THE SECRET DOCTRINE

THE SYNTHESIS

OF

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY.

BY

H. P. BLAVATSKY

[2 Volumes, Unabridged, Single HTML File]

सत्यात् नास्ति परो धर्मः ।

[satyāt nāsti paro dharmaḥ]

“There is no Religion higher than Truth.”

1888 First Edition,
with modernized transliterations.

 

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Last Updated: 01/26/2021 23:58:01.

 

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Vol. I.—COSMOGENESIS.

[Skip to Volume II]

VI

This Work
I Dedicate to all True Theosophists,
In every Country,
And of every Race,
For they called it forth, and for them it was recorded.

VII

PREFACE.

———

The Author—the writer, rather—feels it necessary to apologise for the long delay which has occurred in the appearance of this work. It has been occasioned by ill-health and the magnitude of the undertaking. Even the two volumes now issued do not complete the scheme, and these do not treat exhaustively of the subjects dealt with in them. A large quantity of material has already been prepared, dealing with the history of occultism as contained in the lives of the great Adepts of the Āryan Race, and showing the bearing of occult philosophy upon the conduct of life, as it is and as it ought to be. Should the present volumes meet with a favourable reception, no effort will be spared to carry out the scheme of the work in its entirety. The third volume is entirely ready; the fourth almost so.

This scheme, it must be added, was not in contemplation when the preparation of the work was first announced. As originally announced, it was intended that The Secret Doctrine should be an amended and enlarged version of Isis Unveiled. It was, however, soon found that the explanations which could be added to those already put before the world in the last-named and other works dealing with esoteric science, were such as to require a different method of treatment: and consequently the present volumes do not contain, in all, twenty pages extracted from Isis Unveiled.

The author does not feel it necessary to ask the indulgence of her readers and critics for the many defects of literary style, and the imperfect English which may be found in these pages. She is a foreigner, and her knowledge of the language was acquired late in life. The English tongue is employed because it offers the most widely-diffused medium for conveying the truths which it had become her duty to place before the world.

These truths are in no sense put forward as a revelation; nor does the author claim the position of a revealer of mystic lore, now made public for the first time in the world’s history. For what is contained in this work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden under glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil. What is now attempted is to gather the oldest tenets together and to make of them one harmonious and unbroken whole. The sole advantage which the writer has over her predecessors, is that she need not resort to personal speculations and theories. For this work is a partial statement of what she herself has been taught by more advanced students, supplemented, in a few details only, by the results of her

VIII PREFACE.

own study and observation. The publication of many of the facts herein stated has been rendered necessary by the wild and fanciful speculations in which many Theosophists and students of mysticism have indulged, during the last few years, in their endeavour to, as they imagined, work out a complete system of thought from the few facts previously communicated to them.

It is needless to explain that this book is not the Secret Doctrine in its entirety, but a select number of fragments of its fundamental tenets, special attention being paid to some facts which have been seized upon by various writers, and distorted out of all resemblance to the truth.

But it is perhaps desirable to state unequivocally that the teachings, however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, belong neither to the Hindu, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldean, nor the Egyptian religion, neither to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism nor Christianity exclusively. The Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown, developed, and become materialised.

It is more than probable that the book will be regarded by a large section of the public as a romance of the wildest kind; for who has ever even heard of the book of Dzyan?

The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility for what is contained in this work, and even to face the charge of having invented the whole of it. That it has many shortcomings she is fully aware; all that she claims for it is that, romantic as it may seem to many, its logical coherence and consistency entitle this new Genesis to rank, at any rate, on a level with the “working hypotheses” so freely accepted by modern science. Further, it claims consideration, not by reason of any appeal to dogmatic authority, but because it closely adheres to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy.

The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.

If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content. It is written in the service of humanity, and by humanity and the future generations it must be judged. Its author recognises no inferior court of appeal. Abuse she is accustomed to; calumny she is daily acquainted with; at slander she smiles in silent contempt.

De minimis non curat lex.
[The law does not concern itself with trivialities.]

H. P. B.
London, October, 1888.

IX

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XVII

INTRODUCTORY

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“Gently to hear, kindly to judge.”—Shakespeare.

