impossible -- nay, it is most likely -- that further discoveries in geology and the finding of fossil remains of man will force science to confess that it is esoteric philosophy which is right after all, or, at any rate, nearer to the truth.
-------
PARALLELISM OF LIFE.
[[First Column]]
SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES.
Science divides the period of the globe's history, since the beginning of life on earth (or the Azoic age), into five main divisions or periods, according to Haeckel.**
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[[Second Column]]
ESOTERIC THEORY.
Leaving the classification of the geological periods to Western Science, esoteric philosophy divides only the life-periods on the globe. In the present Manvantara the actual period is separated into seven Kalpas and seven great human races. Its first Kalpa, answering to the "Primordial Epoch," is the age of
* The root and basic idea of the origin and transformation of species -- the heredity (of acquired faculties) seems to have found lately very serious opponents in Germany. Du Bois-Reymond and Dr. Pffuger, the physiologists, besides other men of science as eminent as any, find insuperable difficulties and even impossibilities in the doctrine.
The Primordial Epoch is, science tells us, by no means devoid of vegetable and animal life. In the Laurentian deposits are found specimens of the Eozoon Canadense -- a chambered shell. In the Silurian are discovered sea-weeds (algae), molluscs, crustacea, and lower marine organisms, also the first trace of fishes. The primordial Epoch shows algae, molluscs, crustacea, polyps, and marine organisms, etc., etc. Science teaches, therefore, that marine life was present from the very beginnings of time, leaving us, however, to speculate for ourselves as to how life appeared on earth. If it rejects the Biblical "Creation" (as we do), why does it not give us another, approximately plausible hypothesis?
PRIMARY (Devonian***, Coal, Permian)
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"PRIMEVAL"* (Deva or Divine men, the "Creators" and Progenitors.**)
The Esoteric Philosophy agrees with the statement made by science (see parallel column), demurring, however, in one particular. The 300,000,000 years of vegetable life (see "Brahminical Chronology") preceded the "Divine Men," or Progenitors. Also, no teaching denies that there were traces of life within the Earth besides the Eozoon Canadense in the Primordial Epoch. Only, whereas the said vegetation belonged to this Round, the zoological relics now found in the Laurentian, Cambrian, and Silurian systems, so called, are the relics of the Third Round. At first astral like the rest, they consolidated and materialized pari passu with the NEW vegetation.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
"PRIMARY" -- Divine Progenitors, SECONDARY GROUPS, and the 2 1/2 races. "Fern-forests, Sigillaria, Coniferae, fishes, first trace of reptiles." Thus saith modern science; the esoteric doctrine repeats that which was said above. These are all relics of the preceding Round.**** Once, however, the prototypes are projected out of the astral envelope of the earth, an indefinite amount of modification ensues.
* The same names are retained as those given by science, to make the parallels clearer. Our terms are quite different.
** Let the student remember that the Doctrine teaches that there are seven degrees of Devas or "Progenitors," or seven classes, from the most perfect to the less exalted.
*** It may be said that we are inconsistent in not introducing into this table a [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 713 THE TWO SCIENCES CONTRASTED.
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SECONDARY (Triassic. Jurassic. Chalk or Cretaceous.)
This is the age of Reptiles, of the gigantic Megalosauri, Ichthyosauri, Plesiosauri, etc., etc. Science denies the presence of man in that period. If so, it has to explain how men came to know of these monsters and describe them before the age of Cuvier? The old annals of China, India, Egypt, and even of Judea are full of them, as demonstrated elsewhere. In this period also appear the first (marsupial) mammals***** -- Insectivorous, carnivorous, phytophagous; and (as Prof. Owen thinks) an herbivorous hoofed mammal.
Science does not admit the appearance of man before the close of the
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SECONDARY -- According to every calculation the Third Race had already made its appearance, as during the Triassic there were already a few mammals, and it must have separated.
This, then, is the age of the Third Race, in which the origins of the early Fourth may be perhaps also
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
discoverable. We are, however, here left entirely to conjecture, as no definite data are yet given out by the Initiates.
The analogy is but a poor one, still it may be argued that, as the early Mammalia and pre-mammalia are shown in their evolution merging from one kind into a higher one, anatomically, so are the human races in their procreative processes. A parallel might certainly be found between the Monotremata, the Didelphia (or Marsupialia) and the placental Mammals, divided in their turn into three orders******
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Primary-Age Man. The parallelism of Races and geological periods here adopted, is, so far as the origin of 1st and 2nd are concerned, purely tentative, no direct information being available. Having previously discussed the question of a possible Race in the Carboniferous Age, it is needless to renew the debate.
**** During the interim from one Round to another, the globe and everything on it remains in statu quo. Remember, Vegetation began in its ethereal form before what is called the Primordial, running through the Primary, and condensing in it, and reaching its full physical life in the Secondary.
***** Geologists tell us that "in the secondary epoch, the only mammals which have been (hitherto) discovered in Europe are the fossil remains of a small marsupial or pouch-bearer." (Knowledge, March 31, 1882, p 464.) Surely the marsupial or didelphis (the only surviving animal of the family of those who were on earth during the presence on it of androgyne man) cannot be the only animal that was then on earth? Its presence speaks loudly for that of other (though unknown) mammals, besides the monotremes and marsupials, and thus shows the appellation of "mammalian age" given only to the Tertiary period to be misleading and erroneous; as it allows one to infer that there were no mammals, but reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fishes alone in the Mesozoic times -- the Secondary.
****** These Placentalia of the third sub-class are divided, it appears, into Villiplacentalia (placenta composed of many separate scattered tufts), the Zonoplacentalia (girdle-shaped placenta), and the discoplacentaIia (or discoid). Haeckel sees in the Marsupialia Didelphia, one of the connecting links genealogically between man and the Moneron!!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 714 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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Tertiary period.* Why? Because man has to be shown younger than the higher mammals. But Esoteric philosophy teaches us the reverse. And as science is quite unable to come to anything like an approximate conclusion as to the age of man, or even the geological periods, therefore, even accepted only as a hypothesis, the occult teaching is more logical and reasonable.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
No man is yet allowed to have lived during this period: --
***Tertiary -- Eocene. Miocene. Pliocene.
Says Mr. E. Clodd, in Knowledge : -- "Although the placental mammals and the order of Primates to which man is related, appear in Tertiary times and the climate, tropical in the Eocene age, warm in the Miocene and temperate in the Pliocene, was favourable to his presence, the proofs of his existence in Europe before the close of the Tertiary epoch . . . . are not generally accepted here."
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like the First, Second, and Third Root-Races of men.** But this would require more space than can be now allotted to the subject.
Tertiary age -- The Third race has now almost utterly disappeared, carried away by the fearful geological cataclysms of the Secondary age, leaving behind it but a few hybrid races.
The Fourth, born millions of years before**** the said cataclysm took place, perishes during the Miocene period,****** when the Fifth (our Aryan race) had one million years of independent existence. (See "Esoteric Buddhism, " pp. 53-55. Fourth Ed.) How much older it is from its origin -- who knows? As the "Historical" Period has begun, with the Indian Aryans, with their Vedas, for their multitudes,****** and far earlier in the Esoteric Records, it is useless to establish here any parallels.
* Those who feel inclined to sneer at that doctrine of Esoteric Ethnology, which pre-supposes the existence of Man in the Secondary Age, will do well to note the fact that one of the most distinguished anthropologists of the day, M. de Quatrefages, seriously argues in that direction. He writes: "There is nothing impossible in the supposition that he (Man) may have appeared on the globe with the first representatives of the type to which he belongs in virtue of his organism." This statement approximates most closely to our fundamental assertion that man preceded the other mammalia.
Professor Lefevre admits that the "labours of Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Christy, Bourgeois, Desnoyers, Broca, de Mortillet, Hamy, Gaudry, Capellini, and a hundred others, have overcome all doubts and clearly established the progressive development of the human organism and industries from the Miocene epoch of the Tertiary age. " ("Philosophy," p. 499, chapter on Organic Evolution.) Why does he reject the possibility of a Secondary-Age man? Simply because he is involved in the meshes of the Darwinian Anthropology!! "The origin of man is bound up with that of the higher mammals;" he appeared "only with the last types of his class"!! This is not [[Footnote continued on next page]]
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 715 THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE "ANIMALISTS."
Geology has now divided the periods and placed man in the --
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Quaternary (Palaeolithic man. Neolithic man, and Historical Period.)
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If the Quaternary period is allowed 1,500,000 years, then only does our Fifth Race belong to it.
[[End of Columns]]
Yet, mirabile dictu! -- while the non-cannibal Paleolithic man, who must have certainly antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of thousands of years******* is shown to be a remarkable artist, neolithic
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] argument, but dogmatism. Theory can never excommunicate fact ! Must everything give place to the mere working-hypotheses of Western Evolutionists? Surely not.
** This inclusion of the First Race in the Secondary is necessarily only a provisional working-
hypothesis -- the actual chronology of the First, Second, and Early Third Races being closely veiled by the Initiates. For all that can be said on the subject, the First Root-Race may have been Pre-Secondary, as is, indeed, taught. ( Vide supra.)
*** The above parallels stand good only if Professor Croll's earlier calculations are adopted, namely, of 15,000,000 years since the beginning of the Eocene period (see Charles Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 84), not those in his "Climate and Time," which allow only 2 1/2 million years', or at the utmost three million years' duration to the Tertiary age. This, however, would make the whole duration of the incrusted age of the world only 131,600,000 years according to Professor Winchell, whereas in the Esoteric doctrine, sedimentation began in this Round approximately over 320 million years ago. Yet his calculations do not clash much with ours with regard to the epochs of glacial periods in the Tertiary age, which is called in our Esoteric books the age of the "Pigmies." With regard to the 320 millions of years assigned to sedimentation, it must be noted that even a greater time elapsed during the preparation of this globe for the Fourth Round previous to stratification.
**** Though we apply the term "truly human," only to the Fourth Atlantean Root-Race, yet the Third Race is almost human in its latest portion, since it is during its fifth sub-race that mankind separated sexually, and that the first man was born according to the now normal process. This "first man"
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
answers in the Bible (Genesis) to Enos or Henoch, son of Seth (ch. iv.).
***** Geology records the former existence of a universal ocean, sheets of marine sediments uniformly present everywhere testifying to it; but, it is not even the epoch referred to in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu. The latter is a Deva-Man (or Manu) saving in an ark (the female principle) the germs of humanity, and also the seven Rishis -- who stand here as the symbols for the seven human principles -- of which allegory we have spoken elsewhere. The "Universal Deluge" is the watery abyss of the Primordial Principle of Berosus. (See Stanzas from 2 to 8 in Part I.). How, if Croll allowed fifteen million years to have elapsed since the Eocene period (which we state on the authority of a Geologist, Mr. Ch. Gould) only 60 millions are assigned by him "since the beginning of the Cambrian period, in the Primordial Age " -- passes comprehension. The Secondary strata are twice the thickness of the Tertiary, and Geology thus shows the Secondary age alone to be of twice the length of the Tertiary. Shall we then accept only 15 million years for both the Primary and the Primordial? No wonder Darwin rejected the calculation.
****** We hope that we have furnished all the Scientific data for it elsewhere.
******* It is conceded by Geology to be "beyond doubt that a considerable period must have supervened after the departure of Palaeolithic man and before the arrival of his Neolithic successor." (See James Geikie's "Prehistoric Europe," and Ch. Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 98).
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man is made out almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings notwithstanding.* For see what a learned geologist, Mr. Charles Gould, tells the reader in his "Mythical Monsters": --
"Palaeolithic men were unacquainted with pottery and the art of weaving, and apparently had no domesticated animals or system of cultivation; but the Neolithic lake-dwellers of Switzerland had looms, pottery, cereals, sheep, horses," etc., etc.
Yet, though "Implements of horn, bone, and wood were in common use among both races . . . those of the older are frequently distinguished by their being sculptured with great ability, or ornamented with life-like engravings of the various animals living at the period; whereas there appears to have been a marked absence of any similar artistic ability** on the part of Neolithic man." Let us give the reasons for it.
(1) The oldest fossil man, the primitive cave-men of the old Palaeolithic period, and of the Pre-glacial period (of whatever length, and however far back), is always the same genus man, and there are no fossil remains proving for him "what the Hipparion and Anchitherium have proved for the genus horse -- that is, gradual progressive specialization from a simple ancestral type to more complex existing forms" ("Modern Science, " p. 181).
(2) As to the so-called Palaeolithic hatchet . . . "when placed side by side with the rudest forms of作者:
李洪志 時間: 2021-8-28 15:24
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
stone hatchets actually used by the Australian and other savages, it is difficult to detect any difference" (Ibid, p. 112). This goes to prove that there have been savages at all times; and the inference would be that there might have been civilized people in those days as well, cultured nations contemporary with those rude savages. We see such a thing in Egypt 7,000 years ago.
* Resembling in a manner the pile-villages of Northern Borneo.
** "The most clever sculptor of modern times would probably not succeed very much better, if his graver were a splinter of flint and stone and bone were the materials to be engraved"!! (Prof. Boyd Dawkins' "Cave-Hunting," p. 344.) It is needless after such a concession to further insist on Huxley's, Schmidt's, Laing's, and others' statements to the effect that Palaeolithic man cannot be considered to lead us back in any way to a pithecoid human race; thus demolishing the fantasies of many superficial evolutionists. The relic of artistic merit here re-appearing in the Chipped-Stone-Age men, is traceable to their Atlantean ancestry. Neolithic man was a fore-runner of the great Aryan invasion, and immigrated from quite another quarter -- Asia, and in a measure Northern Africa. (The tribes peopling the latter towards the North-West, were certainly of an Atlantean origin -- dating back hundreds of thousands of years before the Neolithic Period in Europe, -- but they had so diverged from the parent type as to present no longer any marked characteristic peculiar to it.) As to the contrast between Neolithic and Palaeolithic Man, it is a remarkable fact that, as Carl Vogt remarks, the former was a cannibal, the much earlier man of the Mammoth era not. Human manners and customs do not seem to improve with time, then? Not in this instance at any rate.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 717 ONE SALVATION FOR SCIENCE.
(3) An obstacle which is the direct consequence of the two preceding: Man, if no older than the Palaeolithic period, could not possibly have had the actual time to get transformed from the "missing link" into what he is known to have been even during that remote geological time, i.e., even a finer specimen than many of the now existing races.
The above lends itself naturally to the following syllogism: (1) The primitive man (known to Science) was, in some respects, even a finer man of his genus than he is now. (2) The earliest monkey known, the lemur, was less anthropoid than the modern pithecoid species. (3) Conclusion : even though a missing link were found, the balance of evidence would remain more in favour of the ape being a degenerated man made dumb by some fortuitous circumstances,* than tending to show that man descends from a pithecoid ancestor. The theory cuts both ways.
On the other hand, if the existence of Atlantis is accepted, and the statement is believed that in the Eocene Age "even in its very first part, the great cycle of the fourth race men, the Atlanteans had already reached its highest point . . . ." (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 64) then some of the present difficulties of science might be easily made to disappear. The rude workmanship of the Palaeolithic tools proves nothing against the idea that, side by side with their makers, there lived nations highly civilized. We are told that "only a very small portion of the earth's surface has been explored, and of this a very
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
small portion consists of ancient land surfaces or fresh water formations, where alone we can expect to meet with traces of the higher forms of animal life," . . . and that "even these have been so imperfectly explored, that where we now meet with thousands and tens of thousands of undoubted human remains lying almost under our feet, it is only within the last thirty years that their existence has even been suspected" (p. 98). It is very suggestive also that along with the rude haches of the lowest savage, explorers meet with specimens of workmanship of such artistic merit as could hardly be found, or expected, in a modern peasant belonging to any European country -- unless in exceptional cases. The "portrait" of the "Reindeer feeding," from the Thayngin grotto in Switzerland, and those of the man running, with two horse's heads sketched close to him -- a work of the Reindeer period, i.e., at least 50,000 years ago -- are pronounced by Mr. Laing not only exceedingly well done, but, especially the reindeer feeding, as one that "would do credit to any modern animal painter "
* On the data furnished by modern science, physiology, and natural selection, and without resorting to any miraculous creation, two negro human specimens of the lowest intelligence -- say idiots born dumb -- might by breeding produce a dumb Pastrana species, which would start a new modified race, and thus produce in the course of geological time the regular anthropoid ape.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 718 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
-- by no means exaggerated praise, as anyone may see ( Vide infra). Now, since side by side with the modern Esquimaux, who also have a tendency, like their Palaeolithic ancestors of the Reindeer period, the rude and savage human species, to be constantly drawing with the point of their knives sketches of animals, scenes of the chase, etc., we have our greatest painters of Europe, why could not the same have happened in those days? Compared with the specimens of Egyptian drawing and sketching -- "7,000 years ago" -- the "earliest portraits" of men, horses' heads, and reindeer, made 50,000 years ago, are certainly superior. Nevertheless, the Egyptians of those periods are known to have been a highly civilized nation, whereas the Palaeolithic men are called savages of the lower type. This is a small matter seemingly, yet extremely suggestive as showing that every new geological discovery is made to fit in with current theories, instead of the reverse. Yes; Mr. Huxley is right in saying, "Time will show." It will, and must vindicate Occultism.
Meanwhile, the most uncompromising materialists are driven by necessity into the most occult-like admissions. Strange to say, it is the most materialistic -- those of the German school -- who, with regard to physical development, come the nearest to the teachings of the Occultists. Thus, Professor Baumgartner, who believes that "the germs for the higher animals could only be the eggs of the lower animals"; who thinks that "besides the advance of the vegetable and animal world in development, there occurred in that period the formation of new original germs," which formed the basis of new metamorphoses, etc. -- thinks also that "the first men who proceeded from the germs of animals beneath them, lived first in a larva state."
