Article selections by Andrew T. Sibbald | Notes by H.P.B.
Śrāddha1
1. Śrāddha” is a Brahmanical rite, of which there are several kinds. Gautama describes seven kinds of each of the three sorts of Śrāddha, generally translated as “devotional rites” to the manes of one’s progenitors. Manu speaks of four varieties—the offering of food to the ViDvadharas (gods, collectively, mystic deities), to spirits, to departed ancestors and to guests (iii, 86). But Gautama specifies them as offerings to progenitors, on certain eight days of the fortnight, at the full and change of the moon, to Śrāddhas generally, and to the manes on the full moon of four different months. It is a very occult rite involving various mystic results.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
It was not ordinary fire that was employed, but a flame obtained in that manner which philosophers have imagined to have first conferred on man the knowledge and possession of this wonderful element—the friction of the branches of trees.2
2. The Svastika, by means of which celestial fire was obtained. A stick used for this purpose and called matha and pramatha (suggestive of Prometheus, indeed!) from the prefix pra- giving the idea of forcing the fire to descend, added to that contained in the verb mathami—“to produce by friction.” The oldest rite in India, much speculated upon, but very little understood.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
. . . how . . . consecrate a spot, when all earth was alike? How choose a direction? Yet they did consecrate a spot, and it was by drawing geometrical lines, derived from the motions of the earth and the heavenly bodies; on these lines, first used to place altars, were temples subsequently raised, so uniformly in all succeeding time, and throughout every region of the earth, that it has not entered into the mind of man to inquire into the motive, or to think even of the fact. The process may be seen practised today as originally devised, by every Brahmin who prepares the scene for a Śraddha; he commences by drawing the figure of the cross.3
3. Spirit and Matter, also the symbols of the male and female lines, or the vertical and the horizontal.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
According to the Institutes of Manu, the first offerings specified are “grains, the naturalproduct of the earth.” If this be the commonest of things, it is the first fruits of human toil, and consequently the first of human offerings. Next to these come “vegetables, rice, clarified butter, the milk of cows, and food made from it; but flesh is particularly agreeable to them, especially that of the long-eared white goat.”4
4. Now animals are not often sacrificed in India; only occasionally the goat, to Kali, the blood-thirsty consort of Śiva—and in a very few temples.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
The Pitris had, however, effectual means of control over their descendants. If they could blast and curse, they could also bless and cause to fructify. To them entreaty was made for success in every enterprise, and acknowledgments offered in return for good fortune. Vows were paid to them for fame, wealth, power, length of days, or increase of happiness. They are applied to as intercessors, both for men on earth and for departed spirits, and they stood in the relation to men of saints and of gods, linked to them by the ties of blood, so that each race of mortals on earth, became part of a dynasty in heaven; the gods were not brought down to the level of the Pitris; but these were raised to the rank of divinities. As fire was worshipped as their messenger, so was the moon as their abode.5
5. This has a very occult meaning, however. There are seven classes of Pitris enumerated in the Purânas—but only three classes are composed of the progenitors (from pitar, father) of primeval man; one class creates the form of man—nay, is, or rather becomes, that form (or physical man) itself; the other two are the creators of our souls and minds. It is a very complicated tenet—but the Pitris are surely not the “Spirits” of the dead, as believed by some spiritualists.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
. . . [there are] twelve species of Śrāddha6
6. Manu speaks of four only, and Gautama of seven. Twelve species are enumerated only in Nirnaya Sindhu, by Kamalakara (see Asiat. Researches, Vol. VII, 232), a work on religious ceremonies. But all these are exoteric and later rites.—[H.P.B.]
. . .
. . . duty to the gods by a virtuous life, is altogether effaced by a remarkable notion that the Pitris were fed by the moon’s light, which accounted for the changes in that luminary; and when the reservoir was exhausted it had to be replenished by the good deeds of men; so that the nightly changes of the sky, in connection with their ancestral reverence, became an unceasing incitement to a good life; and the sustenance of the manes depended no less on obedience than on sacrifice.
Unless by this transition, how, indeed, could the notion of sustaining the gods by sacrifice have ever arisen?7 The original conception of the Divinity must, by universal consent, have been that of an incorporeal and all-powerful Creator; that it was so in Brahminism there is no doubt If then we have the Maker of the Universe suffering from emaciation, attenuated by hunger, and begging for the minutest portion of sacrificial butter, even if no bigger than a pistachio nut (the afflicting condition of lndra, at the time of that Buddhistic reform), it was that the distinction between gods and ancestors had been lost.8
7. Because esoteric teaching maintains that the Pitris are the “primeval human race, the fathers and progenitors of later men, who developed into the present physical man.”—[H.P.B.]