Since the appearance of Theosophical literature in England, it has become customary to call its teachings “Esoteric Buddhism.” And, having become a habit—as an old proverb based on daily experience has it—“Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”

Old truisms are often the wisest. The human mind can hardly remain entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made. This is said with reference to the prevailing double mistake (a) of limiting Theosophy to Buddhism, and (b) of confounding the tenets of the religious philosophy preached by Gautama, the Buddha, with the doctrines broadly outlined in Esoteric Buddhism. Any thing more erroneous than this could be hardly imagined. It has enabled our enemies to find an effective weapon against theosophy; because, as an eminent Pāli scholar very pointedly expressed it, there was in the volume named “neither esotericism nor Buddhism.” The esoteric truths, presented in Mr. Sinnett’s work, had ceased to be esoteric from the moment they were made public; nor did it contain the religion of Buddha, but simply a few tenets from a hitherto hidden teaching which are now supplemented by many more, enlarged and explained in the present volumes. But even the latter, though giving out many fundamental tenets from the Secret Doctrine of the East, raise but a small corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living adept, would be permitted to, or could—even if he would—give out promiscuously, to a mocking, unbelieving world, that which has been so effectually concealed from it for long æons and ages.

Esoteric Buddhism was an excellent work with a very unfortunate

XVIII INTRODUCTORY.

title, though it meant no more than does the title of this work, The Secret Doctrine. It proved unfortunate, because people are always in the habit of judging things by their appearance, rather than their meaning; and because the error has now become so universal, that even most of the Fellows of the Theosophical Society have fallen victims to the same misconception. From the first, however, protests were raised by Brāhmins and others against the title; and, in justice to myself, I must add that Esoteric Buddhism was presented to me as a completed volume, and that I was entirely unaware of the manner in which the author intended to spell the word “Budh-ism.”

This has to be laid directly at the door of those who, having been the first to bring the subject under public notice, neglected to point out the difference between “Buddhism”—the religious system of ethics preached by the Lord Gautama, and named after his title of Buddha, “the Enlightened”—and Budha, “Wisdom,” or knowledge (Vidyā), the faculty of cognizing, from the Sanskrit root “budh,” to know. We theosophists of India are ourselves the real culprits, although, at the time, we did our best to correct the mistake. (See Theosophist, June, 1883.) To avoid this deplorable misnomer was easy; the spelling of the word had only to be altered, and by common consent both pronounced and written “Budhism,” instead of “Buddhism.” Nor is the latter term correctly spelt and pronounced, as it ought to be called, in English, Buddhaïsm, and its votaries “Buddhaïsts.”

This explanation is absolutely necessary at the beginning of a work like this one. The “Wisdom Religion” is the inheritance of all the nations, the world over, though the statement was made in Esoteric Buddhism (Preface to the original Edition) that “two years ago (i.e., 1883), neither I nor any other European living, knew the alphabet of the Science, here for the first time put into a scientific shape,” etc. This error must have crept in through inadvertence. For the present writer knew all that which is “divulged” in Esoteric Buddhism—and much more—many years before it became her duty (in 1880) to impart a small portion of the Secret Doctrine to two European gentlemen, one of whom was the author of Esoteric Buddhism; and surely the present writer has the undoubted, though to her, rather equivocal, privilege of being a European, by birth and education. Moreover, a considerable part of the philosophy

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expounded by Mr. Sinnett was taught in America, even before Isis Unveiled was published, to two Europeans and to my colleague, Colonel H. S. Olcott. Of the three teachers the latter gentleman has had, the first was a Hungarian Initiate, the second an Egyptian, the third a Hindu. As permitted, Colonel Olcott has given out some of this teaching in various ways; if the other two have not, it has been simply because they were not allowed: their time for public work having not yet come. But for others it has, and the appearance of Mr. Sinnett’s several interesting books is a visible proof of the fact. It is above everything important to keep in mind that no theosophical book acquires the least additional value from pretended authority.

In etymology Ādi-, and Adhi-Budha, the one (or the First) and “Supreme Wisdom” is a term used by Āryāsaṅga in his Secret treatises, and now by all the mystic Northern Buddhists. It is a Sanskrit term, and an appellation given by the earliest Āryans to the Unknown deity; the word “Brahmā” not being found in the Vedas and the early works. It means the absolute Wisdom, and “Ādi-bhūta” is translated “the primeval uncreated cause of all” by Fitzedward Hall. Æons of untold duration must have elapsed, before the epithet of Buddha was so humanized, so to speak, as to allow of the term being applied to mortals and finally appropriated to one whose unparalleled virtues and knowledge caused him to receive the title of the “Buddha of Wisdom unmoved.” Bodha means the innate possession of divine intellect or “understanding”; “Buddha,” the acquirement of it by personal efforts and merit; while Buddhi is the faculty of cognizing, the channel through which divine knowledge reaches the “Ego,” the discernment of good and evil, “divine conscience” also; and “Spiritual Soul,” which is the vehicle of Ātmā. “When Buddhi absorbs our Egotism (destroys it) with all its Vikāras, Avalokiteśvara becomes manifested to us, and Nirvāṇa, or Mukti, is reached,” “Mukti” being the same as Nirvāṇa, i.e., freedom from the trammels of “Māyā” or illusion. “Bodhi” is likewise the name of a particular state of trance condition, called Samādhi, during which the subject reaches the culmination of spiritual knowledge.