Just so, in a larva state, we say, too; only from no "animal" germ, and that "larva" was the soulless astral form of the pre-physical Races. And we believe, as the German professor does, with several
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
other men of Science in Europe now, that the human races "have not descended from one pair, but appeared immediately in numerous races"; (Anfange zu einer Physiologischen Schopfungs-geschichte der Pflanzen und Thierwelt, 1885). Therefore, when we read "Force and Matter," and find that Emperor of Materialists, Buchner, repeating after Manu and Hermes, that "the plant passes imperceptibly into the animal, and the animal into man" (p. 85), we need only add "and man into a spirit," to complete the Kabalistic axiom. The more so, since on page 82 of the same work we read the following admission: . . . "Produced in the way of spontaneous generation . . . it is by the aid of intense natural forces and endless periods of time (that) there has progressively arisen that rich and infinitely modified organic world by which we are at present surrounded." . . . And (page 84) "Spontaneous generation played, no doubt,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 719 BETWEEN TWO VOIDS.
a more important part in the primeval epoch than at present; nor can it be denied that in this way beings of a higher organization were produced than now,"* for this is the claim of Occultism.
The whole difference lies in this: Modern Science places her materialistic theory of primordial germs on earth, and the last germ of life on this globe, of man, and everything else, between two voids. Whence the first germ, if both spontaneous generation and the interference of external forces, are absolutely rejected now? Germs of organic life, we are told, by Sir W. Thomson, came to our earth in some meteor? This helps in no way and only shifts the difficulty from this earth to the supposed meteor.
These are our agreements and disagreements with Science. About the endless periods we are, of course, at one even with materialistic speculation; for we believe in Evolution, though on different lines. Professor Huxley very wisely says: "If any form of progressive development is correct, we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of man." But when we are told that this man is a product of the natural forces inherent in matter, force, according to modern views, being but a quality of matter, a "mode of motion," etc.; and when we find Sir W. Thomson repeating in 1885 what was asserted by Buchner and his school thirty years ago, we fear all our reverence for real Science is vanishing into thin air! One can hardly help thinking that materialism is, in certain cases, a disease. For when men of Science, in the face of the magnetic phenomena and the attraction of iron particles through insulating substances, like glass, maintain that the said attraction is due to "molecular motion," or to the "rotation of the molecules of the magnet," then, whether the teaching comes from a "credulous" Theosophist innocent of any notion of physics, or from an eminent man of Science, it is equally ridiculous. The individual who asserts such a theory in the teeth of fact, is only one more proof that "When people have not a niche in their minds in which to shoot facts, so much the worse for the facts."
As present the dispute between the spontaneous generationists and their opponents is at rest, having ended in the provisional victory of the latter. But even they are forced to admit, as Buchner did, and Messrs. Tyndall and Huxley still do -- that spontaneous generation must have occurred once, under "special thermal conditions." Virchow refuses even to argue the question; it must have taken place sometime in the history of our planet: and there's an end of it. This seems to look more natural than Sir
* "Force and Matter," by Dr. Louis Buchner, translated and edited by J. Frederick Collingwood, F.R.S., F.G.S., 1864.
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scientific hypothesis coupled to the recently adopted belief that there exists no "Vital principle" whatever, but only vital phenomena, which can all be traced to the molecular forces of the original protoplasm. But this does not help Science to solve the still greater problem -- the origin and the descent of Man, for here is a still worse plaint and lamentation.
"While we can trace the skeletons of Eocene mammals through several directions of specialization in succeeding Tertiary times, man presents the phenomenon of an unspecialized skeleton which cannot fairly be connected with any of these lines." ("Origin of the World," p. 39, by Sir W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S.)
The secret could be soon told, not only from the esoteric but even from the standpoint of every religion the world over, without mentioning the Occultists. The "specialized skeleton" is sought for in the wrong place, where it can never be found. It is expected to be discovered in the physical remains of man, in some pithecoid "missing link," with a skull larger than that of the ape's, and with a cranial capacity smaller than in man, instead of looking for that specialization in the super-physical essence of his inner astral constitution, which can hardly be excavated from any geological strata! Such a tenacious, hopeful clinging to a self-degrading theory is the most wonderful feature of the day.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
REINDEER ENGRAVED ON ANTLER BY PALAEOLITHIC MAN. (After Geikie .)
Meanwhile, this is a specimen of an engraving made by a Palaeolithic "savage": Palaeolithic meaning the "earlier Stone-age" man, one supposed to have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 721 THE PALAEOLITHIC LANDSEER.
Leaving the modern South Sea Islander, or even any Asiatic race, aside, we defy any grown-up schoolboy, or even a European youth, one who has never studied drawing, to execute such an engraving or even a pencil sketch. Here we have the true artistic raccourci, and correct lights and shadows without any plane model before the artist, who copied direct from nature, thus exhibiting a knowledge of anatomy and proportion. The artist who engraved this reindeer belonged, we are asked to believe, to the primitive "semi-animal" savages (contemporaneous with the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros), whom some over-zealous Evolutionists once sought to picture to us as distinct approximations to the type of their hypothetical "pithecoid man"!
This engraved antler proves as eloquently as any fact can that the evolution of the races has ever proceeded in a series of rises and falls, that man, perhaps, is as old as incrustated Earth, and -- if we can call his Divine ancestor "Man" -- far older still.
Even de Mortillet himself seems to experience a vague distrust of the conclusions of modern archaeologists, when he writes: -- "The prehistoric is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word." ("Prehist. Antiq. of Man, " 1883.) According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the "Father" of Geology: -- "The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs, is based on the theory of progressive
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
development, and it may prove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yet we have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races." ("Antiq. of Man, " p. 25.) Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!
This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Muller, whose attack on the Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of LANGUAGE has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered: --
"What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history?" (Cf. this with the esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palaeolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.) "Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents. . . . How have they come to be what they are? . . . . Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindus, the Greeks and Romans (far older). . . .
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 722 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a RELAPSE INTO SAVAGERY or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages." ("India," 1883, F. Max Muller.)
"The primeval savage is a familiar term in modern literature," remarks Professor Rawlinson, "but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Rather all the evidence looks the other way." ("Antiq. of Man Historically Considered. ") In his "Origin of Nations," pp. 10-11, he rightly adds: "The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a 'golden age' which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement." How is the modern evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?
We repeat the question asked in "Isis Unveiled": "Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the earth have disappeared, and some archaeologist belonging to the 'coming race' of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was 'just emerging from the Stone Age'?"
Another strange inconsistency in scientific knowledge is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than the Palaeolithic one. Either Lubbock's "Pre-historic Man," or Evans' "Ancient Stone Implements" must be at fault, or -- both. For this is what we learn from these works and others: --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palaeolithic Man, the stone implements become, from gracefully shaped and polished instruments, rude lumbering makeshifts. Pottery, etc., disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!
(2) Palaeolithic Man lived in caves which he shared with hyaenas and lions also,* whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.
Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palaeolithic haches, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this is in Europe, a few portions only of which were barely rising from the waters in the days
* In such a case Palaeolithic man must have been endowed in his day with thrice Herculean force and magic invulnerability, or else the lion was as weak as a lamb at that period, for both to share the same dwelling. We may as well be asked to believe next that it is that lion or hyaena which has engraved the deer on the antler, as be told that this bit of workmanship was done by a savage of such a kind.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 723 ENTRAPPED BY THE REINDEER.
of the highest Atlantean civilizations. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason to maintain that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palaeolithic savages? All the articles which geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than from the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palaeolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period -- for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.
The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that: "It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they . . . . altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer." ("Mod. Science and Mod. Thought, " p. 164.)
Another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
"In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures, or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found . . . . the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period . . . which appear to be intended for female figures of life size" . . . . (p. 199 Ibid.)
And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond post-tertiary or "Quaternary" times -- though Abbe Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning* -- seems to point to the truth of another esoteric statement,
* More than twenty specimens of fossil monkeys have been found in one locality alone, in Miocene strata (Pikermi, near Athens). If man was not then, the period is [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 724 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
which runs thus: "Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas." . . . Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands that reappeared while their predecessors formed the floors of new Oceans -- deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since "retreated" and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.
The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period of fairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery -- possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palaeolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect. Not one implement fit to bear comparison with the finely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratum is to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palaeolithic age, mixed up confusedly with the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above. In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palaeolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism -- in
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
Europe again. We are made also to face the "mammoth age" -- the extreme or earliest division of the Palaeolithic age -- in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, point to a very low type of Humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something besides; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] too short for him to have been transformed -- stretch it as you may. And if he was, and if no monkey is found earlier, what follows?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 725 STRANGE CONFESSIONS OF SCIENCE.
As said by an anthropologist in "Modern Thought " (art. "The Genesis of Man"): "The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrere may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognised that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans, should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places the Homo Afer on the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It has never originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own" (Dr. C. Carter Blake). It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be, fossil man in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth nor the age of his earliest civilizations.
It is time the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than the hypotheses of the Scientists at any rate. As to the proof for the antiquity which they claim for man, they have, moreover, Darwin himself and Lyell. The latter confesses that they (the naturalists) "have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, and this even before the era of the earliest historical records."* This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by the students of Occultism, for with all others he says: "In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he (Man) must have flourished on Earth, there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch, possibly on some continents or islands now submerged beneath the Ocean."
Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds (also Races) are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldees, all antiquity believed in this. Twice already
has the face of the globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in the Book of Enoch between Noah and his "grandfather" Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact: there is a secular change in the inclination of the earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in the Popular Science Review (New Series in Vol. I. p. 115), Art.: "Evidences of the Age of Ice." . . . . "If it be necessary to call in extramundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system."
The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on "The extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey" shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact. It is a quotation in the body of the Lecture: --
"Evergreen Figs, Laurels, Palms, and Ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congeners in a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when the present climate of any district is regarded as normal.
"When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69[[degrees]] 20' and 70[[degrees]] 30' N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiae, Quercus Lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that "the 'splendid evergreen' (Magnolia Inglefieldi) 'ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70 [[degrees]] ' " (Phil. Trans. clix., 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that the time for its solution has not yet arrived.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
"It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question; How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis? -- a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state, 'the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period' (Lyell's Principles, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene (?) depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver, 'A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and Recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin. . . . This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia . . . then along the Himalaya and through China. . . . We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America. . . . We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World. . . . The consideration of these facts leads me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.' " (Nat. Hist. Rev. ii. 164, 1862.) See, however, "Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents."
But nothing short of a pithecoid man, will ever satisfy the luckless searchers after the thrice hypothetical "missing link." Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks ("Fallacies of Darwinism "), no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the tertiaries, if they had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 728 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
might still be found "in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea." Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Were not preconceptions to fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of "Antiquity of Man " would have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may not the soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
in a progressive scheme.
This hypothesis is made in relation to Evolution not being entirely due to "natural selection"; but it applies as well to our case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the "Soul," or the inner man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built -- his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.
"Thus incorporeal Spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense," . . . and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from the still gigantic (in our modern sense) stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half of that size at present.
Man is certainly no special creation, and he is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution -- is the "Eternal Pilgrim," the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute "unknowable."
In his "Antiquity of Man," Sir C. Lyell quotes -- perhaps in rather a mocking spirit -- what Hallam says (in Vol. iv., p. 162) in his "Introduction to the Literature of Europe ": --
"If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forest of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both?"
An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyan Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was made in the image of man, since the frame-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 729 PALAEOLITHIC MAN, A CALIGRAPH!
work of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means of the actual form of the Third-Round, and of the Fourth-Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in nature, not an atom: this latter is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand that form should be equally endowed with permanency.
And yet what do we find: --
"It is significant," says Sir W. Dawson, F.R.S., "that Professor Huxley in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals, mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures ('Nature,' 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and that Haeckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown ('History of Creation.') . . . . The so-
called 'tallies' found with the bones of Palaeocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writings were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archaeology or geology." (See Wilson's "Prehistoric Man, " op. cit., vol. ii., p. 54. "Origin of the World," p. 393.)
Again in Dr. C. R. Bree's "Fallacies of Darwinism, " on page 160, we read: --
"Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore, the time -- which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow -
- must have been enormous also during man's development from the monkey.* The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found. Neither in the gravel, nor the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds, nor in the tertiaries below them has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, as assumed to have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not, also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravels and drift! . . . . . . the celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote epoch (bronze and stone ages), and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape."
* And how much more "enormous" if we reverse the subjects and say during the monkey's development from the Third Race Man.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 730 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Our globe being convulsed each time that it reawakens for a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it -- it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 4 cont
forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms -- vegetable, animal and human -- changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions having formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna having been utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic Ape-Man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality and transfigured into the parent form in the modern Anthropoid.
This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, and far more probable than many "scientific" theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth -- like Ain Soph on his Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ on the meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premises will be -- no one can tell. Meanwhile, the present theories, as any one can see, clash together far more discordantly among themselves than even those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the Life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term; and now insists that life is an effect due to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm! The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in a few words, in which Mr. Herbert Spencer has defined "special creation" . . . "it is worthless. Worthless, by its derivation; worthless, in its intrinsic incoherence; worthless, as absolutely without evidence; worthless, as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless, as not satisfying a moral want. We must, therefore, consider it as counting for nothing in opposition to any other hypothesis respecting the origin of organic beings." (Principles of Biology, Vol. I., p. 345.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 731 STILL GREATER DIFFICULTIES.
§ V.
ORGANIC EVOLUTION AND CREATIVE CENTRES.
IT is argued that the Universal Evolution, otherwise, the gradual development of species in all the kingdoms of nature, works by uniform laws. This is admitted, and the law enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in modern Science. But we are told also, that it is equally a law that "development works from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in themselves, but constantly accumulating in the required direction." It is from the infinitesimally small that the comparatively gigantic species are produced.
Esoteric Science agrees with it, but adds that this law applies only to what is known to it as the Primary Creation -- the evolution of worlds from primordial atoms, and the pre-primordial ATOM, at the first differentiation of the former; and that during the period of cyclic evolution in space and time, this law is limited and works only in the lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first geological periods, from simple to complex, on the rough material surviving from the relics of the Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity when terrestrial activity recommences.
No more than Science, does esoteric philosophy admit design or "special creation." It rejects every claim to the "miraculous," and accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of force (or spirit) and of matter, which, starting from the neutral centre of Being, develops in its cyclic progress and incessant transformations. The primitive germ from which all vertebrate life has developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the primitive germ from which the vegetable and the animal life have evolved, there are side laws whose work is determined by the conditions in which the materials to be worked upon are found by them, and of which Science -- physiology and anthropology especially -- seems to be little aware. Its votaries speak of that "primitive germ," and maintain that it is shown beyond any doubt that the "design" and the "designer," if there be any, in the case of man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand especially, "must be placed very much farther back, and (the design) is, in fact, involved in the primitive germ," from which not only all vertebrate life, but, "probably all life, animal and vegetable, have been slowly developed" (p . 94 of "Modern Science and Modern Thought ").
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 732 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This is as true of the "primitive germ" as it is false that that "germ" is only "very much farther back" than man is; for it is at an immeasurable and inconceivable distance (in time, though not in space)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
from the origin even of our Solar system. As the Hindu philosophy very justly teaches, the "Aniyamsam Aniyasam, " can be known only through false notions. It is the "many" that proceed from the ONE -- the living spiritual germs or centres of forces -- each in a septenary form, which first generate, and then give the PRIMARY IMPULSE to the law of evolution and gradual slow development.
Limiting the teaching strictly to this, our earth, it may be shown that, as the ethereal forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by seven Dhyan-Chohanic centres of Force, so there are centres of creative power for every ROOT or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable and animal life. This is, again, no "special creation," nor is there any "Design," except in the general "ground-plan" worked out by the universal law. But there are certainly "designers," though these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason -- the ONE LIFE and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, or possibility of working on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is what natural history has sufficient evidence for. In the creation of new species, departing sometimes very widely from the Parent stock, as in the great variety of the genus Felis -- like the lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc. -- it is the "designers" who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For, it is those terrestrial spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature; which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.
Were there no such thing as evolutionary cycles, an eternal spiral progress into matter with a proportionate obscuration of spirit -- though the two are one -- followed by an inverse ascent into spirit and the defeat of matter -- active and passive by turn -- how explain the discoveries of zoology and geology? How is it that, on the dictum of authoritative science, one can trace the animal life from the mollusc up
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 733 THE "TO BE OR NOT TO BE" OF SCIENCE.
to the great Sea Dragon, from the smallest land-worm up again to the gigantic animals of the Tertiary Period; and that the latter were once crossed is shown by the fact of all those species decreasing, dwindling down and being dwarfed. If the seeming process of development working from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complex, were a universal law indeed, instead of being a very imperfect generalization of a mere secondary nature in the great Cosmic process, and if there were no such cycles as those claimed, then the Mesozoic fauna and flora ought to change places with the latest Neolithic. It is the Plesiosauri and the Ichthyosauri that we ought to find developing from the present sea and river reptiles, instead of giving place to their dwarfed modern analogies. It is, again, our old friend, the good-tempered elephant, that would be the fossil antediluvian ancestor, and the mammoth of the Pliocene age who would be in the menagerie; the megalonyx and the gigantic
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
megatherium would be found instead of the lazy sloth in the forests of South America, in which the colossal ferns of the carboniferous periods would take the place of moss and present trees -- dwarfs, even the giants of California, in comparison with the Titan-trees of past geological periods. Surely the organisms of the megasthenian world of the Tertiary and the Mesozoic Ages must have been more complex and perfect than those of the microsthenian plants and animals of the present age? The Dryopithecus, for instance, is found more perfect anatomically, more fit for a greater development of brain power, than the modern gorilla or gibbon? How is this, then? Are we to believe that the constitution of all those colossal land and sea-dragons, of the gigantic flying reptiles, was not far more developed and complex than the anatomy of the lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and even of the whales -- in short, all those animals we are acquainted with?