8. It was lost indeed, and long before the day of Gautama Buddha, who tried to restore Brahmanism to its original purity but—failed, and had to separate the two religious systems. The “Pitris” is a generic and collective name, and man has other progenitors more exalted and spiritual. Manu says (Chap. iii, 284), “The wise [the Initiated Adepts] call our fathers Vasus, our paternal grandfathers, Rudras; our paternal great grandfathers, Adityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas,” these three classes have a direct reference in Esotericism (a) to the creators of man in his three chief aspects (or principles), and (b) to the three primeval and serial races of men who preceded the first physical and perfect Race, which the Eastern Occultists call the Atlanteans.—[H.P.B.]
. . .
. . . the Śrāddha . . . is attributed to several personages, but especially to Pururavas, son of Buddha,9 chief of the Lunar Line, a line marked throughout by religious innovation, and presenting, if not the fleshly body, at least the “ferver” of Buddhism.10
9. This is a mistake on the part of the author. The name of the Son of Soma (the moon) by Târâ, Brihaspati’s wife whose infidelity led to the war of the Gods with the Asuras—is Budha (Intelligence) with one d, not Buddha, the Enlightened.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
10. The Buddhists have never had among their religious beliefs that of “Ferwer,” [see Fravashi] if this word is meant by “Ferver.” It is a term, meaning the double, or copy body, a Sosia, and belongs to the Zoroastrian religion.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
We must naturally look to the names as furnishing further elucidation. Ekkodishto,11 the monthly oblation, does not sound by any means Sanskrit; the Zend, however, may aid us. Kuds and Kuddus is the name anciently given to Jerusalem, and still preserved; Feridoun conferred it on a religious edifice which he there constructed. The great annual oblation is called Sapindana; in this the cow is consecrated for sacrifice; and here Sanskrit philologists are entirely at fault. In Turkish, dana is “cow”; it is the common word in use in every field, market-place and butcher’s shop. If so, we have then a compound word. Sapin is not Turkish; but if we write the word Sab-i-dana, we have, in Turkish, “the master and the cow.”12
12. This might be so, if the word “Sapindana” had not been a mistake of Wilson’s, who made many, and of other scholars. In the original Sanskrit MSS. the term used is Sapiṇḍīkaraṇa. See Vishnu-Purâna. Wilson’s translation, edited and corrected by Fitzedward Hall. (Vol. III, p. 154.) Curious etymology. What can the “master and cow” or Sab-i-dana in Turkish, which is no ancient tongue, have to do with the Sanskrit Sapiṇḍīkaraṇa?
. . .
. . . now, the triangle is connected, though in a manner which I do not understand, with the Śraddha, for it was one of the forms of the earth-elevation or altar constructed for that purpose. It was a square in ordinary cases; but for a person recently deceased, and apparently during the season of mourning, it was a triangle13
13. All this is occult, and has an esoteric meaning. The triangle (or symbol of the three higher principles) is all that remains of the mortal septenary, whose quaternary remains behind him. Every theosophist knows this.
. . .
The Khond say that life is composed of three souls, one of which is animal, one intellectual and one Divine; that the first, when the body dies, dies with it; that the second, after death, is punished or recompensed, according to the body’s deeds; and that the third returns to and is absorbed in the Deity from which it had originally emanated.14
14. Read the Theosophical and Esoteric literature on the Division of Inner Man.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
. . .
The Cross was known to the Jews . . . It is tattooed on those of the Berber tribes of Africa, as it was on those of the tribes of North America, in whose tombs it was also found, and who adored it when presented to them by the Spaniards. It appears in the Buddhistic monuments of India, and the coins called Hindu-Scythic, and amongst the stamps by which the tribes of Tartary marked their horses. In one of the last discovered Assyrian monuments it hangs on the breast of a king, exactly in the form and fashion of a modern decoration.15
15. The Cross was, from the highest antiquity, a spiritual, a psychic, and a phallic symbol, metaphysical, astronomical, numerical and occult. (Vide Mr. Gerald Massey’s The Natural Genesis, Vol. I, pp. 422 et seq.)
. . .
Besides food and raiment, the ancestors required drink, and water for ablution. Fire did not, however serve for conveying water. It was, besides, an element, and constituted the substance of the gods. They had recourse to a peculiar process; it was suspended, or poured out, and so supposed to be conveyed to them. Probably motion was given to it; this, the wave-offering of the Jews, would suggest. They used fire and sacred fire. The vessel used in sacrifice by the Hindus is called Arghya Natha.16 In the Jewish sacrifice the vessel used for receiving the blood was called Aganath.