Unwise are those who, in their blind and, in our age, untimely hatred of Buddhism, and, by re-action, of “Budhism,” deny its esoteric teachings (which are those also of the Brāhmins), simply because the name

XX INTRODUCTORY.

suggests what to them, as Monotheists, are noxious doctrines. Unwise is the correct term to use in their case. For the Esoteric philosophy is alone calculated to withstand, in this age of crass and illogical materialism, the repeated attacks on all and everything man holds most dear and sacred, in his inner spiritual life. The true philosopher, the student of the Esoteric Wisdom, entirely loses sight of personalities, dogmatic beliefs and special religions. Moreover, Esoteric philosophy reconciles all religions, strips every one of its outward, human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of an absolute Divine Principle in nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the Sun. Esoteric philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ēns. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever Unknowable. Furthermore, the records we mean to place before the reader embrace the esoteric tenets of the whole world since the beginning of our humanity, and Buddhistic occultism occupies therein only its legitimate place, and no more. Indeed, the secret portions of the “Dan” or “Jan-na”¹ (“Dhyāna”) of Gautama’s metaphysics—grand as they appear to one unacquainted with the tenets of the Wisdom Religion of antiquity—are but a very small portion of the whole. The Hindu Reformer limited his public teachings to the purely moral and physiological aspect of the Wisdom-Religion, to Ethics and man alone. Things “unseen and incorporeal,” the mystery of Being outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving the hidden Truths for a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the famous Saptaparṇa cave (the Sattapaṇṇi of Mahāvaṃsa) near Mount Vaibhāra (the Vebhāra of the Pāli MSS.). This cave was in Rājagṛha, the ancient capital of Māgadha, and was the Chēdì cave of Fǎxiǎn, as rightly suspected by some archæologists.²

Time and human imagination made short work of the purity and philo-

 

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XXI INTRODUCTORY.

sophy of these teachings, once that they were transplanted from the secret and sacred circle of the Arhats, during the course of their work of proselytism, into a soil less prepared for metaphysical conceptions than India; i.e., once they were transferred into China, Japan, Siam [Thailand], and Burma [Myanmar]. How the pristine purity of these grand revelations was dealt with may be seen in studying some of the so-called “esoteric” Buddhist schools of antiquity in their modern garb, not only in China and other Buddhist countries in general, but even in not a few schools in Tibet, left to the care of uninitiated Lamas and Mongolian innovators.

Thus the reader is asked to bear in mind the very important difference between orthodox Buddhism—i.e., the public teachings of Gautama the Buddha, and his esoteric Budhism. His Secret Doctrine, however, differed in no wise from that of the initiated Brāhmins of his day. The Buddha was a child of the Āryan soil, a born Hindu, a Kṣatriya and a disciple of the “twice born” (the initiated Brāhmins) or Dvijas. His teachings, therefore, could not be different from their doctrines, for the whole Buddhist reform merely consisted in giving out a portion of that which had been kept secret from every man outside of the “enchanted” circle of Temple-Initiates and ascetics. Unable to teach all that had been imparted to him—owing to his pledges—though he taught a philosophy built upon the ground-work of the true esoteric knowledge, the Buddha gave to the world only its outward material body and kept its soul for his Elect. (See also Volume II.) Many Chinese scholars among Orientalists have heard of the “Soul Doctrine.” None seem to have understood its real meaning and importance.

That doctrine was preserved secretly—too secretly, perhaps—within the sanctuary. The mystery that shrouded its chief dogma and aspirations—Nirvāṇa—has so tried and irritated the curiosity of those scholars who have studied it, that, unable to solve it logically and satisfactorily by untying the Gordian knot, they cut it through, by declaring that Nirvāṇa meant absolute annihilation.

Toward the end of the first quarter of this century, a distinct class of literature appeared in the world, which became with every year more defined in its tendency. Being based, soi-disant [self-proclaimed], on the scholarly researches of Sanskritists and Orientalists in general, it was held scientific. Hindu, Egyptian, and other ancient religions, myths, and emblems were made to yield anything the symbologist wanted them to

XXII INTRODUCTORY.

yield, thus often giving out the rude outward form in place of the inner meaning. Works, most remarkable for their ingenious deductions and speculations, in círculo vicioso [vicious circle], foregone conclusions generally changing places with premisses as in the syllogisms of more than one Sanskrit and Pāli scholar, appeared rapidly in succession, over-flooding the libraries with dissertations rather on phallic and sexual worship than on real symbology, and each contradicting the other.