Let us admit, however, for argument's sake, that all those cycles, races, septenary forms of evolution and the tutti quanti of esoteric teaching, are no better than a delusion and a snare. Let us agree with Science and say that man, instead of being an imprisoned "Spirit," and his vehicle, the shell or body, a gradually perfected and now complete mechanism for material and terrestrial uses, as claimed by the Occultists -- is simply a more developed animal, whose primal form emerged from one and the same primitive germ on this earth, as the flying dragon and the gnat, the whale and the amoeba, the crocodile and the frog, etc., etc. In this case, he must have passed through the identical developments and through the same process of growth as all the other mammals? If man is an animal, and nothing more, a highly intellectual ex-brute, he should be privileged, at least, and allowed to have been a gigantic mammal of his kind, a
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 734 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
meganthropos in his day. It is just this, that esoteric science shows as having taken place in the first three rounds, and in this, as in most other things, it is more logical and consistent than modern science. It classifies the human body with the brute creation, and maintains it in the path of animal evolution, from first to last, while science leaves man a parentless orphan born of sires unknown, an "unspecialized skeleton" truly! And this mistake is due to a stubborn rejection of the doctrine of cycles.
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A.
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE MAMMALIA: SCIENCE AND THE
ESOTERIC PHYLOGENY.
Having dealt almost exclusively with the question of the origin of Man in the foregoing criticism of Western Evolutionism, it may not be amiss to define the position of the Occultists with regard to the differentiation of species. The pre-human fauna and flora have been already generally dealt with in the Commentary on the Stanzas, and the truth of much of modern biological speculation admitted, e.g.,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
the derivation of birds from reptiles, the partial truth of "natural selection," and the transformation theory generally. It now remains to clear up the mystery of the origin of those first mammalian fauna which M. de Quatrefages so brilliantly endeavours to prove as contemporary with the Homo primigenius of the Secondary Age.
The somewhat complicated problem relating to the "Origin of Species," -- more especially of the varied groups of fossil or existing mammalian fauna -- will be rendered less obscure by the aid of a diagram. It will then be apparent to what extent the "Factors of Organic Evolution," relied upon by Western biologists,* are to be considered as
* The Darwinian theory has been so strained, that even Huxley was forced at one time to deprecate its occasional degeneration into "fanaticism." Oscar Schmidt presents a good instance of a thinker who unconsciously exaggerates the worth of an hypothesis. He admits ("The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," p. 158), that "natural selection" "is in some cases . . . inadequate, . . . in others . . . not requisite, as the solution of the formation of species is found in other natural conditions." He also asserts the "intermediate grades are . . . wanting, which would entitle us to infer with certainty the direct transition from unplacental to placental mammals" (p. 271); that "we are referred entirely to conjecture and inference for the origin of the mammals" (p. 268); and the repeated failures of the framers of "hypothetical pedigrees," more especially of Haeckel. Nevertheless he asserts on p. 194, that "what we have gained by the Doctrine of Descent based on the theory of selection is the KNOWLEDGE of the connection of organisms as 'consanguineous beings.' " Knowledge in the face of the above-cited concessions, is, then, the synonym for conjecture and theory only?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 735 CONJECTURES ARE NOT FACTS.
adequate to meet the facts. The line of demarcation between etherospiritual, astral and physical evolution must be drawn. Perhaps, if Darwinians deigned to consider the possibility of the second process, they would no longer have to lament the fact that "we are referred to conjecture and inference for the origin of the Mammals"!! (The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 268, by Professor O. Schmidt.) At present the admitted chasm between the systems of reproduction of the oviparous vertebrates and mammalia, constitutes a hopeless crux to those thinkers who, with the Evolutionists, seek to link all existing organic forms in a continuous line of descent.
Let us take -- exempli gratia -- the case of the ungulate mammals. "In no other division," it is said, "do we possess such abundant fossil material." So much progress has been made in this direction, that in some instances the intermediate links between the modern and Eocene ungulates have been unearthed; a notable example being that of the complete proof of the derivation of the present one-toed horse from the three-toed Anchitherium of the old Tertiary. This standard of comparison between Western Biology and the Eastern doctrine could not, therefore, be improved upon. The pedigree here utilized, as embodying the views of scientists in general, is that of Schmidt based on the exhaustive researches of Rutimeyer. Its approximate accuracy -- from the standpoint of evolutionism -- leaves little to be desired: --
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
UNGULATE MAMMALS.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 736 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The midway point of evolution. Science comes to a standstill. "The root to which these two families lead back IS UNKNOWN" (Schmidt).
No. I. represents the realm explored by Western Evolutionists, the area in which climatic influences, "natural selection," and all the other physical causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology and palaeontology find their province here in investigating the many physical agencies which contribute so largely, as shown by Darwin, Spencer and others, to the segregation of species. But even in this domain the sub-conscious workings of the Dhyan-Chohanic wisdom are at the root of all the "ceaseless striving towards perfection," though its influence is vastly modified by those purely material causes which de Quatrefages terms the "milieux" and Spencer the "Environment."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
The "midway point of evolution" is that stage where the astral prototypes definitely begin to pass into the physical, and thus become subject to the differentiating agencies now operative around us. Physical causation supervenes immediately on the assumption of "coats of skin" -- i.e., the physiological equipment in general. The forms of Men and mammalia previous to the separation of sexes* are woven out of astral matter, and possess a structure utterly unlike that of the physical organisms, which eat, drink, digest, etc., etc., etc. The known physiological contrivances in organisms were almost entirely evolved subsequently to the incipient physicalization of the 7 Root-Types out of the astral -- during the "midway halt" between the two planes of existence. Hardly had the "ground-
plan" of evolution been limned out in these ancestral types, than the influence of the accessory terrestrial laws, familiar to us, supervened, resulting in the whole crop of mammalian species. AEons of slow differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.
* Bear in mind, please, that though the animals -- mammalians included -- have all been evolved after and partially from man's cast-off tissues, still, as a far lower being, the mammalian animal became placental and separated far earlier than man.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 737 THE UNITY OF TYPE.
No. II. represents the domain of the purely astral prototypes previous to their descent into (gross) matter. Astral matter, it must be noted, is fourth state matter, having, like our gross matter, its own "protyle." There are several "protyles" in Nature, corresponding to the various planes of matter. The two sub-physical elemental kingdoms, the plane of mind (manas, the fifth state matter), as also that of Buddhi (sixth state matter), are each and all evolved from one of the six "protyles" which constitute the basis of the Object-Universe. The three "states," so-called of our terrestrial matter, known as the "solid," "liquid," and "gaseous," are only, in strict accuracy, SUB-states. As to the former reality of the descent into the physical, which culminated in physiological man and animal, we have a palpable testimony in the fact of the so-called spiritualistic "materializations."
In all these instances a complete temporary mergence of the astral into the physical takes place. The evolution of physiological Man out of the astral races of early Lemurian age -- the Jurassic age of Geology -- is exactly paralleled by the "materialization" of "spirits" (?) in the seance-room. In the case of Professor Crookes' "Katie King," the presence of a physiological mechanism -- heart, lungs, etc. -- was indubitably demonstrated!!
This, in a way, is the ARCHETYPE of Goethe. Listen to his words: "Thus much we should have gained . . . all the nine perfect organic beings . . . (are) formed according to an archetype which merely fluctuates more or less in its very persistent parts and, moreover, day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of reproduction." This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the occult fact of the differentiation of species from the primal astral root-types. Whatever the whole posse comitatus of "natural selection," etc., etc., may effect, the fundamental unity of structural plan remains practically unaffected by all subsequent modifications. The "Unity of Type" common, in a sense, to all the animal and human kingdoms, is not, as Spencer and others appear to hold, a proof of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
the consanguineity of all organic forms, but a witness to the essential unity of the "ground-plan" Nature has followed in fashioning her creatures.
To sum up the case, we may again avail ourselves of a tabulation of the actual factors concerned in the differentiation of species. The stages of the process itself need no further comment here, being the basic principles underlying organic development, than to enter on the domain of the biological specialist.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 738 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
FACTORS CONCERNED IN THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE.
BASIC ASTRAL PROTOTYPES PASS INTO THE PHYSICAL.
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B.
THE EUROPEAN, PALAEOLITHIC RACES. -- WHENCE, AND HOW
DISTRIBUTED.
IS Science against those who maintain that down to the Quaternary period the distribution of the human races was widely different from what it is now? Is Science against those who, further, maintain that the fossil men found in Europe -- although having almost reached a plane of sameness and unity from the fundamental physiological and anthropological aspects which continues till this day -- still differ, sometimes greatly, from the type of the now existing populations. The late Littre confesses it in an article published by him on the Memoir called Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes (1849) -- in the Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1,1859). He says in it (a) that in these periods when the Mammoths, exhumed with the hatchets in Picardy, lived in the latter region, there must have been an eternal spring reigning over all the terrestrial globe*; nature was the contrary of
* Scientists now admit that Europe enjoyed in the Miocene times a warm, in the Pliocene or later Tertiary, a temperate climate. Littre's contention as to the balmy spring of the Quaternary -- to which deposits M. de Perthes' discoveries of flint implements are traceable (since when the Somme has worn down its valley many scores of feet) -- must be accepted with much reservation. The Somme-valley relics are post-glacial, and possibly point to the immigration of savages during one of the more temperate periods intervening between minor ages of Ice.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 739 AFRICA IN EUROPE.
those "periods " and then adds: (b) "Spring, professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Liege, found in a grotto near Namur, in the mountain of Chauvaux, numerous human bones 'of a race quite distinct from ours.' "
Skulls exhumed in Austria offered a great analogy with those of African negro races, according to Littre, while others, discovered on the shores of the Danube and the Rhine, resembled the skulls of the Caribs and those of the ancient inhabitants of Peru and Chili. Still, the Deluge, whether Biblical or Atlantean, was denied. But further geological discoveries having made Gaudry write conclusively: "Our forefathers were positively contemporaneous with the rhinoceros tichorrhinus, the hippopotamus major"; and add that the soil called diluvial in geology "was formed partially at least after man's apparition on earth" -- Littre pronounced himself finally. He then showed the necessity, before "the resurrection of so many old witnesses," of rehandling all the origins, all the durations, and added that there was AN AGE hitherto unknown to study "either at the dawn of the actual epoch or, as I believe, at the beginning of the epoch which preceded it."
The types of the skulls found in Europe are of two kinds, as is well known: the orthognathous and the prognathous, or the Caucasian and the negro types; such as are now found only in the African and the lower savage tribes. Professor Heer -- who argues that the facts of Botany necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis -- has shown that the plants of the Neolithic lake-villagers are mainly of African origin. How did the latter come to be in Europe if there was no former point of union between Africa and Europe? How many thousand years ago did the seventeen men live whose skeletons were exhumed in the Department of the Haute Garonne, in a squatting posture near the remains of a coal fire, with some amulets and broken crockery around them, and in company with the bear spelaeus, the Elephas primigenius, the aurochs (regarded by Cuvier as a distinct species), the Megaceros hibernicus -- all antediluvian mammals? Certainly at a most distant epoch, but not one which carries us further back than the Quaternary. A much greater antiquity for Man has yet to be proved. Dr. James Hunt, the late President of the Anthropological Society, makes it 9,000,000 years. This man of science, at any rate, makes some approach to our esoteric computation, if we leave the first two semi-human, ethereal races, and the early Third Race out of the computation.
The question, however, arises -- who were these Palaeolithic men of the European quaternary epoch?
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
Were they aboriginal, or the outcome of some immigration dating back into the unknown past? The latter is the only tenable hypothesis, as all scientists agree in eliminating Europe from the category of possible "cradles of mankind." Whence, then, radiated the various successive streams of "primitive" men?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 740 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The earliest Palaeolithic men in Europe -- about whose origin Ethnology is silent, and whose very characteristics are but imperfectly known, though expatiated on as "ape-like" by imaginative writers such as Mr. Grant Allen -- were of pure Atlantean and "Africo"-Atlantean stocks.* (It must be borne in mind that by this time the Atlantis continent itself was a dream of the past.) Europe in the quaternary epoch was very different from the Europe of to-day, being then only in process of formation. It was united to N. Africa -- or rather what is now N. Africa -- by a neck of land running across the present Straits of Gibraltar -- N. Africa thus constituting a species of extension of Spain, while a broad sea washed the great basin of the Sahara. Of the great Atlantis, the main bulk of which sank in the Miocene, there remained only Ruta and Daitya and a stray island or so. The Atlantean connections of the forefathers** of the Palaeolithic cave-men are evidenced by the upturning of fossil skulls (in Europe) reverting closely to the West Indian Carib and ancient Peruvian type -- a mystery indeed to all those who refuse to sanction the "hypothesis" of a former Atlantic continent to bridge the ocean (Cf. "Scientific and geological proofs of the reality of several submerged continents"). What are we also to make of the fact that while de Quatrefages points to that "magnificent race," the TALL Cro-
Magnon cave-men and the Guanches of the Canary Islands as representatives of one type -- Virchow also allies the Basques with the latter in a similar way? Professor Retzius independently proves the relationship of the aboriginal American dolichocephalous tribes and these same Guanches. The several links in the chain of evidence are securely joined together. Legions of similar facts could be adduced. As to the African tribes -- themselves diverging offshoots of Atlanteans modified by climate and conditions -- they crossed into Europe over the peninsula which made the Mediterranean an inland sea. Fine races were many of these European cave-men; the Cro-Magnon, for instance. But, as was to be expected, progress is almost non-existent through the whole of the vast period allotted
* "Whence they (the old cave-men) came, we cannot tell" (Grant Allen).
"The palaeolithic hunters of the Somme Valley did not originate in that inhospitable climate, but moved into Europe from some more genial region -- (Dr. Southall "Epoch of the Mammoth" p. 315).
** The pure Atlantean stocks -- of which the tall quaternary cave-men were, in part, the direct descendants -- immigrated into Europe long prior to the Glacial Period; in fact as far back as the Pliocene and Miocene times in the Tertiary. The worked Miocene flints of Thenay, and the traces of Pliocene man discovered by Professor Capellini in Italy, are witnesses to the fact. These colonists were portions of the once glorious race, whose cycle from the Eocene downwards had been running down the scale.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 5
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 741 A TARDY ADMISSION.
by Science to the Chipped Stone-Age.* The cyclic impulse downwards weighs heavily on the stocks thus transplanted -- the incubus of the Atlantean Karma is upon them. Finally, Palaeolithic man makes room for his successor -- and disappears almost entirely from the scene. Professor Lefevre asks in this connection: --
"Has the Polished succeeded the Chipped Stone-Age by an imperceptible transition, or was it due to an invasion of brachycephalous Celts? But whether, again, the deterioration produced in the populations of La Vezere was the result of violent crossings, or of a general retreat northwards in the wake of the reindeer, is of little moment to us." He continues: --
"Meantime the bed of the ocean has been upheaved, Europe is now fully formed, her flora and fauna fixed. With the taming of the dog begins the pastoral life. We enter on those polished stone and bronze periods, which succeed each other at irregular intervals, which even overlap one another in the midst of ethnical fusions and migrations. . . . The primitive European populations are interrupted in their special evolution and, without perishing, become absorbed in other races, engulfed . . . by successive waves of migration overflowing from Africa, possibly from a lost Atlantis [?? far too late by aeons of years] and from prolific Asia . . . all FORERUNNERS OF THE GREAT ARYAN INVASION" (Fifth Race).
* The artistic skill displayed by the old cave-men renders the hypothesis which regards them as approximations to the "pithecanthropus alalus" -- that very mythical Haeckelian monster -- an absurdity requiring no Huxley or Schmidt to expose it. We see in their skill in engraving a gleam of Atlantean culture atavistically re-appearing. It will be remembered that Donnelly regards modern European as a renaissance of Atlantean civilization. ("Atlantis," pp. 237-264.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 742 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ VI.
GIANTS, CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED
CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY.
WHEN statements such as are comprised in the above heading are brought forward, the writer is, of course, expected to furnish historical instead of legendary evidence in support of such claims. Is this possible? Yes; for evidence of this nature is plentiful, and has simply to be collected and brought together to become overwhelming in the eyes of the unprejudiced.
Once the sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he may find it out for himself. We give facts and show land-marks: let the wayfarer follow them. What is given here is amply sufficient for THIS Century.
In a letter to Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies of the "grand old invalid of Ferney" should be attracted to the "representatives of knowledge and wisdom, the Brahmans of India." He then adds a curious statement. "But," he says, "your Brahmans are very young in comparison with their ancient instructors."*
Bailly, who knew nought of the esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria, believed, nevertheless, unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in several pre-historic and civilized nations which had disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and traditions extensively, and he saw that the arts and sciences known to those we now call the "ancients," were "not the achievements of any of the now or even then existing nations, nor of any of the historical peoples of Asia." And that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindoos, their undeniable priority in the antiquity of their race had to be referred to a people or a race still more ancient and more learned than were even the Brahmans themselves.**
Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist par excellence, shared Bailly's belief. He thought it quite likely "that long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature." ("Lettres sur l'Atlantide, " p. 15).***
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
** Histoire de l'Astronomie Ancienne, p. 25, et seq.
*** This conjecture is but a half-guess. There were such "deluges of barbarians" in the Fifth Race. With regard to the Fourth, it was a bond fide deluge of water which swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however, knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the East.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 743 A MYSTERIOUS NATION.