This is the true reason, perhaps, why the outline of a few fundamental truths from the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic ages is now permitted to see the light, after long millenniums of the most profound silence and secrecy. I say “a few truths,” advisedly, because that which must remain unsaid could not be contained in a hundred such volumes, nor could it be imparted to the present generation of Sadducees. But, even the little that is now given is better than complete silence upon those vital truths. The world of today, in its mad career towards the unknown—which it is too ready to confound with the unknowable, whenever the problem eludes the grasp of the physicist—is rapidly progressing on the reverse, material plane of spirituality. It has now become a vast arena—a true valley of discord and of eternal strife—a necropolis, wherein lie buried the highest and the most holy aspirations of our Spirit-Soul. That soul becomes with every new generation more paralyzed and atrophied. The “amiable infidels and accomplished profligates” of Society, spoken of by [Horace] Greeley, care little for the revival of the dead sciences of the past; but there is a fair minority of earnest students who are entitled to learn the few truths that may be given to them now; and now much more than ten years ago, when Isis Unveiled, or even the later attempts to explain the mysteries of esoteric science, were published.

One of the greatest, and, withal, the most serious objection to the correctness and reliability of the whole work will be the preliminary Stanzas: “How can the statements contained in them be verified?” True, if a great portion of the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Mongolian works quoted in the present volumes are known to some Orientalists, the chief work—that one from which the Stanzas are given—is not in the possession of European Libraries. The Book of Dzyan (or “Dzan”) is utterly unknown to our Philologists, or at any rate was never heard of by them under its present name. This is, of course, a great drawback

XXIII INTRODUCTORY.

to those who follow the methods of research prescribed by official Science; but to the students of Occultism, and to every genuine Occultist, this will be of little moment. The main body of the Doctrines given is found scattered throughout hundreds and thousands of Sanskrit MSS., some already translated—disfigured in their interpretations, as usual,—others still awaiting their turn. Every scholar, therefore, has an opportunity of verifying the statements herein made, and of checking most of the quotations. A few new facts (new to the profane Orientalist, only) and passages quoted from the Commentaries will be found difficult to trace. Several of the teachings, also, have hitherto been transmitted orally: yet even those are in every instance hinted at in the almost countless volumes of Brahmanical, Chinese and Tibetan temple-literature.

However it may be, and whatsoever is in store for the writer through malevolent criticism, one fact is quite certain. The members of several esoteric schools—the seat of which is beyond the Himālayas, and whose ramifications may be found in China, Japan, India, Tibet, and even in Syria, besides South America—claim to have in their possession the sum total of sacred and philosophical works in MSS. and type: all the works, in fact, that have ever been written, in whatever language or characters, since the art of writing began; from the ideographic hieroglyphs down to the alphabet of Cadmus and the Devanāgarī.

It has been claimed in all ages that ever since the destruction of the Alexandrian Library (see Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 27), every work of a character that might have led the profane to the ultimate discovery and comprehension of some of the mysteries of the Secret Science, was, owing to the combined efforts of the members of the Brotherhoods, diligently searched for. It is added, moreover, by those who know, that once found, save three copies left and stored safely away, such works were all destroyed. In India, the last of the precious manuscripts were secured and hidden during the reign of the Emperor Akbar.³

It is maintained, furthermore, that every sacred book of that kind, whose text was not sufficiently veiled in symbolism, or which had any

 

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XXIV INTRODUCTORY.

direct references to the ancient mysteries, after having been carefully copied in cryptographic characters, such as to defy the art of the best and cleverest palæographer, was also destroyed to the last copy. During Akbar’s reign, some fanatical courtiers, displeased at the Emperor’s sinful prying into the religions of the infidels, themselves helped the Brāhmins to conceal their MSS. Such was Badāʾūnī, who had an undisguised horror for Akbar’s mania for idolatrous religions.⁴

Moreover in all the large and wealthy lamasaries, there are subterranean crypts and cave-libraries, cut in the rock, whenever the gön pa [dgon pa] and the lha khang are situated in the mountains. Beyond the Western Tsaidam, in the solitary passes of Kūnlún⁵ there are several such hiding-places. Along the ridge of Altyn-Tagh, whose soil no European foot has ever trodden so far, there exists a certain hamlet, lost in a deep gorge. It is a small cluster of houses, a hamlet rather than a monastery, with a poor-looking temple in it, with one old lama, a hermit, living near by to watch it. Pilgrims say that the subterranean galleries and halls under it contain a collection of books, the number of which, according to the accounts given, is too large to find room even in the British Museum.⁶

All this is very likely to provoke a smile of doubt. But then, before

 

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the reader rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over the following well known facts. The collective researches of the Orientalists, and especially the labours of late years of the students of comparative Philology and the Science of Religions have led them to ascertain as follows: An immense, incalculable number of MSS., and even printed works known to have existed, are now to be found no more. They have disappeared without leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But it is not so; for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys to works still extant, and entirely incomprehensible, for the greater portion of their readers, without those additional volumes of Commentaries and explanations. Such are, for instance, the works of Lǎozǐ, the predecessor of Confucius [Kǒng​fū​zǐ].⁷