That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly "a question of historical facts." For "I make great case of ancient traditions preserved through a long series of generations," he wrote. (Ibid.) It was possible, he thought, that a foreign nation should, after instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces behind. When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather archaic, nation should not have left at least some recollection in the human mind, he answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and events. But, the history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages of old Egypt had preserved it, and "it is so preserved to this day elsewhere." "You do not know which was the best and most handsome generation of men which has ever lived on this earth," said the priests of Sais to Solon, according to Plato. "Only a weak seed of it, of which you (Greeks) are the descendants,* is all that remains." "Their books," they added, "preserved the records of a great nation, which emerging from the Atlantic sea had invaded Europe and Asia (Timaeus). The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious nation. . . ."**
What was this nation? The secret doctrine teaches that it was the latest, seventh sub-race of the Atlanteans, already swallowed up in one of the early sub-races of the Aryan stock, one that had been gradually spreading over the continent and islands of Europe, as soon as they had begun to emerge from the seas. Descending from the high plateaux of Asia, where the two Races had sought refuge in the days of the agony of Atlantis, it had been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly emerged lands. The emigrant sub-race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that virgin soil; had divided into many families, which in their turn divided into nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phoenicians, and the Northern stocks, had thus proceeded from that one sub-race. Thousands of years later, other races -- the remnants of the Atlanteans -- "yellow and red, brown and black," began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers were defeated; and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries. Some of these lands became in course of time -- owing to new geological convulsions -- islands. Being thus forcibly
* For a full discussion of the relations between the old Greeks and Romans, and the Atlantean colonists, cf. "Five Years of Theosophy."
** The story about Atlantis and all the traditions thereon were told, as all know, by Plato in his "Timaeus and Critias." Plato, when a child, had it from his grand-sire Critias, aged ninety, who in his youth had been told of it by Solon, his father Dropidas' friend -- Solon, one of the Grecian Seven
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
Sages. No more reliable source could be found, we believe.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 744 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
separated from the continents, the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the Atlantean stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.
Did not the Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with WHITE savage chiefs; and has not the presence of African negro types in Europe in the pre-historic ages been now ascertained? It is this presence of a type associated with that of the negro, and also with that of the Mongolian, which is the stumbling-block of anthropology. The individual who lived at an incalculably distant period at La Naulette, in Belgium ( Vide Dr. Carter Blake's paper "On the Naudette Jaw," Anthrop. Review, Sept., 1867), is an example. "The caves on the banks of the Lesse, in South-Eastern Belgium," says this Anthropologist, "afford evidence of what is, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by the Naulette jaw. Such man, however, had amulets of stone, perforated for the purpose of ornament; these are made of a psammite now found in the basin of the Gironde."
Thus Belgian man was extremely ancient. That man who was antecedent to the great flood of waters -- which covered the highlands of Belgium with a deposit of lehm or upland gravel 30 metres above the level of the present rivers -- must have combined the characters of the Turanian and the negro. The Canstadt, or La Naulette, man, may have been black, and had nothing to do with the Aryan type whose remains are contemporary with those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of the Aquitaine bone-
caves belong to a far later period of history, and may not be as ancient as the former.
If the statement is objected to on the ground that Science does not deny the presence of man on earth from an enormous antiquity, though that antiquity cannot be determined, since that presence is conditioned by the duration of geological periods, the age of which is not ascertained; if it is argued that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period, or, again, that there have ever existed giants, three-eyed and four-armed and four-legged men, androgynes, etc., then the objectors are asked in their turn, "How do you know? What proof have you besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may be upset any day by new discoveries?" And these future discoveries are sure to prove that, whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthropologists was in complexion, he was in no respect apish. The Canstadt man, the Engis man alike possessed essentially human attributes. ( Vide de Quatrefages and Hamy. "Cranes des Races Humaines.") People have looked for the missing link at the wrong end of the chain; and the Neander valley man has long since been dismissed to the "limbo of all hasty blunders" (Ibid.). Disraeli divided man into the associates of the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 745 REMARKABLE "COINCIDENCES."
apes and the angels. Reasons are given in the text in favour of an "angelic theory," -- as Christians would say -- at least as applicable to some of the races of men. At all events, if man exists only since
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
the Miocene period, even then, humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of the Palaeolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they say is mere arbitrary speculative guess-work, invented by them to answer to and fit in with their own fanciful theories.
We speak of events hundreds of thousands years old, nay, even millions -- if man dates from the geological periods* -- not of any of those events which happened during the few thousand years of the pre-historic margin allowed by timid and ever-cautious history. Yet there are men of science who are almost of our way of thinking. From the brave confession of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, who says that: -- "Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it" -- down to the latest palaeontologists and anthropologists, the majority of scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. Apropos of Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethnological affinities and characteristics of the race which reared those Cyclopean erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a great civilization? At Cuelap, for instance, such are found, consisting "of a wall of wrought stones, 3,600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150 feet high, constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this mass was another, 600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 feet high, making an aggregate height of 300 feet. In it were rooms and cells." (Cf., the mass of evidence collected by Donnelly to prove the Peruvian colony an offshoot of the Atlanteans.) A most suggestive fact is the startling resemblance between the architecture of these colossal buildings and that of the archaic European nations. Mr. Fergusson regards the analogies between the ruins of "Inca" civilization and the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece as a coincidence "the most remarkable in the history of architecture." "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between them." The "relation" is simply explained by the derivation of the stocks,
* Haeckel's "Man-ape" of the Miocene period is the dream of a monomaniac, which de Quatrefages (see his "Human Species, " pp. 105-113) has cleverly disposed of. It is not clear why the world should accept the lucubrations of a psychophobic materialist, (to accept whose theory necessitates the acceptance on faith of various animals unknown to Science or Nature -- like the Sozura, for instance, that amphibian which has never existed anywhere outside Haeckel's imagination), rather than the traditions of antiquity.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 746 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
who devised these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic continent. The acceptance of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of this and similar problems in almost every branch of modern science.
Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by declaring that: -- "The truth, so long contested, of the co-existence of man with the great extinct species (Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorrhinus, Hyaena spelaea, Ursus spelaeus, etc., etc.), appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by science." ("Cavernes de Perigord," p. 35.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages' opinion. "Man has in all probability seen Miocene times* and consequently the entire Pliocene epoch," he says, and there are reasons for believing that "his traces will be found further back still, . . . ." he adds ("The Human Species, " p. 152.)
Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto-Aryan tribes began to settle on it, when the British Islands** and France were not even in existence. It is well known that "the tongue of the AEgyptian Sea," or the Delta of lower Egypt, became firm land very gradually, and followed the highlands of Abyssinia; unlike the latter, which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it was very slowly formed, through long ages, from successive layers of sea slime and mud, deposited annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the present Nile. Yet even the Delta as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited for more than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Aryan blood in them than their predecessors, arrived from the East, and conquered it from a people whose very name is lost to posterity, except in Secret works. It is this natural barrier of slime, which sucked in slowly and surely every boat that approached these inhospitable shores, that was, till within a few thousand of years B.C., the best safeguard of the later Egyptians, who had managed to reach it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia, led on by Manu Vina in the day of Visvamitra. (See in "Isis Unveiled, " vol. 1, p. 627, what Kulluka Bhatta says.)
So evident does the antiquity of man become with every day that even the Church is preparing an honourable surrender and retreat. The learned Abbe Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared
* The ingenious author of "Atlantis, the Ante-diluvian World," in discussing the origin of various Grecian and Roman institutions, expresses his conviction that "the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene Age." Ay, and further yet, as already stated.
** As we know them, however. For not only does Geology prove that the British islands have been four times submerged and re-elevated, but that the straits between them and Europe were dry land at a remote former epoch.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 747 THE SEVEN SABBATHS.
that pre-historic palaeontology and archaeology may, without any harm to the Scriptures, discover in the tertiary beds . . . . . the traces of pre-adamite man as much as they like. "Since it disregards all creations anterior to the last deluge but one, (that which produced the diluvium, according to the Abbe), Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in the grey diluvium, in Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the other hand, however, geologists are not all agreed in regarding the men who inhabited the globe in these primitive ages as our ancestors.*
The day when the Church will find that its only salvation lies in the occult interpretation of the Bible, may not be so far off as some imagine. Already many an abbe and ecclesiastic has become an ardent
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
Kabalist, and as many appear publicly in the arena, breaking a lance with Theosophists and Occultists in support of the metaphysical interpretation of the Bible. But they commence, unfortunately for them, from the wrong end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon the metaphysical in their Scriptures, to study and master that which relates to the purely physical -- e.g., its geological and ethnological hints. For such allusions to the Septenary constitution of the Earth and Man, to the seven Rounds and Races, abound in the New as in the Old Testaments, and are as visible as the sun in the heavens to him who reads both symbolically. What do the laws in chapter xxiii., v. 15, of Leviticus apply to? What is the philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadic offerings and symbolical calculations as: "ye shall count . . . . from the morrow after the Sabbath . . . . that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be completed" (15), "And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish" (18), etc. etc. We shall be contradicted, no doubt, when we say that all these "wave" and "peace" offerings were in commemoration of the Seven "Sabbaths" of the mysteries, which Sabbaths are seven pralayas, between seven manvantaras, or what we call Rounds -- for "Sabbath" is an elastic word, meaning a period of Rest of whatever nature, as explained elsewhere (Part II, "Sections on the Septenary.") And if this is not sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which follows (16), and which adds, "even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days" (forty-nine, 7 x 7, stages of activity, and forty-nine stages of rest, on the seven globes of the chain, and then
* "Les origines de la terre et de l'homme," p. 454. To this, Professor N. Joly, of Toulouse, who quotes the Abbe in his "Man before Metals, " expresses the hope that M. Fabre will permit him "to differ from him on this last point," p. 186. So do the Occultists; for though they claim a vast difference in the physiology and outward appearance of the five races so far evolved, still they maintain that the present human species has descended from one and the same primitive stock, evolved from the "divine men" -- our common ancestors and progenitors.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 748 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
comes the rest of Sabbath, the fiftieth ); after which "ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord," i.e., ye shall make an offering of your flesh or "coats of skin," and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits. This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was an institution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews via the "Chaldees," who were the "wise men" of a caste, not of a nation, a community of great adepts come from their "Serpent-
holes," and who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if this interpretation from Leviticus (full of the disfigured laws of Manu) is found too far-fetched, then turn to Revelation. Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to the famous Chapter xvii., with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH," or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity, that which was the "ceremonial magic" of old, with its terrible effects, and is now the harmless (because distorted) farce of ritualistic worship. The "mystery" of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul-killing Churchianity and of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
SUPERSTITION. "The beast that was, and is not, and yet is." "And here is the Mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains (seven continents and seven races) on which the woman sitteth," the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have covered that symbol "with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs" who protested and do protest. "And there are seven Kings (seven races); five are fallen (our fifth race included), and one is (the fifth continues), and the other (the sixth and the seventh races) is not yet come. . . . And when he (the race "King") cometh, he must continue a short space" (v. 10). There are many such Apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find them out for himself. These five Kings were mentioned before.
If the Bible combines with archaeology and geology to show that human civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological epochs -- why should not the statements of the Secret Doctrine be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific too, to disbelieve, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the famous Thenay flints* "were carved by the Dryopithecus monkey "; or, with the Occultist, that the anthro-
* "The flints of Thenay bear unmistakable trace of the work of human hands." (G. de Mortillet, "Promenades au Musee de St. Germain, " p. 76.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 749 THE APE LATER THAN MAN.
pomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically demonstrated, that "there was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species of mammal identical with species now extant" (Albert Gaudry "Les Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps geologiques" p. 240); and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are,* -- then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch,** is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent naturalists.
"Thus, in the savage of quaternary ages who had to fight against the mammoth with stone weapons, we find all those craniological characters generally considered as the sign of great intellectual development" (de Quatrefages, "The Human Species, p. 312.)
Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe the learned Abbe Bourgeois ( Vide infra, footnote**).
As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the "Mentone man" (6 ft. 8 in.), others may yet be excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that "in a tomb of the neolithic age . . . . a skeleton of extraordinary size was found in 1807," and that it was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7 ft. to even 9 ft. and 11 ft. high, this only proves -- on the law of atavism, or the reappearance of ancestral features of character -- that there was a time when 9 ft. and 10 ft. was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-
European race.
But as the subject was sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what the moderns know now.
The great nation mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred, had been destroyed by the Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race of Palaeolithic savages. Nevertheless, already in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and Initiates, no one seems
* Speaking of the reindeer hunters of Perigord, Joly says of them that "they were of great height, athletic, with a strongly built skeleton . . ." etc. ("Man before Metals, " p. 353).
** "On the shores of the lake of Beauce," says the Abbe Bourgeois, "man lived in the midst of a fauna which completely disappeared (Aceratherium, Tapir, Mastodon). With the fluviatile sands of Orleanais came the anthropomorphous monkey (pliopithecus antiquus); therefore, later than man." (See Comptes Rendus of the "Prehistoric Congress " of 1867 at Paris.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 750 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
to have preserved any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages; they were themselves descended from an alien race, and had settled in Egypt some 400,000 years before,* but their Initiates had preserved all the records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the statues of 341 kings who had reigned over their little Atlanto-Aryan Sub-race ( Vide about the latter "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 66, Fifth Edition.) If one allows only twenty years as an average figure for the reign of each King, the duration of the Egyptian Empire has to be pushed back, from the day of Herodotus, about 17,000 years.
Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern archaeologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years; and generously concede to Thebes with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests -- Initiates -- journeying in a North-Westerly direction, by land, via what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phoenician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still travelling by land, on the North-Western promontory of the New Continent.**
What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits? The archaic records show the Initiates of the Second Sub-race of the Aryan family moving from one
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
land to the other for the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptables for the ashes of generations to come. When was it? The fact of their crossing from France to Great Britain by land may give an idea of the date when such a journey could have been performed on terra firma.
* "In making soundings in the stony soil of the Nile Valley two baked bricks were discovered, one at the depth of 20, the other at 25 yards. If we estimate the thickness of the annual deposit formed by the river at 8 inches per century (more careful calculations have shown no more than from three to five per century), we must assign to the first of these bricks 12,000 years, and to the second 14,000 years. By means of analogous calculations, Burmeister supposes 72,000 years to have elapsed since the first appearance of man on the soil of Egypt, and Draper attributes to the European man, who witnessed the last glacial epoch, an antiquity of more than 250,000 years." ("Man before Metals," p. 183.) Egyptian Zodiacs show more than 75,000 years of observation! (See further.) Note well also that Burmeister speaks only of the Delta population.
** Or on what are now the British Islands, which were not yet detached from the main continent in those days. "The ancient inhabitant of Picardy could pass into Great Britain without crossing the Channel. The British Isles were united to Gaul by an isthmus which has since been submerged." ("Man before Metals," p. 184.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 751 DARWINIANS REJECT THE TRUTH.
It was --
"When the level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher than it is now; when the valley of the Somme was not hollowed to the depth it has now attained; when Sicily was joined to Africa, Barbary to Spain," when "Carthage, the Pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Uxmal and Palenque were not in existence, and the bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to undertake their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were yet unborn. What we know with certainty is that European man was contemporaneous with the extinct species of the quaternary epoch . . . . that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alps* and the extension of the glaciers, in a word that he lived for thousands of years before the dawn of the remotest historical traditions . . . . It is even possible that man was the contemporary of extinct mammalia of species yet more ancient . . . . of the Elephas meridionalis of the sands of St. Prest . . . and the Elephas antiquus, assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius, since their bones are found in company with carved flints in several English caves, associated with those of the Rhinoceros hemitaechus and even of the Machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date . . . . M. E. Lartet is of opinion that there is nothing really impossible in the existence of man as early as the Tertiary period."**
If "there is nothing impossible" scientifically in the idea, and it may be admitted that man lived already
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
as early as the Tertiary period, then it is just as well to remind the reader that Mr. Croll places the beginning of that period 2,500,000 years back (See Croll's "Climate and Time"); but there was a time when he assigned to it 15,000,000 years.
And if all this may be said of European man, how great is the antiquity of the Lemuro-Atlantean and of the Atlanto-Aryan man? Every educated person who follows the progress of Science, knows how all vestiges of man during the Tertiary period are received. The calumnies that were poured on Desnoyers in 1863, when he made known to the Institute of France that he had made a discovery "in the undisturbed pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartres, proving the co-existence of man and the Elephas meridionalis" -- were equal to the occasion. The later discovery (in 1867) by the Abbe Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was given at the Pre-historic Con-
* He witnessed and remembered it too, as "the final disappearance of the largest continent of Atlantis was an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps," a master writes (See Esoteric Buddhism p. 70). Pari passu, as one portion of the dry land of our hemisphere disappeared, some land of the new continent emerged from the seas. It is on this colossal cataclysm, which lasted during a period of 150,000 years, that traditions of all the "Deluges" are built, the Jews building their version on an event which took place later in "Poseidonis."
** The Antiquity of the Human Race in "Men before Metals," by M. Joly, Professor at the Science Faculty of Toulouse, p. 184.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 752 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
gress held at Brussels in 1872, proves that the average man of Science will never see but that which he wants to see.*
The modern archeologist, though speculating ad infinitum upon the dolmens and their builders, knows, in fact, nothing of them or their origin. Yet, these weird, and often colossal monuments of unhewn stones -- which consist generally of four or seven gigantic blocks placed together -- are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in groups or rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and variously upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks. People name them "devil's altars," druidic stones, and giant tombs. The stones of Carnac in the Morbihan, Brittany -- nearly a mile in length and numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows -- are twin sisters of those at Stonehenge. The Conical menhir of Loch-Maria-ker in Morbihan, measures twenty yards in length and nearly two yards across. The Menhir of Champ Dolent (near St. Malo) rises thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth below. Such dolmens and prehistoric monuments are met with in almost every latitude. They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark (among the local tumuli from twenty-seven to thirty-five feet in height); in Shetland, and in Sweden, where they are called ganggriften (or tombs with corridors); in Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hunengraben); in Spain (see the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga), and Africa; in Palestine and Algeria; in Sardinia (see the Nuraghi and Sepolture dei giganti, or tombs of giants); in Malabar, in
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (giants) and of the Rakshasas, the men-demons of Lanka ; in Russia and Siberia, where they are known as the Koorgan ; in Peru and Bolivia, where they are termed the chulpas or burial places, etc., etc., etc.
There is no country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are they all connected with Serpents and Dragons, with Alligators and Crocodiles? Because remains of "palaeolithic man" were, it is thought, found in some of them, and because in the funeral mounds of America bodies of later races were discovered with the usual paraphernalia of bone necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns, etc., hence they are declared ancient tombs. But surely the two famous mounds -- one in the Mississippi valley and the other in Ohio -- known respectively as "the Alligator Mound" and "the Great Serpent
* The scientific "jury" disagreed, as usual; while de Quatrefages, de Mortillet, Worsaae, Engelhardt, Waldemar, Schmidt, Capellini, Hamy, and Cartailhac, saw upon the flints the traces of human handiwork, Steenstrup, Virchow and Desor refused to do so. Still the majority, if we except some English Scientists, are for Bourgeois.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 753 STILL MORE ASTOUNDING CONTRADICTIONS.
Mound," were never meant for tombs* ( Vide infra). Yet one is told authoritatively that the Mounds, and the Mound or Dolmen Builders, are all "Pelasgic" in Europe, antecedent to the Incas, in America, yet of "not extremely distant times." They are built by "no race of Dolmen Builders," which never existed (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp) save in the earlier archeological fancy. Finally Virchow's opinion of the giant tombs of Germany is now accepted as an axiom: -- "The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain" -- says that German biologist; and archaeology has but to bow and submit to the decision.**
That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the "tombs" is yet no reason to say there never were the remains of giants in them. Cremation was universal till a comparatively recent period -- some 80, or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, the classics, as shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons still excavated in their day. Besides this, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50, or 60,000 years,*** and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, ever since the third sub-race of the Aryan stock, which sub-race -- born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions -- had become European. Since then, as said, it has steadily been decreasing. It is truer therefore to say, that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,**** or rather the ashes of generations of giants.
* We take the following description from a scientific work. "The first of these animals (the alligator) designed with considerable skill, is no less than 250 ft. long. . . . . The interior is formed of a heap of
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
stones, over which the form has been moulded in fine stiff clay. The great serpent is represented with open mouth, in the act of swallowing an egg of which the diameter is 100 ft. in the thickest part; the body of the animal is wound in graceful curves and the tail is rolled into a spiral. The entire length of the animal is 1,100 ft. This work is unique . . . . and there is nothing on the old continent which offers any analogy to it." Except its symbolism, however, of the Serpent -- the cycle of Time -- swallowing Kosmos, the egg.
** It might be better, perhaps, for FACT had we more Specialists in Science and fewer "authorities" on universal questions. One never heard that Humboldt gave authoritative and final decisions in the matter of polypi, or the nature of an excrescence.
*** 57,000 years is the date assigned by Dr. Dowler to the remains of the human skeleton, found buried beneath four ancient forests at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi river.
**** Murray says of the Mediterranean barbarians that they marvelled at the prowess of the Atlanteans. "Their physical strength was extraordinary (witness indeed their cyclopean buildings), the earth shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever they did, was done speedily. . . . . . They were wise and communicated their wisdom to men" (Mythology p. 4).
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Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs to the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and -- "magicians," both good and bad.
It will always be a subject of regret that history, rejecting a priori the actual existence of giants, has preserved us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every mythology -- which after all is ancient history -- the giants play an important part. In the old Norse mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that makes these giants to be the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the gods to the history of the development of the Aryan race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Aryan theory, as expounded by Max Muller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or AEsir, the gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in time or space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively and de facto side by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours (several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans) are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above 6 1/2 feet high. ( Vide Schweinfurth's latest works.)
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to live even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.
If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants at Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities "Los campos de los gigantes " -- "the fields of giants," are always concomitant with the existence of pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of pliocene raised beaches. "All the giants are not under Mount Ossa," and it would be poor anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the bogaterey (mighty giants)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 755 RACES OF GIANTS.
of old; and their folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, their oldest songs, and their most archaic traditions, speak of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.
"Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,
Such men as live in these degenerate days."
If the fossil footprints from Carson, Indiana, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men. Of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modem and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants 56 feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.
That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In the journal of the Anthropological Institute (Vol. 1871, art. by Dr. C. Carter Blake) such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed neolithic flints in the Jordan valley and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character -- was of a very large stature. The English translations of the Bible can never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim translating the word by "giants," and further adding that they were "hairy" men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by the patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these "Satyrs" -- some alive, others pickled and preserved. The
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
word "giants" being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land, found a pre-existing population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. This tall people existed in Canaan, and
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even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the Great Dragons, and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the "gods" and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant Serpent.
The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids, is as great as that of their supposed fanes is to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were eastern priests akin to the Chaldeans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindus do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio Great-Serpent mound worshipped theirs -- namely under the form of the "mighty Serpent," the emblem of the eternal deity TIME (the Hindu Kala). Pliny called them the "Magi of the Gauls and Britons." But they were more than that. The author of "Indian Antiquities " finds much affinity between the Druids and the Brahmins of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia*; others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace: simply because they were connected, in their esoteric teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.
Like the Hindus, the Greeks and Romans (we speak of the Initiates), the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of worlds, as also in that of seven "creations" (of new continents) and transformations of the face of the earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each earth or globe (See "Esoteric Buddhism "). Wherever the Serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Aryan Hindus and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks
* But the Magi of Persia were never Persians -- not even Chaldeans. They came from a far-off land, the Orientalists being of opinion that the said land was Media. This may be so, but from what part of Media? To this we receive no answer.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 757 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY AGREE.
hardly comprehend now that which they read in their Scriptures. See what Seneca says in Epistle 9, and Quaest. Nat. III., c., ult.: "The world being melted and having re-entered the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time to remain absorbed in himself and concealed, wholly immersed in contemplation. After which a new world springs from him. . . . An innocent race of men and animals are produced anew . . . etc." Then again when speaking of periodical mundane dissolution involving universal death, he (Seneca) says that "when the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the southern pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. The affrighted sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos" (Quoted in "Book of God, " p. 160.)
One might imagine oneself reading the Puranic account by Parasara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter iii. of the Second Epistle of Peter, from verse iii. till the xivth, and he will find there the same ideas. . . . "There shall come in the last days scoffers . . . saying, 'where is the promise of his coming? . . . . Since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.' For, they are ignorant . . . . that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth that are now, are reserved unto the fire . . . . wherein the heavens . . . . shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat . . . . we nevertheless look for new heavens and new earth, etc., etc." If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a new Jerusalem in heaven, this is no fault of "Peter." What the writer of the Epistles meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of these Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in the sciences.
It was mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our "chain" was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathustra. It is time to prove it to those Parsis who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the Avesta the earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger, as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies: the Avesta speaks
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of the three-thirds of the earth because the Rig-Veda mentions "three earths." . . . . "Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this."* But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. The Avesta has not borrowed the idea from the Rig-Veda, but simply repeats the esoteric teaching. The "three strata or layers" do not refer to our globe alone, but to three layers of the globes of our terrestrial chain -- two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six spheres or globes above our earth, the seventh and the fourth, it is septempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane -- it is tripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text in the Avesta and Vendidad, and even by the speculations -- a most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work -- of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the "earth," or rather the earth's chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three "zones," if this word is read "planes." As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old -- the oldest of all -- since the Gathas already speak of the "septempartite earth." (Bumi haptaiti, Yasna, xxxii., 3.) For, "according to the Parsee Scriptures, the seven Karshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth," which they surely are. For, "between them there flows the Ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Karshvar to another."** The "Ocean" is space, of course, for the latter was called "Waters of Space" before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered by Dwipa, and especially Qaniratha by Jambudwipa ("Neriosengh, the translator of the Yasna.")*** But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsi by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the "incongruities" of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such "incongruities" and "coincidences" concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dwipas (islands, or continents, rather) as met with in the Puranas, namely: "The Dwipas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambu Dvipa, which is situated in the centre" (p. 130, vol. I.), and, "according to the Iranian view, the Karshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest . . . . each of them (the other six Karshvars) is a
* p. 129, "Civilization of the Eastern Iranians in Ancient Times."
** Cf., e.g., Vol. I., 4, of the Pahlavi Translation; Bdh. xxi., 2-3.
*** Footnote by Darab Dastur Peshotan Sanjana, B.A., the translator of Dr. Wilhelm Geiger's work on the "Civilization of the Eastern Iranians."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 759 THE MAZDEAN VIEW OF THE SEVEN EARTHS.
peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round (above) Qaniratha" (Ibid. p. 131). Now Qaniratha is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator, "the country inhabited by the Iranian tribes," and the other names do not mean "the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East" (p. 132), but our globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that "two Vorubarshti and Voru-Zarshti lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West," is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the "chain" of our planet, the Earth, represented in the book of Dzyan (11) thus:
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to become an orthodox tenet. The "Earth" (our World), therefore, is "tripartite," because the chain of the worlds is situated on three different planes above our globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven globes or spheres which compose the chain. Hence the further meaning given in Vendidad XIX. 39, showing that "Qaniratha alone is combined with imat, 'this' (earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word 'avat,' 'that' or those -- upper earths." Nothing could be plainer.
The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.
The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore, when, while all the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, the Greeks, and again like the Christians, who do the same to this day, without suspecting the real meaning, they greeted the Morning Star -- the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.*
* Dr. Kenealy quotes, in his "Book of God," Vallancey, who says "I had not been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, where I had studied Hebrew and Chaldaic under Jews of various countries, when I heard a peasant girl say to boor standing by her "Teach an Maddin Nag" (Behold the morning star), pointing to the planet Venus, the Maddena Nag of the Chaldeans."
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Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia, "where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace (lib. iv.) and this island was Sacred Ierna," where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains: "that the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world," but in a series of re-incarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.*
These tenets came to the Fifth Race Aryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6
gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. One finds the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.
AElian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it. It was the last to produce animals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived to twice as old an age. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such (cities) held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance. . . .
Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage -- clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea -- is too disingenuous to be even noticed.
* There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion, and when they were of "one lip." "All the religions of the Earth were at first One and emanated from one centre," says Faber very truly.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
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[[This page continued from previous section]]
A.
SOME STATEMENTS ABOUT THE SACRED ISLANDS AND CONTINENTS
IN THE CLASSICS, EXPLAINED ESOTERICALLY.
All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many others. But as no Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knew, posterity got only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a moralist than as a geographer and ethnologist or historian, the Greek philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 761 WHO, OR WHAT WILL BE DENIED NEXT?
event which he located on one comparatively small island 3000 stadia long by 2000 wide; (or about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland), whereas the priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as "all Asia and Lybia" put together. But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato's narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.* It was not he who invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks of the Atlantes (who are our Atlanteans) and of their island in his Odyssey. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses. The Atlantes and the Atlantides of mythology are based upon the Atlantes and the Atlantides of history. Both Sanchoniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much these accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.
In our own day we witness the stupendous fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakespeare and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful races -- the Lemurians and the Atlanteans -- have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic?
Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes -- a people of Western Africa which gave its name to Mount Atlas; who were vegetarians, and "whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams"; and who, moreover, "daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas (Vide supra) gives the key to it. If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to that other statement -- namely, that
* Plato's veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such friendly critics as Professor Jowett, when the "story of Atlantis" is discussed, that it seems well to cite the testimony of a specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary cavillers in a very ridiculous position: --
"If our knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in every instance wherein the people of Europe accord with the people of America, they were both in accord with the people of Atlantis. . . . . It will be seen that in every case where Plato gives us information in this respect as to Atlantis, we find this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture, navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship, agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all the minor details." (Donnelly, "Atlantis," p. 194.)
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they daily "cursed the Sun" -- this again has nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration that grew with the race. It is explained in our Commentaries. "They (the sixth sub-race of the Atlanteans) used magic incantations even against the Sun" -- failing in which, they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the gods. Thence the same traditions taking form in the Bible about the antediluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, found also in the "Book of Enoch."
Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing the land in which all the gods had received their birth; as also of having had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from Antiquity.
The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and an universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean: because both continents bore races instructed by divine masters, and because both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reappearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso -- "the watery deep," (See Hesiod's Theogony, 507-509, and Odyssey 1, 51): Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the "sustainer" of the huge pillars that separate the heavens from the earth (1, 52-53). He is their "supporter." And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
waves, perished in the ocean deeps,* Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the earth, and join his brother Iapetos in the depths of Tartarus. Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning, Atlas "standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the universe and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the earth and the celestial vault -- the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere" . . . (Memoires de l'Academie des
* Christians ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical destruction of continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of the earth "standing out of the water, and in the water, which earth, being overflowed, perished, but is now reserved unto fire"; (See also the "Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers, " p. 4, London, 1815).
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Inscriptions, p. 176). For Atlas is Atlantis which supports the new continents and their horizons on its "shoulders."
Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grece Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron's translation of the Homeric word [[echei]] by sustinet, as it is not possible to see "how Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in various localities." If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a continent in the west said to support heaven and earth at once (AEschylus, "Prometheus Vinctus, " 351, 429, etc.) -- i.e., the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders support the celestial vault, an allusion to the gigantic peaks of the Lemurian and Atlantean continents -- the epithet "supporter" becomes very correct. The term "conservator" for the Greek word [[echei]], which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning [[phulassei ]] and [[epimeleitai]], does not render the same sense.
The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running along the terrestrial border (or disc). These mountain peaks plunged their roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas, and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thus, the Lybians called Mount Atlas "the pillar of Heaven," according to Herodotus (IV ., 184), and Pindar qualified the later AEtna as "the celestial pillar" (Pyth. 1, 20; Decharme, 315). Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when the African continent had not yet been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, independent, of the continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell ,* for Australia is now part of the Eastern continent. Proud Atlas, according to esoteric tradition, having sunk one third of its size into the waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.
This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo-Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told.** So
* This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Northern and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed part of the continent.
** Had not Diocletian burned the esoteric works of the Egyptians in 296, together with their books on alchemy -- "[[peri chumeias kai chrusou ]]"; Caesar 700,000 rolls at Alexandria, and Leo Isaurus 300,000 at Constantinople (viiith cent.); and the Mahomedans all they could lay their sacrilegious hands on -- the world might know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birth-
place in Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in Egypt.
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secret was the knowledge of the last islands of Atlantis, indeed, -- on account of the superhuman powers possessed by its inhabitants, the last direct descendants of the gods or divine Kings, as it was thought -- that to divulge its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as much in his ever-suspected Meropis, when he speaks of the Phoenicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; and who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.
There are those Orientalists and historians -- and they form the majority -- who, while feeling quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the Bible, and some of the events narrated in it, show great disgust at the immorality in the pantheons of India and Greece.* We may be told that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato, express the same; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented --
"those miserable stories of the poets," as Euripides expresses it ([[haoidon hoide dustenoi logoi]], Hercules furens, 1346, Dindorf's Edition).
But there may have been another reason for this, perhaps. To those who knew that there was more than one key to theogonic symbolism, it was a mistake to have expressed it in a language so crude and misleading. For if the educated and learned philosopher could discern the kernel of wisdom under the coarse rind of the fruit, and knew that the latter concealed the greatest laws and truths of psychic and physical nature, as well as the origin of all things -- not so with the uninitiated profane. For him the dead letter was religion; the interpretation -- sacrilege. And this dead letter could neither edify nor make him more perfect, seeing that such an example was given him by his gods. But
* Professor Max Muller's Lectures -- "on the Philosophy of Mythology" -- are before us. We read his citations of Herakleitos (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer deserved "to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged;" and of Xenophanes "holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. . . . " and for ascribing "to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men . . . unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud." Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett's translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantos (Republic) that "the
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young man (in the State) should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father (as Zeus did with Kronos) . . in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods. . . In my opinion, these stories are not fit to be repeated." To this Dr. Max Muller observes that "the Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief"; while the Christian religion is "an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorised codex and of a settled system of faith" (p. 349). So much the worse if it is "historical," for surely Lot's incident with his daughters would only gain, were it "allegorical."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 765 THE GOD-BEARING LAND.
to the philosopher -- especially the Initiate -- Hesiod's theogony is as historical as any history can be. Plato accepts it as such, and gives out as much of its truths as his pledges permitted him.
The fact that the Atlantes claimed Uranos for their first king, and that Plato commences his story of Atlantis by the division of the great continent by Neptune, the grandson of Uranos, shows that there were continents and kings before Atlantis. For Neptune, to whose lot that continent fell, finds on a small island only one human couple made of clay (i.e., the first physical human man, whose origin began with the last sub-races of the Third Root-Race). It is their daughter Clito that the god marries, and it is his eldest son Atlas who receives for his part the mountain and the continent which was called by his name.
Now all the gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindu Pantheon and the Rishis, were the septiform personations (1) of the noumena of the intelligent Powers of nature; (2) of Cosmic Forces; (3) of celestial bodies; (4) of gods or Dhyan Chohans; (5) of psychic and spiritual powers; (6) of divine kings on earth (or the incarnations of the gods); and (7) of terrestrial heroes or men. The knowledge how to discern among these seven forms the one that is meant, belonged at all times to the Initiates, whose earliest predecessors had created this symbolical and allegorical system.
Thus while Uranos (or the host representing this celestial group) reigned and ruled over the Second Race and their (then) Continent; Kronos or Saturn governed the Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptune* and others fought in the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole earth in the day of the Fourth Race. Poseidonis, or the (last) island of Atlantis "the third step of Idaspati" (or Vishnu) in the mystic language of the secret books -- lasted till about 12,000 years ago.** The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in claiming that it was their country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas, where "the gods were born" -- i.e., "incarnated." But it was after their fourth incarnation that they became, for the first time, human Kings and rulers.