He is said to have written 930 books on Ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, one thousand in all. His great work, however, the heart of his doctrine, the “Dào-dé-jīng,” or the sacred scriptures of the Dàoshì, has in it, as Stanislas Julien shows, only “about 5,000 words” (Tao-te-King, p. xxvii.), hardly a dozen of pages, yet Professor Max Müller finds that “the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so that Mr. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose of his translation,” the earliest going back as far as the year 163 b.c., not earlier, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that preceded this earliest of the commentators there was ample time to veil the true Lǎozǐ doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests and followers of Lǎozǐ, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of the European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real occult records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as almost all the texts, have long since disappeared from the eyes of the profane.

 

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If one turns to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Chaldean Scriptures, the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountainhead of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting-point of Christianity, what do the scholars find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient religions of Babylon; to record the vast cycle of astronomical observations of the Chaldean Magi; to justify the tradition of their splendid and eminently occult literature, what now remains?—only a few fragments, said to be by Berossus.

These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of what has disappeared. For they passed through the hands of his Reverence the Bishop of Cæsarea—that self-constituted censor and editor of the sacred records of other men’s religions—and they doubtless bear to this day the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon?

Written in Greek by Berossus, a priest of the temple of Belus, for Alexander the Great, from the astronomical and chronological records preserved by the priests of that temple, and covering a period of 200,000 years, it is now lost. In the first century b.c. Alexander Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it—also lost. Eusebius used these extracts in writing his Chronicon (270–340 a.d.). The points of resemblance—almost of identity—between the Jewish and the Chaldean Scriptures,⁸ made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his rôle of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the Jewish Scriptures, and with them an absurd chronology. It is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian Synchronistic tables of Manetho—so much so that Bunsen⁹ charges him with mutilating history most unscrupulously. And Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice-patriarch of Constantinople (eighth century), both denounce him as the most daring and desperate forger.

Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted?

 

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So that, with the exception of these more than doubtful fragments, the entire Chaldean sacred literature has disappeared from the eyes of the profane as completely as the lost Atlantis. A few facts that were contained in the Berossian History are given in Part II. of Vol. II., and may throw a great light on the true origin of the Fallen Angels, personified by Bel and the Dragon.

Turning now to the oldest Āryan literature, the Ṛgveda, the student will find, following strictly in this the data furnished by the said Orientalists themselves, that, although the Ṛgveda contains only “about 10,580 verses, or 1,028 hymns,” in spite of the Brāhmaṇas and the mass of glosses and commentaries, it is not understood correctly to this day. Why is this so? Evidently because the Brāhmaṇas, “the scholastic and oldest treatises on the primitive hymns,” themselves require a key, which the Orientalists have failed to secure.

What do the scholars say of Buddhist literature? Have they got it in its completeness? Assuredly not. Notwithstanding the 325 volumes of the Kangyur [bka’ ‘gyur] and the Tengyur [bstan ‘gyur] of the Northern Buddhists, each volume we are told, “weighing from four to five pounds,” nothing, in truth, is known of Lamaism. Yet, the sacred canon of the Southern Church is said to contain 29,368,000 letters in the Saddharmālaṃkāra,¹⁰ or, exclusive of treatises and commentaries, “five or six times the amount of the matter contained in the Bible,” the latter, in the words of Professor Max Müller, rejoicing only in 3,567,180 letters. Notwithstanding, then, these “325 volumes” (in reality there are 333, Kangyur [bka’ ‘gyur] comprising 108, and Tengyur [bstan ‘gyur] 225 volumes), “the translators, instead of supplying us with correct versions, have interwoven them with their own commentaries, for the purpose of justifying the dogmas of their several schools.”¹¹ Moreover, “according to a tradition preserved by the Buddhist schools, both of the South and of the North, the sacred Buddhist Canon comprised originally 80,000 or 84,000 tracts, but most of them were lost, so that there remained but 6,000,” the professor tells his audiences. “Lost” as usual for Europeans. But who can be quite sure that they are likewise lost for Buddhists and Brāhmins?