Diodorus speaks of Uranos as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either consciously or otherwise, the continents; but, as shown, Plato indirectly corrects the statement. The first astronomical teacher of men was Uranos, because he is one of the seven Dhyan Chohans of that second period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara
* Neptune or Poseidon is the Hindu Idaspati, identical with Narayana (the mover on the waters) or Vishnu, and like this Hindu god he is shown crossing the whole horizon in three steps. Idaspati means also "the master of the waters."
** Bailly's assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the Egyptian priests do not represent "solar years" is groundless. Bailly knew nothing of geology and its calculations; otherwise he would have spoken differently.
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(that of Swarochisha), among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis,* the teacher of astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the names of Brahma. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the sky, Ouranos), and name him as their first teacher of astronomy. Uranos gave birth to the Titans of the Third Race, and it is they who (personified by Saturn-Kronos) mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who fell into generation, when "creation by will was superseded by physical procreation," they needed Uranos no more.
And here a short digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence of the last scholarly production of Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century, "The Greater Gods of Olympos," the ideas of the general public about Greek Mythology have been still further perverted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as "the true key to the Homeric conception," whereas this "key" was merely a blind. Poseidon "is indeed essentially of the earth earthy . . . . strong and self-asserting, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive," -- but this is because he symbolises the Spirit of the Fourth Root-Race, the ruler of the Seas, that race which lives above the surface of the seas ([[limne]], Il. xxiv., 79), which is composed of the giants, the children of Eurymedon, the race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan and one-eyed Cyclops. Though Zeus reigns over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules, and who is the true key to the triad of the Kronid Brothers and to our human races. Poseidon and Nereus are one: the former the ruler or spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of its submersion, the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the living race; Nereus, its spirit reincarnated in the subsequent Fifth or Aryan Race: and this is what the great Greek scholar of England has not yet discovered, or even dimly perceived. And yet he makes many observations upon the "artfulness" of Homer, who never names Nereus, at whose designation we arrive . . . . only through the patronymic of the Nereids!
Thus the tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to confine their speculations to the exoteric images of mythology and to lose sight of their inner meaning: and it is remarkably illustrated in the case of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, as we have shown. While almost the most conspicuous figure of our age as a statesman, he is at the same time one of the most cultured scholars England has given birth to. Grecian literature has been the loving study of his life, and he has found time amid the bustle of public affairs to enrich contemporary literature with contributions to Greek scholarship which will make his name famous through coming generations. At the same time, as his sincere
* See Matsya Purana, which places him among the seven Prajapatis of the period.
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admirer, the present writer cannot but feel a deep regret that posterity, while acknowledging his profound erudition and splendid culture, will yet, in the greater light which must then shine upon the whole question of symbolism and mythology, judge that he has failed to grasp the spirit of the religious system which he has often criticised from the dogmatic Christian standpoint. In that future day it will be perceived that the esoteric key to the mysteries of the Christian as well as of the Grecian theogonies and Sciences, is the Secret Doctrine of the pre-historic nations, which, along with others, he has denied. It is that Doctrine alone which can trace the kinship of all human religious speculations or even so-called Revelations, and it is this teaching which infuses the Spirit of life into the lay figures on the Mounts of Meru, Olympus, Walhalla, or Sinai. If Mr. Gladstone were a younger man, his admirers might hope that his scholastic studies would be crowned by the discovery of this underlying truth. As it is, he but wastes the golden hours of his declining years in futile disputations with that giant free-thinker, Col. Ingersoll, each fighting with the weapons of exoteric temper, drawn from the arsenals of ignorant LITERALISM. These two great controversialists are equally blind to the true esoteric meaning of the texts which they hurl at each other's head like iron bullets, while the world alone suffers by such controversies: since the one helps to strengthen the ranks of materialism, and the other those of blind Sectarianism and of the dead letter. And now we may return once more to our immediate subject.
Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our commentators. The power of names is great, and was known since the first men were instructed by the divine masters. And as Solon had studied it, he translated the "Atlantean" names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the Great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of "Atlantis."
Thus, in the Timaeus and Critias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself surrounded by mountain chains. . . . . And the plain was smooth and level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other. . . . . They surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.
Now in other places the entire size of the island of Poseidonis is given as about the same as that assigned here to the "plain around the
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city" alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great continent, and the other to its last remnant -- Plato's island.
And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million men; its navy as 1,200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!
The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters (seven sub-races), whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope, Merope, Alcyone, and Celaeno. This ethnologically, as they are credited with having married gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides have become the seven Pleiades (?). In occult science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to Karmic law.
Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria (confused already several thousands of years before our era with Atlantis): and these were the Egyptians, the Phoenicians ( Vide Sanchoniathon), and the old Greeks ( Vide Diodorus, after Plato). But the oldest civilized country of Asia -- India -- can be shown to claim the same descent likewise. Sub-
races guided by Karmic law or destiny repeat unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother-
races. As the comparatively fair Brahmins have come -- when invading India with its dark-coloured Dravidians -- from the North, so the Aryan Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The occult sciences show that the founders (the respective groups of the seven Prajapatis) of the Root Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find: --
"He who understands the age of Dhruva* who measures 9090 mortal years, will understand the times of the pralayas, the final destiny of nations, O Lanoo."
Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should locate its great progenitors and saints in the Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is 70,000 YEARS, HOWEVER, SINCE THE POLE OF THE EARTH POINTED TO THE FURTHER END OF URSA MINOR'S TAIL; and many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the constellation of Ursa Major.
The Aryan race was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further south into Asia. Hence Prometheus is son of Asia, and Deukalion, his son, the Greek Noah -- he who created men out of the stones of mother
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earth -- is called a northern Scythe, by Lucian, and Prometheus is made the brother of Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the Snows.*
Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phoenicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed.** All the "fables" of Greece were built on historical facts, if that history had only passed unadulterated by myths to posterity. The "one-eyed" Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Coelus and Terra -- three in number, according to Hesiod -- were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the "one-eye" referring to the Wisdom eye***; for the two front eyes were fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of Ithaca was saved by putting out with a fire-brand the eye of Polyphemus, is based upon the psycho-physiological atrophy of the "third" eye. Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a "sage" in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.**** His adventure with the latter -- a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey -- is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of
* Deukalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phoenicia. Now the worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole where the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in latitude 68 [[degrees]] it remains dead only for forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of Lemuria, or on that continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, and which stretched up to the Polar regions. This is well shown by de Gebelin's "Allegories d 'Orient," p. 246, and by Bailly; though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects.
** The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, were described (Herod, IV., 33-35; Pausanias, 1, 31, 2; V., 7, 8; ad X., 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the gods, and of Apollo chiefly.
*** The Cyclopes are not the only "one-eyed" representatives in tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye. (Geographie ancienne, Vol. II, p. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts. (See supra.)
**** Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of AEaea, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs for their voluptuousness; and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection (Odyssey and elsewhere). Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas (Odys. Book XII.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the ocean: thus identifying it with Atlantis.
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the Third Race to lose their all-penetrating spiritual eye. That other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclops to avenge the death of his son Asclepios, does not refer to the three races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the "Wisdom-eye." The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the south as much as in the north; the latter, were confined to the north solely. Thus Apollo -- pre-
eminently the god of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration -- killed them -- his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal -- and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions. (Hygin. "Astron. Poetique, " Book ii. c. 15). Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean god is the Sun personified, which during the course of the sidereal year (25,868 y.) changes the climates on the earth's surface, making of tropical, frigid regions, and vice versa. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his "Greater Gods of Olympos," "the qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athene) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology" (Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.)
The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo's mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phoebus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle (Diod. Sic. II. 307). Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its race -- geologically.*
* To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the southern. Thus Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book II.): "The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis." The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the mythologists have tried to make of Eridan the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridan and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridan, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridan by Jupiter's thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where "the magnolia blossomed" became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ices. This allegory covers then the events of two pralayas ; and if well understood ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.
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When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine -- Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of birds, the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels -- then the bright god assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of Seership, when he sends the astral double of AEneas to the battle field (II. 431-53), and has the gift of appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present -- (Iliad, xvii., 322-36) -- a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.
The King of the Hyperboreans, was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the north-wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe (the Atlantean race) -- the mother of seven sons and seven daughters personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches (see Apollodorus for this number) -- allegorizes the history of the two continents. The wrath of "the sons of god," or of "Will and Yoga," at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great (See "The Sons of God and the Sacred Island"); and the destruction of the "children of Niobe" by the children of Latona -- Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the earth's axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms -- is thus very clear.* The fable about the
* So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii.) as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child "cries, travailing in birth, pained to be delivered." A great red Dragon, etc., stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God (the Sun). The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who keep the commandment of God, etc. (See xii., 1, 17.) Anyone, who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognise the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for "the man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron" of Revelation, is surely not the meek "Son of God," Jesus, but the physical Sun, "who rules all nations"; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona "to bring forth" -- (the Sun to appear). "She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth," until Neptune (the ocean), moved with pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos (the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the ocean) on which Latona finds refuge and where the bright god [[Delios]] is born, the god, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns -- with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain -- Atlantis covered with water -- is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades (or Atlantides) the grand-daughter of Atlas therefore, (See "Metamorphoses of Ovid, " Book VI.), because she represents the last generations of the doomed continent.
A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous influence on antiquity. "If these names," he adds, "are mere allegories, then all that those fables contain of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real tradition -- however altered -- then the whole of the ancient history is still in it." (Lettres sur l'Atlantide, p. 137.)
So much so, that all ancient writings -- prose and poetry -- are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-
Atlanteans, the first physical races, though the Third and the Fourth in number. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet (Hesiod, in oper. and dieb. v . 143). Such were the giants of the first physical races. The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the "Sons of God," or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge, to rid the earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zoroaster as one of the "Sons of God." -- It says: "Thou, O Zarathustra, didst make all demons (i.e., Sorcerers), who before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth" (i.e., helped them to get submerged).
The Lemurians, as also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes -- the "Sons of Night" or Darkness, and the "Sons of the Sun," or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, from whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and "tried to wrench the lord of light" from their better favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months' duration in the Polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] chapter just cited of the Apocalypse. Latona became a powerful goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his occult aspect Apollo is patron of Number 7. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times around Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre -- the seven rays of the sun and the seven forces of nature. But this only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 773 THE CYCLES OF TIME.
than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the north where the year was divided into a day and night of six months' duration each, for Pliny says so in his Fourth Book, c. 12. They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former
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inhabited the Palus Maeotis (between 45 [[degrees]] and 50 [[degrees]] latitude). Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians, which nation stopped near Tanais, having crossed Asia. "These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year" (in Mario). As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor (c. 16), "sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves."
Even the writers of the Zohar knew of the fact (as shown in iii., fol. 10a), as it is written: "In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . . . there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants." (Isaac Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 139).
The island of Delos, the Asteria of the Greek mythology, was never in Greece, a country which, in its day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern seas. One calls it Basilea or "royal" ( Vol. II., p. 225 of Diod.); the other, Pliny, names it Osericta (Book xxxvii, c. 2), a word, according to Rudbeck ( Vol. I., p. 462-464), having had "a significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the divine Kings or god-Kings," or again the "royal island of the gods," because the gods were born there, i.e., the divine dynasties of the kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let geographers and geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiold on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions.* The secret books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a paradise before they became hell;
* These islands were "found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses," etc. If there was no man on earth at that period "how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?" asks a master in a letter. ("Esoteric Buddhism, " 67). The reply is given above in the text.
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the dark Hades of the Greeks and the cold realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the goddess-
Queen of the country of the dead, "holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim." Yet, it was the birth-place of Apollo, who was the brightest of gods, in heaven -- astronomically -- as he was the most enlightened of the divine kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad IV., 239-62, Vide "The Greater gods" -- wherein Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the god of the four races) and six times in human form, i.e., as connected with the divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.
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It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries (which have now become uninhabitable), as well as the name given to man both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church fathers for inventing a hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality.*
It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths -- known to and communicating with the Greeks -- who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name it is averred came from pelagus, the great sea. Noah's Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men -- or rather of nations -- which were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Hindu Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun -- the "beloved of the gods," who rescued him from the flood in a canoe -- or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the gods did the same in the north, are all identical as a personage. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the continent and the island of Atlantis.
The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in Sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount
* A good proof that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north, which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were "of one lip," these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, ( Voyage de Renard en Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes ; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death -- all proceed from the same root or word.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 775 WHO WERE THE NEPHILIM?
Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition via pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote upon the Titans -- the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, which race descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birth-place of the first giants. The Commentaries on the sacred books explain that the said region was the far north, the polar lands now, the pre-Lemurian earliest continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
But who were the Nephilim of Genesis vi. 4? There were Palaeolithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or Satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these Satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean race. What is the meaning of Poseidon's amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc., etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of those Lemuro-Atlantean races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, "monsters," as the Stanzas have it.
Now mythology, built upon Hesiod's Theogony, which is but a poetised record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Kottos, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Kronos for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with an hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in mythology every personage almost is a god or derni-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect;* and
* Thus, for instance, Gyges is a hundred-armed and fifty-headed monster, a demi-god in one case, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king of the country, in another version. The same is found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of Brahma are reborn as mortals.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 776 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub-races, the esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the arctic and antarctic poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore northern Asia is called the "eternal or perpetual land," and the Antarctic the "ever living" and "the concealed"; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reappear in turn, into and above the great waters.
From the first appearance of the great continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants had been imprisoned in their circle by Kronos. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon (or Neptune, hence by the seas), which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad (viii., 13) makes of it the Tartaros. When the gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus -- the deity of the Fourth
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
Race -- the father of the gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants in order to conquer the gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.* The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Rakshasas of Lanka and the Bharateans, the melee of the Atlanteans and Aryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds (or Peris), became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the angels of God and the angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-
race born but yesterday, and one of the latest issues of the Aryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious
* The continents perish in turn by fire and water: either through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or by sinking and the great displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish owing to the former cataclysmal process. The incessant earthquakes of this and the past years may be a warning.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 777 MYTHOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY.
thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking Humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.
But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar -- as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire -- that Hesiod's theogony was based upon historical facts (see Decharme's Mythol. de la Grece Antique), it becomes easier for the occult teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.
Such symbolisms as are found in all the exoteric creeds, are so many landmarks of prehistoric truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then hyperborean and Saturnine*; thus showing the Golden Age and reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many-sided in its character indeed -- climatically, ethnologically and morally. For, the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The Cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations we may seek for some more corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont
* Denis, the geographer, tells us that the great sea North of Asia was called glacial, or Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny (Book IV., c. 16) corroborate the statement by showing that it is its giant inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by telling us that all the continents were formed from North to South; and that as the sudden change of climate dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so, several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced the tallest men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this day. The tallest men now found are those in Northern countries, while the smallest are Southern Asiatics, Hindus, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and the English, with the inhabitants of central India and the average European on the continent. Thus also the giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of Hesiod, are all Northerners.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 778 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ VII.
SCIENTIFIC AND GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE
EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS.
IT may not be amiss -- for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of a lost Miocene Atlantis into an "antiquated myth," to append a few scientific admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely indifferent to such questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit that, in any case, a cautious agnosticism as to geological problems concerning the remote past is far more philosophical than a priori denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient data.
Meanwhile two very interesting instances, that have been lately met with, may be pointed out as "confirming" certain passages in the letter of a Master, published in "Esoteric Buddhism." The eminence of the authorities will not be questioned: --
[[First Column]]
Extract from p. 61 of "Esoteric Buddhism."
No. 1.
"The sinking of the Atlantis (the group of continents and islands) began during the Eocene period . . . . and it culminated in the Miocene, first in the final disappearance of the largest, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps, and second in the sinking of the last of the fair islands mentioned by Plato."
[[First Column continued on next page]]
[[Second Column]]
Extract from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.
No. 1.
"Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis -- a continent or Archipelago of large islands occupying the area of the North Atlantic? There is, perhaps, nothing unphilosophical in the hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, 'The Alps have acquired 4,000 and even in some places more than 10,000
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene epoch ' (Lyell's Principles 2nd Ed. p. 256.) -- a post-Miocene depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths."*
* Having already given several instances of the vagaries of Science, it is delightful to find such agreement in this particular case. Read in connection with the scientific admission (cited elsewhere) of the geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods, the following passage is highly instructive: "We are not yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent epoch at which our Northern Hemisphere was covered with glaciers. According to Mr. Wallace, this epoch may have occurred seventy thousand years ago, while others would assign to it an antiquity of at least two hundred thousand years, and there are yet others who urge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion that a million of years is barely enough to have produced the changes which have taken place since that event." (Fiske, "Cosmic [[Footnote continued on next page]]
"Lemuria cannot any more be confounded with the Atlantis continent than Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned with all their 'gods'; yet, between the two catastrophes a short period of about some 700,000 years elapsed; Lemuria flourishing and ending her career just about that trifling lapse of time before the early Eocene Age, since its Race was the Third. Behold the relics of that once great race in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your AUSTRALIA." ("Esoteric Buddhism," p. 55.)
[[Second Column continued from previous page]]
No. 2.
"It would be premature to say, because no evidence has yet been adduced, that men may not have existed in the Eocene Age, especially as it can be shown that a race of men, the lowest we know of, co-
exists with that remnant of the Eocene flora which still survives on the continent and islands of Australia. " (Extract from an article in "Popular Science Review," Vol. V. p. 18, by Professor Seemann, Ph.D., F.L.S., P.A.S.).
Haeckel, who fully accepts the reality of a former Lemuria, also regards the Australians as direct descendants of the Lemurians. "Persistent forms (of both his Lemurian stems,) are in all probability still surviving . . . Papuans and Hottentots . . . Australians . . . one division of the Malays."
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
[[End of Columns]]
With regard to a former civilization, of which a portion of these degraded Australians are the last surviving offshoot, the opinion of Gerland is strongly suggestive. Commenting upon the religion and mythology of the tribes, he writes, "The statement that the Australian civilization (?) indicates a higher grade, is nowhere more clearly proved than here, where everything resounds like the expiring voices of a previous and richer age. The idea that the Australians have no religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated." (Cited in Schmidt's "Doctrine of Descent of Darwinism, " pp. 301-2.) As to his other statement, namely, that the Australians are a "division of the Malays" ( Vide his ethnological theories in the "Pedigree of Man "), Haeckel is in error, if he classes the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a mixed stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub-races with the Seventh sub-race of the Third Root-Race. Like the Hottentots, they are of indirect Lemuro-Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact -- to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma -- that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Philosophy," Vol. II., p. 304). Prof. Lefevre, again, gives us as his estimate 100,000 years. Clearly, then, if modern Science is unable to estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era as the Glacial Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of Race-Periods and Geological Ages.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 780 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
place all over the globe, among those races, whose "time is up" -- among just those stocks, be it remarked, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. "Nothing," says even the materialist Lefevre, "can save those that have run their course. . . . It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle. . . . The peoples that have been most spared . . . Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion. " ("Philosophy, " p. 508.)
True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the "destined cycle" and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their "appointed hour"? The answer that it is due to a "mental disproportion" between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden "checks to fertility" which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks, "the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
but three great human types" (before the Sixth Root-Race dawns), the white (Aryan, Fifth Root-Race), the yellow, and the African negro -- with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc., etc. -- all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root-Race runs through a gamut of seven sub-races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the "why." The tide-wave of incarnating EGOS has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity. Some extraordinary and unexplained statistics as to Race extinction are given in de Quatrefages' "Human Species, " p. 428 et seq. No solution, except on the occult lines, is able to account for these.
But we have digressed from our direct subject. Let us hear now what Professor Huxley has to say on the subject of former Atlantic and Pacific Continents.
He writes in "NATURE," Nov. 4th, 1880: "There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or geological evidence at present accessible, to render untenable the hypothesis that an area of the mid-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 781 TRADITION AS TRUE AS HISTORY.
Atlantic or Pacific sea-bed as big as Europe, should have been uplifted as high as Mont Blanc, and have subsided again, any time since the Palaeozoic epoch, if there were any grounds for entertaining it."
That is to say, then, that there is nothing which can militate against positive evidence to the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postulates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Seemann assures us in the "Popular Science Review" (Vol. V., p. 18), article "Australia and Europe formerly one Continent,"* that: --
"The facts which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by the great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present flora of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental connection between South-Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests on a solid historical basis . . . . Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river-banks (from Asia generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the East. The west also furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a late period, was to facilitate communication between the two continents in such a remarkable manner. At that time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just rising (?) above the ocean."
And in another number of the same review (Vol. I., p. 143) Mr. Duppa Crotch, M.A., F.L.S., in an
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
article entitled "The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations," alludes to the same subject.
"Is it probable that land could have existed where now the broad Atlantic rolls? All tradition says so: old Egyptian records speak of Atlantis, as Strabo and others have told us. The Sahara itself is the sand of an ancient sea, and the shells which are found upon its surface
* Undoubtedly a fact and a confirmation of the esoteric conception of the Lemuria which originally not only embraced great areas in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but projected round South Africa into the North Atlantic. Its Atlantic portion subsequently became the geological basis of the future home of the Fourth Race Atlanteans.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 782 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
prove that, no longer ago than the Miocene period, a sea rolled over what is now desert. The voyage of the 'Challenger' has proved the existence of three long ridges* in the Atlantic Ocean,** one extending for more than three thousand miles, and lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account for the marvellous similarity of the fauna of the Atlantic islands.*** . . . . The submerged continent of LEMURIA, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is considered to afford an explanation of many difficulties in the distribution of organic life, and, I think, the existence of a MIOCENE ATLANTIS will be found to have a strong elucidative bearing on subjects of greater interest [Truly So!] than the migration of the lemming. At all events, if it can be shown that land existed in former ages where the North Atlantic now rolls, not only is a motive found for these apparently suicidal migrations, but also a strong collateral proof that what we call instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial inheritance of previously acquired experiences."
(At certain periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and perish. Coming, as they do, from all parts of Norway, the powerful instinct which survives throughout ages as an inheritance from their progenitors impels them to seek a continent, once existing but now submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a watery grave.)
In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace's "Island Life" -- a work devoted largely to the question of the distribution of animals, etc. -- Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes ("Subsidence and Elevation," Geological Magazine, June, 1881): --
"By a process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of different kinds, he arrives at the conclusion that the distribution of life upon the land as we now see it, has been accomplished without the aid of important changes in the relative positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we must believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa, New Zealand and Australia, Europe and America, have been united at some period not remote geologically, and that seas to the depth of 1,000 fathoms have been bridged over; but we must treat as utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to
* Cf. the published reports of the "Challenger" expedition; also Donnelly's "Atlantis," p. 468 and pp. 46-56, chap. "The Testimony of the Sea."
** Even the cautious Lefevre speaks of the existence of Tertiary men on "upheaved lands, islands and continents then flourishing, but since submerged beneath the waters," and elsewhere introduces a "possible Atlantis" to explain ethnological facts. Cf. his "Philosophy, " Eng. Ed., pp. 478 and 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with rare intuition that "modern civilization is Atlantean . . . . the 'inventive' faculty of the present age is taking up the delegated work of Creation where Atlantis left it thousands of years ago" (Atlantis, p. 133). He also refers the origin of culture to the Miocene times. It is, however, to be sought for in the teachings given to the Third Race-men by their Divine Rulers -- at a vastly earlier period.
*** An equally "curious" similarity is traced between some of the West Indian and West African fauna.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 783 ATLANTIS, NECESSARY TO ETHNOLOGY.
all the evidences at our command (!!), the supposition that temperate Europe and temperate America, Australia, and South America, have ever been connected except by way of the Arctic or Antarctic circles and that lands now separated by seas of more than 1,000 fathoms depth have ever been united. Mr. Wallace, it must be admitted, has succeeded in explaining the chief features of existing life-distribution, without bridging the Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the Poles, yet I cannot help thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more easily explained by admitting the former existence of the connection between the coast of Chile and Polynesia* and Great Britain and Florida, shadowed by the submarine banks which stretch between them. Nothing is urged that renders the more direct connection impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why the floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The route by which (according to the anti-Atlantean and Lemurian hypotheses of Wallace) the floras of South America and Australia are supposed to have mingled, is beset by almost insurmountable obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of sub-tropical American plants in our Eocene flora, necessitates a connection more to the south than the present 1,000 fathom line . . . . forces are unceasingly acting, and there is no reason why an elevating force once set in action in the centre of an ocean should cease to act until a continent is formed. They have acted and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent geological times, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits repeatedly that sea-beds have been elevated 1,000 fathoms and islands have risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to suppose that the upheaving forces are limited in power, is, it seems to me, 'utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command.' "
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
The "Father" of English Geology -- Sir Charles Lyell -- was an Uniformitarian in his views of continental formation. On page 492 of his "Antiquity of Man" we find him saying: --
"Professor Unger (Die versunkene Insel Atlantis) and Heer (Flora Tertiaria Helvetiae) have admitted on botanical grounds the former existence of an Atlantic Continent during some part of the Tertiary Period, as affording the only plausible explanation that can be imagined of the analogy between the Miocene flora of central Europe, and the existing flora of Eastern America. Professor Oliver, on the other hand, after showing how many of the American types found fossil in Europe are common to Japan, inclines to the theory, first advanced by Dr. Asa Gray, that the migration of species, to which the community of types in the Eastern States of North America, and the Miocene flora of Europe is due, took place when there was an overland communication from America to central Asia between the fiftieth and sixtieth parallels of latitude, or south of Behring Straits, following the direction of the Aleutian islands. By this course they may have made their way, at any epoch, Miocene, Pliocene, or Pleistocene, antecedently to the Glacial Epoch, to Amoorland, on the East coast of North Asia."
The unnecessary difficulties and complications here incurred in order to avoid the hypothesis of an Atlantic Continent, are really too
* The Pacific portion of the giant Lemurian Continent christened by Dr. Carter Blake, the anthropologist, "Pacificus."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 784 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
apparent to escape notice. If the botanical evidences stood alone, scepticism would be half legitimate; but in this case all branches of science converge to one point. Science has made blunders, and has exposed itself to greater errors than the admission of our two now invisible continents, would lay it open to. It has denied even the undeniable, from the days of the mathematician Laplace down to our own, and that only a few years ago.* We have Professor Huxley's authority for saying that there is no a priori improbability whatever against possible evidences supporting the belief. ( Vide supra.) But now that the POSITIVE EVIDENCE is brought forward, will that eminent scientist admit the corollary?
Touching on the problem in another place ("Principles of Geology, " pp. 12-13), Sir Charles Lyell tells us: "Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, we gather much information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed almost all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of the world. (Continental, not cosmic, catastrophes.) We learn from Plutarch that this was the theme of one of the hymns of Orpheus, so celebrated in the fabulous ages of Greece. It was brought by him from the banks of the Nile; and we even find in his verses, as in the Indian systems, a definite period assigned for the duration of every successive World. The returns of great catastrophes were determined by the present period of the Magnus Annus, or great year -- a cycle composed of the revolutions of the sun, moon, and planets, and terminating when these
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
return together to the sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to set out. We learn particularly from the Timaeus of Plato that the Egyptians believed the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges. The sect of the Stoics adopted most fully the system of catastrophes destined at intervals to destroy the world. These, they taught, were of two kinds -- the cataclysm, or destruction by water, and the Ecpyrosis, or destruction by fire (submarine volcanoes). From the Egyptians they derived the doctrine of the gradual debasement of man from a state of innocence" (nascent simplicity of the first sub-races of each Root-Race). "Towards the
* When Howard read, before the Royal Society of London, a paper on the first serious researches that were made on the aerolites, the Geneva naturalist Pictet, who was present, communicated, on his return to Paris, the facts reported to the French Academy of Sciences. But he was forthwith interrupted by Laplace, the great astronomer, who cried: "Stop! we have had enough of such fables, and know all about them," thus making Pictet feel very small. Globular-shaped lightnings or thunderbolts have been admitted by Science only since Arago demonstrated their existence, says de Rochat ("Forces non-
definies," p. 4): "Every one remembers Dr. Bouilland's misadventure at the Academy of Medicine when he had declared Edison's phonograph 'a trick of ventriloquism! ` "
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 785 ASTRAEA FALLS ON HER HEAD.
termination of each era the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of man, and a shock of the elements, or a deluge, overwhelmed them; (vide degeneracy into magical practices and gross animality of the Atlanteans) after which calamity, Astraea again descended on the earth to renew the golden age." (Dawn of a new Root-Race.)
Astraea, the goddess of justice, is the last of the deities to forsake the earth, when the gods are said to abandon it and be taken up into heaven by Jupiter again. But, no sooner does Zeus carry away from earth Ganymedes (the object of lust, personified) than the father of the gods throws down Astraea back on the earth again, on which she falls upon her head. Astraea is Virgo, the constellation of the Zodiac. Astronomically it has a very plain significance, and one which gives the Key to the occult meaning. But it is inseparable from Leo, the sign that precedes it, and from the Pleiades and their sisters, the Hyades, of which Aldebaran is the brilliant leader. All of these are connected with the periodical renovations of the earth, with regard to its continents -- even Ganymedes, who in astronomy is Aquarius. It was already shown that while the South Pole is the pit (or the infernal regions figuratively and cosmologically), the North Pole is geographically the first continent; while astronomically and metaphorically the celestial pole, with its pole star in heaven, is Meru, or the seat of Brahma, the throne of Jupiter, etc. For in the age when the gods forsook the earth and were said to ascend into heaven, the ecliptic had become parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac appeared to descend from the north pole to the north horizon. Aldebaran was in conjunction then with the Sun, as it was 40,000 years ago, at the great festival in commemoration of that Magnus Annus, of which Plutarch was speaking. Since that year (40,000 years ago) there has been a retrograde motion of the equator, and about 31,000 years ago Aldebaran was in conjunction with the vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even in Christian mysticism, is too well known to need repetition. The famous
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
Orphic hymn on the great periodical cataclysm divulges the whole esotericism of the event. Pluto (in the pit) carries off Eurydice, bitten by the (polar) serpent. Then Leo, the lion, is vanquished. Now, when the Lion is in the pit, or below the south pole, then Virgo, as the next sign, follows him, and when her head, down to the waist, is below the South horizon -- she is inverted. On the other hand, the Hyades are the rain or Deluge constellations; and Aldebaran (he who follows, or succeeds the daughters of Atlas, or the Pleiades) looks down from the eye of Taurus. It is from this point of the ecliptic that the calculations of the new cycle were commenced. The student has to remember also, that when Ganymedes (Aquarius) is raised to
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 786 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
heaven (or above the horizon of the North Pole) Virgo or Astraea, who is Venus-Lucifer, descends head downwards below the horizon of the South Pole, or the pit; which pit , or the pole, is also the Great Dragon, or the Flood. Let the student exercise his intuition by placing these facts together; no more can be said.
"The connection," comments Lyell, "between the doctrine of successive catastrophes and repeated deteriorations in the moral character of the human race, is more intimate and natural than might at first be imagined. For, in a rude state of society, all great calamities are regarded by the people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man. . . . In like manner in the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of the inhabitants."
True; but was it not owing to the fact that all esoteric truths were given out to the public by the Initiates of the temples under the guise of allegories? "Jupiter," is merely the personification of that immutable Cyclic Law, which arrests the downward tendency of each Root-Race, after attaining the zenith of its glory.* Unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske's singularly dogmatic opinion** that every myth "is an explanation by the uncivilized mind, of some natural phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, for the ingenuity is wasted (! !) which strives to detect in myths the remnants of a refined primeval science -- but an explanation. Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means of allegory [How does Mr. Fiske know?], nor were they such sorry pedants as to talk in riddles when plain language would serve their purpose." We venture to say the language of the Initiated few was far more "plain," and their science-philosophy far more com-
* The Cyclic Law of Race-Evolution is most unwelcome to scientists. It is sufficient to mention the fact of "primeval civilization" to excite the frenzy of Darwinians; it being obvious that the further culture and science is pushed back, the more precarious becomes the basis of the ape-ancestor theory. But as Jacolliot says: -- "Whatever there may be in these traditions (submerged continents, etc.), and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India, was developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly important for Science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they be." (Histoire des Vierges ;
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
les peuples et les continents disparus, p. 15.) Donnelly has proved the fact from the clearest premises, but the Evolutionists will not listen. A Miocene civilization upsets the "universal stone-age" theory, and that of a continuous ascent of man from animalism! And yet Egypt, at least, runs counter to current hypotheses. There is no stone-age visible there, but a more glorious culture is apparent, the further back we are enabled to carry our retrospect. (Verb. Sap.)
** "Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 21.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 787 INGENIOUS EXPLANATIONS.
prehensive and satisfying alike to the physical and spiritual wants of man, than even the terminology and system respectively elaborated by Mr. Fiske's Master -- Herbert Spencer. What, however, is Sir Charles Lyell's "explanation" of the "myth"? Certainly, he in no way countenances the idea of its "astronomical" origin, as asserted by some writers.
The two interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyell's solution is as follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal changes, from the absence (?) of any reliable historical data on the point, as well as from a strong bias to the Uniformitarian conceptions of geologic changes,* he attempts to trace the Atlantis "tradition" to the following sources: --
(1) Barbarous tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God, who is assumed in this way to punish immoral races.
(2) Hence the commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.
(3) The primary source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia -- a continent subject to violent earthquakes. Exaggerated accounts would thus be handed down the ages.
(4) Egypt, being herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not inconsiderable geologic knowledge on these cataclysmal traditions.
An ingenious "explanation," as all such are. But proving a negative is proverbially a difficult task. Students of esoteric science, who know what the resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such laboured hypothesis. Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always able to furnish a reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch of science, seem to necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic changes on the surface of our planet, the impartial critic, who is not a
* Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations -- if not of all. Elevation and subsidence of continents is always in progress. The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet and settled down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British islands have been four times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raised again and
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
peopled. The Alps, Himalayas and Cordilleras were all the result of depositions drifted on to sea-
bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces to their present elevation. The Sahara was the basin of a Miocene sea. Within the last five or six thousand years the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway have risen from 200 to 600 feet; in Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries surmounting the shore now eroded by the hungry wave. The North of Europe is still rising from the sea and South America presents the phenomenon of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a height varying from 100 to 1,300 feet above the sea-level. On the other hand, the coast of Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All these phenomena are certain. Why may not a gradual change have given place to a violent cataclysm in remote epochs? -- such cataclysms occurring on a minor scale even now (e.g., the case of Sunda island with 80,000 Malays).
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specialist, will recognise the immense difficulty of explaining away the cumulative evidences, -- namely, the archaeological, ethnological, geological, traditional, botanical, and even biological -- in favour of former continents now submerged. When each science is fighting for its own hand, the cumulative force of the evidence in its collectivity is almost invariably lost sight of.