Considering the sacredness for the Buddhists of every line written

 

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upon Buddha or his “Good Law,” the loss of nearly 76,000 tracts does seem miraculous. Had it been vice versā, every one acquainted with the natural course of events would subscribe to the statement that, of these 76,000, five or six thousand treatises might have been destroyed during the persecutions in, and emigrations from, India. But as it is well ascertained that Buddhist Arhats began their religious exodus, for the purpose of propagating the new faith beyond Kaśmīr and the Himālayas, as early as the year 300 before our era,¹² and reached China in the year 61 a.d.¹³ when Kaśyapa, at the invitation of the Emperor Míng-dì, went there to acquaint the “Son of Heaven” with the tenets of Buddhism, it does seem strange to hear the Orientalists speaking of such a loss as though it were really possible. They do not seem to allow for one moment the possibility that the texts may be lost only for the West and for themselves; or, that the Asiatic people should have the unparalleled boldness to keep their most sacred records out of the reach of foreigners, thus refusing to deliver them to the profanation and misuse of races even so “vastly superior” to themselves.

Owing to the expressed regrets and numerous confessions of almost every one of the Orientalists (See Max Müller’s Lectures for example) the public may feel sufficiently sure (a) that the students of ancient religions have indeed very few data upon which to build such final conclusions as they generally do about the old religions, and (b) that such lack of data does not prevent them in the least from dogmatising. One would imagine that, thanks to the numerous records of the Egyptian theogony and mysteries preserved in the classics, and in a number of ancient writers, the rites and dogmas of Pharaonic Egypt ought to be well understood at least; better, at any rate, than the too abstruse philosophies and Pantheism of India, of whose religion and language Europe had hardly any idea before the beginning of the present century. Along the Nile and on the face of the whole country, there stand to this hour, exhumed yearly and daily, fresh relics which eloquently tell their own history. Still it is not so. The learned Oxford philologist himself confesses the truth by saying that “Though . . . we see still standing the Pyramids, and the ruins of temples and labyrinths, their walls

 

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covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and with the strange pictures of gods and goddesses. . . . . On rolls of papyrus, which seem to defy the ravages of time, we have even fragments of what may be called the sacred books of the Egyptians; yet, though much has been deciphered in the ancient records of that mysterious race, the mainspring of the religion of Egypt and the original intention of its ceremonial worship are far from being fully disclosed to us.”¹⁴ Here again the mysterious hieroglyphic documents remain, but the keys by which alone they become intelligible have disappeared.

Nevertheless, having found that “there is a natural connection between language and religion”; and, secondly, that there was a common Āryan religion before the separation of the Āryan race; a common Semitic religion before the separation of the Semitic race; and a common Turanian religion before the separation of the Chinese and the other tribes belonging to the Turanian class; having, in fact, only discovered “three ancient centres of religion” and “three centres of language,” and though as entirely ignorant of those primitive religions and languages, as of their origin, the professor does not hesitate to declare “that a truly historical basis for a scientific treatment of those principal religions of the world has been gained!”

A “scientific treatment” of a subject is no guarantee for its “historical basis”; and with such scarcity of data on hand, no philologist, even among the most eminent, is justified in giving out his own conclusions for historical facts. No doubt, the eminent Orientalist has proved thoroughly to the world’s satisfaction, that according to Grimm’s law of phonetic rules, Odin and Buddha are two different personages, quite distinct from each other, and he has shown it scientifically. When, however he takes the opportunity of saying in the same breath that Odin “was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the age of the Veda and of Homer” (Max Müller, “On False Analogies in Comparative Theology,” Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1873, p. 318), he has not the slightest “historical basis” for it. He makes history and fact subservient to his

 

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own conclusions, which may be very “scientific,” in the sight of Oriental scholars, but yet very wide of the mark of actual truth. The conflicting views on the subject of chronology, in the case of the Vedas, of the various eminent philologists and Orientalists, from Martin Haug down to Mr. Max Müller himself, are an evident proof that the statement has no historical basis to stand upon, “internal evidence” being very often a Jack-o’-lantern, instead of a safe beacon to follow. Nor has the Science of modern Comparative Mythology any better proof to show, that those learned writers, who have insisted for the last century or so that there must have been “fragments of a primeval revelation, granted to the ancestors of the whole race of mankind . . . . preserved in the temples of Greece and Italy,” were entirely wrong. For this is what all the Eastern Initiates and Pundits have been proclaiming to the world from time to time. While a prominent Sinhalese priest assured the writer that it was well known that the most important Buddhist tracts belonging to the sacred canon were stored away in countries and places inaccessible to the European pundits, the late S‍vāmī Dayānan‍da Saras‍vatī, the greatest Sanskritist of his day in India, assured some members of the Theosophical Society of the same fact with regard to ancient Brahmanical works. When told that Professor Max Müller had declared to the audiences of his “Lectures” that the theory . . . . “that there was a primeval preternatural revelation granted to the fathers of the human race, finds but few supporters at present,”—the holy and learned man laughed. His answer was suggestive. “If Mr. Moksh Mooller,” as he pronounced the name, “were a Brāhmin, and came with me, I might take him to a gupta cave (a secret crypt) near Ukhīmaṭha, in the Himālayas, where he would soon find out that what crossed the Kālāpānī (the black waters of the ocean) from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books. There was a ‘primeval revelation,’ and it still exists; nor will it ever be lost to the world, but will reappear; though the Mlecchas will of course have to wait.”

Questioned further on this point, he would say no more. This was at Meerut, in 1880.

No doubt the mystification played, in the last century at Calcutta, by the Brāhmins upon Colonel Wilford and Sir William Jones was a cruel one. But it had been well deserved, and no one was more to be blamed

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in that affair than the Missionaries and Colonel Wilford themselves. The former, on the testimony of Sir William Jones himself (see Asiatic Researches, Vol. I. (1798), p. 272), were silly enough to maintain that “the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Maheśa [Śiva] were no other than the Christian trinity.”¹⁵ It was a good lesson. It made the Oriental scholars doubly cautious; but perchance it has also made some of them too shy, and caused, in its reaction, the pendulum of foregone conclusions to swing too much the other way. For “that first supply on the Brahmanical market,” made for Colonel Wilford, has now created an evident necessity and desire in the Orientalists to declare nearly every archaic Sanskrit manuscript so modern as to give to the missionaries full justification for availing themselves of the opportunity. That they do so and to the full extent of their mental powers, is shown by the absurd attempts of late to prove that the whole Purāṇic story about Kṛṣṇa was plagiarized by the Brāhmins from the Bible! But the facts cited by the Oxford Professor in his Introduction to the Science of Religion, concerning the now famous interpolations, for the benefit, and later on to the sorrow, of Col. Wilford, do not at all interfere with the conclusions to which one who studies the Secret Doctrine must unavoidably come. For, if the results show that neither the New nor even the Old Testament borrowed anything from the more ancient religion of the Brāhmins and Buddhists, it does not follow that the Jews have not borrowed all they knew from the Chaldean records, the latter being mutilated later on by Eusebius. As to the Chaldeans, they assuredly got their primitive learning from the Brāhmins, for Rawlinson shows an undeniably Vedic influence in the early mythology of Babylon; and Col. Vans Kennedy has long since justly declared that Babylonia was, from her origin, the seat of Sanskrit and Brāhmin learning. But all such proofs must lose their value, in the presence of the latest theory worked out by Prof. Max Müller. What it is everyone knows. The code of phonetic laws has now become a universal solvent for every identification and “connection” between

 

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the gods of many nations. Thus, though the Mother of Mercury (Budha, Thōth-Hermēs, etc.), was Maia, the mother of Buddha (Gautama), also Māyā, and the mother of Jesus, likewise Maya (illusion, for Mary is Mare, the Sea, the great illusion symbolically)—yet these three characters have no connection, nor can they have any, since Bopp has “laid down his code of phonetic laws.”

In their efforts to collect together the many skeins of unwritten history, it is a bold step for our Orientalists to take, to deny, a priori, everything that does not dovetail with their special conclusions. Thus, while new discoveries are daily made of great arts and sciences having existed far back in the night of time, even the knowledge of writing is refused to some of the most ancient nations, and they are credited with barbarism instead of culture. Yet the traces of an immense civilization, even in Central Asia, are still to be found. This civilization is undeniably prehistoric. And how can there be civilization without a literature, in some form, without annals or chronicles? Common sense alone ought to supplement the broken links in the history of departed nations. The gigantic, unbroken wall of the mountains that hem in the whole table-land of Tibet, from the upper course of the river Huáng Hé down to the Kharkhorum hills, witnessed a civilization during millenniums of years, and would have strange secrets to tell mankind. The Eastern and Central portions of those regions—the Nánshān and the Altyn-Tagh—were once upon a time covered with cities that could well vie with Babylon. A whole geological period has swept over the land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting sand, and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of the basin of Tarim testify. The borderlands alone are superficially known to the traveller. Within those table-lands of sand there is water, and fresh oases are found blooming there, wherein no European foot has ever yet ventured, or trodden the now treacherous soil. Among these verdant oases there are some which are entirely inaccessible even to the native profane traveller. Hurricanes may “tear up the sands and sweep whole plains away,” they are powerless to destroy that which is beyond their reach. Built deep in the bowels of the earth, the subterranean stores are secure; and as their entrances are concealed in such oases, there is little fear that anyone should discover them, even should several armies invade the sandy wastes where—

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“Not a pool, not a bush, not a house is seen,
And the mountain-range forms a rugged screen
Round the parch’d flats of the dry, dry desert. . . . .”