In the "Theosophist" (August, 1880), we wrote: "We have as evidences the most ancient traditions of various and wide-separated peoples -- legends in India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal isles of Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages; and in the traditions of the richest literature in the world -- the Sanskrit literature of India -- there is an agreement in saying, that, ages ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological cataclysm was engulfed by the sea,* (Lemuria). And it is our firm belief . . . that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan archipelago to Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since the memory of man never had, and never could have any intercourse with, or even a knowledge of each other, have yet a tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea: that there were in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of the gods, and to punish them for their incessant quarrelling, swallowed them up. Notwithstanding the geographical proof that New Zealand, the Sandwich and Easter Islands, are at a distance from each other of between 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that, according to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate islands, for instance, the Marquesan, Society, Fiji, Tahitian, Samoan, and other islands, could, since they became islands, ignorant as their people were of the compass, have communicated with each other before the arrival of Europeans; yet they one and all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward the West, on the Asian side. Moreover, with very small differences, they all speak dialects evidently of the same language; and understand each other with little difficulty; have the same religious beliefs and superstitions; and pretty much the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered earlier than a century ago, the Pacific Ocean itself being unknown to Europe till the days of Columbus, and as these islanders have never ceased repeating the same old traditions since the Europeans first set
* For the opinions of Jacolliot, after long travels through the Polynesian Islands and his proofs of a former great geological cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his "Histoire des Vierges : Peuples et Continents disparus," p. 308.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 789 HAECKEL FOR ONCE IS RIGHT.
foot on their shores, it seems to us a logical inference that our theory is nearer to the truth than any other. "Chance would have to change its name and meaning, were all this due but to chance alone."
"A great series of animal-geographical facts," declares Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the hypothesis of a former Lemuria, "is explicable only on the theory of the former existence of a Southern Continent of which Australia is a remnant. . . . . " [the distribution of species] "points to the vanished land of the South where perhaps the home of the progenitors of the Maki of Madagascar may also be looked for."*
Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his "Malay Archipelago," arrives at the following conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand: -- "The inference that we must draw from these facts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Borneo and Sumatra do essentially form part of a former Australian or Pacific Continent . . . This continent must have been broken up before the extreme south-
eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent formation."
According to Haeckel: -- "Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean." ("Pedigree of Man, " Eng. Trans. p. 73.) In one sense Haeckel is right as to Lemuria -- the "cradle of the Human race." That continent was the home of the first physical Human Stock -- the later Third-Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite different. (Haeckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.)
Professor Rutimeyer, the eminent Palaeontologist, asks: -- "Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant-eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and Australia must be the remains -- need this conjecture raise difficulties at a moment when from their fossil remains, Heer restores to sight the ancient forests of Smith's Sound and Spitzbergen." (Cited in Schmidt's "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 237.)
Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists -- the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
* "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 236. (Cf. also his lengthy arguments on the subject, pp. 231-7.)
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is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary. With regard, however, to the former, it is found that: --
(1) The Miocene flora of Europe have their most numerous and striking analogues in the flora of the United States. In the forests of Virginia and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip-trees, evergreen oaks, plane trees, etc., etc., etc., which correspond with European Tertiary flora term for term. How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed "explanation" to the effect that the transition was by way of Asia and the Aleutian islands is a mere uncalled-for theory, obviously upset by the fact that a large number of these flora only appear EAST of the Rocky Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a trans-Pacific migration. They are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.
(2) Skulls exhumed on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a striking similarity to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littre). Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear representations of undoubted negro heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is now N. W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.
(3) According to Farrar ("Families of Speech ") the "isolated language" of the Basques has no affinities with the other languages* of Europe, but with "the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent (America) and those alone." Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.
Palaeolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a pure Atlantean, as we have previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a much later date than this, but their affinities, as here shown, go far to prove the original extraction of their remote ancestors. The "mysterious" affinity between their tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India will be understood by those who have followed our outline of continental formations and shiftings.
(4) Stones have been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured symbols similar to those found on the shore of Lake Superior. Berthollet was induced
* For further facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and their ethnological relations, cf. Joly, "Man before Metals, " p. 316. B. Davis is disposed to concede, from an examination of the skulls of the Guanches of the Canary Islands and modern Basques, that both belong to a race proper to those ancient islands, of which the Canaries are the remains!! This is a step in advance indeed. De Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro-Magnon men of South France and the Guanches to
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
one type -- a proposition which involves a certain corollary which both these writers may not care to father.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 791 FINAL AND IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE.
by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of the early men of Canary Islands and America (Cf. Benjamin, the "Atlantic Islands, " p. 130.)
The Guanches of the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the Atlanteans. This fact will account for the great stature evidenced by their old skeletons, as well as by those of their European congeners the Cro-Magnon Palaeolithic men.
(5) Any experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along the Canary Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of volcanic and rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every side by that vast watery space. Such frequent questions led finally to the expedition of the famous Leopold von Buch, which took place in the first quarter of the present century. Some geologists maintained that the volcanic islands had been raised right from the bottom of the ocean, the depth of which in the immediate vicinity of the island varies from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these groups, including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verdes -- the remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united Africa with America. The latter men of science supported their hypothesis by a mass of evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient "myths." Hoary "superstitions," such as the fairy-like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden of Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them mythoi connected with the peak of Teneriffe, did not go far with sceptical Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species -- showing either a previous connection between America and the remaining groups of the islands -- (the hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the Old World by the waves was too absurd to stand long) -- found more serious consideration. But it is only quite lately, and after Donnelly's book had been published several years, that the theory has greater chances than ever of becoming an accepted fact. Fossils found on the Eastern Coast of South America have now been proved to belong to the Jurassic formations, and are nearly identical with the Jurassic fossils of Western Europe and Northern Africa. The geological structure of both coasts is also almost identical ; the resemblance between the smaller marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of South America, the Western African, and the South European coasts, is also very great. All such facts are bound to bring naturalists to the conclusion that there has been, in distant pre-historic ages, a continent which extended from the coast of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands and North Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.
(6) The great resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South
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America, North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and admits of no
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
explanation, unless the ocean is bridged with an Atlantis. But why, also, is there so marked a similarity between the fauna (animal life) of the -- now -- isolated Atlantic islands? Why did the specimens of Brazilian fauna dredged up by Sir C. Wyville Thompson resemble those of Western Europe? Why does a resemblance exist between many of the West African and West Indian animal groups? Again:
"When the animals and plants of the Old and New World are compared, one cannot but be struck with their identity; all, nearly all belong to the same genera, while many, even of the species, are common to both continents . . . indicating that they radiated from a common centre " (Atlantis), ("Westminster Review, " Jan., 1872).
The horse, according to Science, originated in America. At least, a large proportion of the once "missing links" connecting it with inferior forms have been exhumed from American strata. How did the horse penetrate into Europe and Asia, if no land communication bridged the oceanic interspaces? Or if it is asserted that the horse originated in the New World, how did such forms as the hipparion, etc., get into America in the first instance on the migration hypothesis?
Again "Buffon had . . . remarked in the repetition of the African in the American fauna, how, for example, the lama is a juvenescent and feeble copy of the camel, and how the puma of the New represented the lion of the Old World" (Schmidt, "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " p. 223).
(7) The following quotation runs with No. (2), but its significance is such and the writer cited so authoritative, that it deserves a place to itself: --
"With regard to the primitive dolichocephalae of America, I entertain a hypothesis still more bold, namely, that they are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks, Copts, which Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian-Atlantidae. We find one and the same form of skull in the Canary Islands, in front of the African coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The colour of the skin on both sides of the Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a reddish-brown." (Professor Retzius, "Smithsonian Report," 1859, p. 266.)
If, then, Basques and Cro-Magnon Cave-Men are of the same race as the Canarese Guanches, it follows that the former are also allied to the aborigines of America. This is the conclusion which the independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de Quatrefages necessitate. The Atlantean affinities of these three types become patent.
(8) The sea-soundings undertaken by H.M.S. "Challenger" and the "Dolphin," have established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in length, projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the
Atlantic, extends from a point near the British Islands southwards, curving round near Cape de Verde, and running in a south-easterly direction along the West African Coast. This elevation averages some
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
9,000 feet in height, and rises above the waves at the Azores, Ascension, and other places. In the ocean depths around the neighbourhood of the former the ribs of a former massive piece of land have been discovered (vide investigations of United States Ship "Dolphin" and others). "The inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface could never have been produced in accordance with any known laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation; but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water-level." -- (Scientific American, July 28th, 1877). It is most probable that necks of land formerly existed knitting Atlantis to South America, somewhere above the mouth of the Amazon; to Africa near Cape de Verde, while a similar point of juncture with Spain is not unlikely, as contended for by Donnelly. ( Vide his chart, "Atlantis," p. 47, Eng. Ed., 1884, though he deals with only a fragment of the real continent.) Whether the latter existed or not, is of no consequence, as the fact that (what is now) N. W. Africa was -- before the elevation of the Sahara and the rupture of the Gibraltar connection -- an extension of Spain. Consequently no difficulty can be raised as to how the migration of the European fauna (etc.) took place.
Enough has now been said from the purely scientific standpoint, and it is needless, in view of the manner in which the subject has now been developed on the lines of esoteric knowledge, to swell the mass of testimony further. In conclusion, the words of one of the most intuitive writers of the day may be cited as admirably illustrative of the opinions of the occultist, who awaits in patience the dawn of the coming day: --
"We are but beginning to understand the past; one hundred years ago the world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the lingual tie that binds together the Indo-European nations; nothing of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow-headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of to-
* Donnelly, "Atlantis ; the Ante-Diluvian World," p. 480.
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And now to conclude.
-------
We have concerned ourself with the ancient records of the nations, with the doctrine of chronological and psychic cycles, of which these records are the tangible proof; and with many other subjects, which may, at first sight, seem out of place in this volume.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
But they were necessary in truth. In dealing with the secret annals and traditions of so many nations, whose very origins have never been ascertained on more secure grounds than inferential suppositions, in giving out the beliefs and philosophy of more than prehistoric races, it is not quite as easy to deal with the subject matter as it would be if only the philosophy of one special race, and its evolution, were concerned. The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology. The birth and evolution of the Sacred Science of the Past are lost in the very night of Time; and that, even, which is historic -- i.e., that which is found scattered hither and thither throughout ancient classical literature -- is, in almost every case, attributed by modern criticism to lack of observation in the ancient writers, or to superstition born out of the ignorance of antiquity. It is, therefore, impossible to treat this subject as one would the ordinary evolution of an art or science in some well-known historical nation. It is only by bringing before the reader an abundance of proofs all tending to show that in every age, under every condition of civilization and knowledge, the educated classes of every nation made themselves the more or less faithful echoes of one identical system and its fundamental traditions -- that he can be made to see that so many streams of the same water must have had a common source from which they started. What was this source? If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them. It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them. There must be truth and fact in that which every people of antiquity accepted and made the foundation of its religions and its faith. Moreover, as Haliburton said, "Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; hear both sides, and all will be clear." The public has hitherto had access to, and heard but one side -- or rather the two one-sided views of two diametrically opposed classes of men, whose prima facie propositions or respective premises differ widely, but whose final conclusions are the same -- Science and Theology. And now our
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 795 OLD MASONIC SYMBOLISM.
readers have an opportunity to hear the other -- the defendants' -- justification on and learn the nature of our arguments.
Were the public to be left to its old opinions: namely, on one side, that Occultism, Magic, the legends of old, etc., were all the outcome of ignorance and superstition; and on the other, that everything outside the orthodox groove was the work of the devil, what would be the result? In other words, had no theosophical and mystic literature obtained a hearing for the few last years, the present work would have had a poor chance of impartial consideration. It would have been proclaimed -- and by many will still be so proclaimed -- a fairy tale woven out of abstruse problems, poised in, and based on the air; built of soap bubbles, bursting at the slightest touch of serious reflection, with no foundation, as it would be alleged, to stand upon. Even "the ancient superstitious and credulous classics" have no word of reference to it in clear and unmistakable terms, and the symbols themselves fail to yield a hint at the existence of such a system. Such would be the verdict of all. But when it becomes undeniably proven that the claim of the modern Asiatic nations to a Secret Science and an esoteric history of the world, is
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
based on fact; that, though hitherto unknown to the masses and a veiled mystery even to the learned, (because they never had the key to a right understanding of the abundant hints thrown out by the ancient classics), it is still no fairy tale, but an actuality -- then the present work will become but the pioneer of many more such books. The statement that hitherto even the keys discovered by some great scholars have proved too rusty for use, and that they were but the silent witnesses that there do exist mysteries behind the veil which are unreachable without a new key -- is borne out by too many proofs to be easily dismissed. An instance may be given as an illustration out of the history of Freemasonry.
In his "Franc-maconnerie Occulte," rightly or wrongly, Ragon, an illustrious and learned Belgian Mason, reproaches the English Masons with having materialized and dishonoured Masonry, once based upon the Ancient Mysteries, by adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the craft, the name of Free Masonry and Free Masons. The mistake is due, he says, to those who connect Masonry with the building of Solomon's Temple, deriving its origin from it. He derides the idea, and says: . . "The Franc Mason (which is not macon libre, or free masonry) knew well when adopting the title, that it was no question of building a wall, but that of being initiated into the ancient Mysteries veiled under the name of Francmaconnerie (Freemasonry); that his work was only to be the continuation or the renovation of the ancient mysteries, and that he was to become a mason after the manner of Apollo or Amphion. And do not we know that the ancient initiated poets, when speaking of the foundation
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of a city, meant thereby the establishment of a doctrine? Thus Neptune, the god of reasoning, and Apollo, the god of the hidden things, presented themselves as masons before Laomedon, Priam's father, to help him to build the city of Troy -- that is to say, to establish the Trojan religion." (Maconnerie Orthodoxe, p. 44.)
Such veiled sentences with double meaning abound in ancient classical writers. Therefore, had an attempt been made to show that, e.g., Laomedon was the founder of a branch of archaic mysteries in which the earth-bound material soul (the fourth principle), was personified in Menelaus' faithless wife (the fair Helen), if Ragon had not come to corroborate what we asserted, we might be told that no classical author speaks of it, and that Homer shows Laomedon building a city, not an esoteric worship or MYSTERIES! And who are those left now, save a few Initiates, who understand the language and correct meaning of such symbolical terms?
But after having pointed to many a misconceived symbol bearing on our thesis, there still remains more than one difficulty to be overcome. Most important among several such obstacles is that of chronology. But this could hardly be helped.
Wedged in between theological chronology and that of the geologists, backed by all the materialistic Anthropologists who assign dates to man and nature which fit in with their own theories alone -- what could the writer do except what is being done? Namely, since theology places the Deluge 2448 B.C., and the World's Creation only 5890 years ago; and since the accurate researches by the methods of exact Science, have led the geologists and physicists to assign to the incrusted age of our Globe
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
between 10 million and 1,000 million of years* (a trifling difference, verily!): and the Anthropologists to vary their divergence of opinion as to the appearance of man -- between 25,000 and 500,000 of years -- what can one who studies the Occult doctrine do, but come out and bravely present the esoteric calculations before the world?
But to do this, corroboration by even a few "historical" proofs was necessary, though all know the real value of the so-called "historical evidence." For, whether man had appeared on earth 18,000 or 18,000,000 years ago, can make no difference to profane History, since it begins hardly a couple of thousand years before our era, and since, even then, it grapples hopelessly with the clash and din of contradictory and mutually-destroying opinions around it. Nevertheless, in view of the respect the average reader has been brought up in for exact science, even that short Past would remain meaningless, unless the esoteric teachings were corroborated and supported on the spot --
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 797 THE PROLOGUE TO ESOTERIC TRUTH.
whenever possible -- by references to historical names of a so-called historical period. This is the only guide that can be given to the beginner before he is permitted to start among the (to him) unfamiliar windings of that dark labyrinth called the pre-historic ages. This necessity has been complied with. It is only hoped that the desire to do so, which has led the writer to be constantly bringing ancient and modern evidence as a corroboration of the Archaic and quite unhistoric Past, will not bring on her the accusation of having sorely jumbled up without order or method the various and widely-separated periods of history and tradition. But literary form and method had to be sacrificed to the greater clearness of the general exposition.
To accomplish the proposed task, the writer had to resort to the rather unusual means of dividing each volume or Book into three Parts; the first of which only is the consecutive, though very fragmentary, history of the Cosmogony and the Evolution of Man on this globe. But these two volumes had to serve as a PROLOGUE, and prepare the reader's mind for those which shall now follow. In treating of Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show that no religion, since the very earliest, has ever been entirely based on fiction, as none was the object of special revelation; and that it is dogma alone which has ever been killing primeval truth. Finally, that no human-born doctrine, no creed, however sanctified by custom and antiquity, can compare in sacredness with the religion of Nature. The Key of Wisdom that unlocks the massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost sanctuaries can be found hidden in her bosom only: and that bosom is in the countries pointed to by the great seer of the past century Emanuel Swedenborg. There lies the heart of nature, that shrine whence issued the early races of primeval Humanity, and which is the cradle of physical man.
Thus far have proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of the archaic, earliest Races contained in their hitherto secret Scriptural records. But our explanations are by no means complete,
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 7
nor do they pretend to give out the full text, or to have been read by the help of more than three or four keys out of the sevenfold bunch of esoteric interpretation, and even this has only been partially accomplished. The work is too gigantic for any one person to undertake, far more to accomplish. Our main concern was simply to prepare the soil. This, we trust we have done. These two volumes only constitute the work of a pioneer who has forced his way into the well-nigh impenetrable jungle of the virgin forests of the Land of the Occult. A commencement has been made to fell and uproot the deadly upas trees of superstition, prejudice, and conceited ignorance, so that these two
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 798 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
volumes should form for the student a fitting prelude for Volumes III. and IV. Until the rubbish of the ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these volumes are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely depends upon the reception with which Volumes I. and II. will meet at the hands of Theosophists and Mystics, whether these last two volumes will ever be published, though they are almost completed.
Satyat Nasti paro dharmah.
THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.
End of Vol. II.
[[For Index, go to Index of the Secret Doctrine, prepared by John P. Van Mater, on this site]]