But there is no need to send the reader across the desert, when the same proofs of ancient civilization are found even in comparatively populated regions of the same country. The oasis of Cherchen, for instance, situated about 4,000 feet above the level of the river Cherchen-Derya, is surrounded with the ruins of archaic towns and cities in every direction. There, some 3,000 human beings represent the relics of about a hundred extinct nations and races—the very names of which are now unknown to our ethnologists. An anthropologist would feel more than embarrassed to class, divide and subdivide them; the more so, as the respective descendants of all these antediluvian races and tribes know as little of their own forefathers themselves, as if they had fallen from the moon. When questioned about their origin, they reply that they know not whence their fathers had come, but had heard that their first (or earliest) men were ruled by the great genii of these deserts. This may be put down to ignorance and superstition, yet in view of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine, the answer may be based upon primeval tradition. Alone, the tribe of Khorāsān claims to have come from what is now known as Afghanistan, long before the days of Alexander, and brings legendary lore to that effect as corroboration. The Russian traveller, Colonel (now General) Przhevalsky, found quite close to the oasis of Cherchen, the ruins of two enormous cities, the oldest of which was, according to local tradition, ruined 3,000 years ago by a hero and giant; and the other by the Mongolians in the tenth century of our era. “The emplacement of the two cities is now covered, owing to shifting sands and the desert wind, with strange and heterogeneous relics; with broken china and kitchen utensils and human bones. The natives often find copper and gold coins, melted silver, ingots, diamonds, and turquoises, and what is the most remarkable—broken glass. . . . .” “Coffins of some undecaying wood, or material, also, within which beautifully preserved embalmed bodies are found. . . . . The male mummies are all extremely tall powerfully built men with long waving hair. . . . . A vault was found with twelve dead men sitting in it. Another time, in a separate coffin, a young girl was discovered by us. Her eyes were closed with golden discs, and the jaws held firm by a golden circlet running from under the chin across the top of the head. Clad in a narrow

XXXIV INTRODUCTORY.

woollen garment, her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet being left naked.” (From a lecture by N. M. Przhevalsky.) To this, the famous traveller adds that all along their way on the river Cherchen they heard legends about twenty-three towns buried ages ago by the shifting sands of the deserts. The same tradition exists on the Lob-nor and in the oasis of Këriye.

The traces of such civilization, and these and like traditions, give us the right to credit other legendary lore warranted by well educated and learned natives of India and Mongolia, when they speak of immense libraries reclaimed from the sand, together with various reliques of ancient magic lore, which have all been safely stowed away.

To recapitulate. The Secret Doctrine was the universally diffused religion of the ancient and prehistoric world. Proofs of its diffusion, authentic records of its history, a complete chain of documents, showing its character and presence in every land, together with the teaching of all its great adepts, exist to this day in the secret crypts of libraries belonging to the Occult Fraternity.

This statement is rendered more credible by a consideration of the following facts: the tradition of the thousands of ancient parchments saved when the Alexandrian library was destroyed; the thousands of Sanskrit works which disappeared in India in the reign of Akbar; the universal tradition in China and Japan that the true old texts with the commentaries, which alone make them comprehensible—amounting to many thousands of volumes—have long passed out of the reach of profane hands; the disappearance of the vast sacred and occult literature of Babylon; the loss of those keys which alone could solve the thousand riddles of the Egyptian hieroglyphic records; the tradition in India that the real secret commentaries which alone make the Veda intelligible, though no longer visible to profane eyes, still remain for the initiate, hidden in secret caves and crypts; and an identical belief among the Buddhists, with regard to their secret books.

The Occultists assert that all these exist, safe from Western spoliating hands, to re-appear in some more enlightened age, for which in the words of the late S‍vāmī Dayānan‍da Saras‍vatī, “the Mlecchas (outcasts, savages, those beyond the pale of Āryan civilization) will have to wait.”

For it is not the fault of the initiates that these documents are now “lost” to the profane; nor was their policy dictated by selfishness, or

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any desire to monopolise the life-giving sacred lore. There were portions of the Secret Science that for incalculable ages had to remain concealed from the profane gaze. But this was because to impart to the unprepared multitude secrets of such tremendous importance, was equivalent to giving a child a lighted candle in a powder magazine.

The answer to a question which has frequently arisen in the minds of students, when meeting with statements such as this, may be outlined here.

“We can understand,” they say, “the necessity for concealing from the herd such secrets as the Vril, or the rock-destroying force, discovered by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, but we cannot understand how any danger could arise from the revelation of such a purely philosophic doctrine, as, e.g., the evolution of the planetary chains.”

The danger was this: Doctrines such as the planetary chain, or the seven races, at once give a clue to the seven-fold nature of man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race; and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven-fold occult forces—those of the higher planes being of tremendous power. So that any septenary division at once gives a clue to tremendous occult powers, the abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity. A clue, which is, perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially the Westerns—protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic disbelief in the occult; but a clue which would, nevertheless, have been very real in the early centuries of the Christian era, to people fully convinced of the reality of occultism, and entering a cycle of degradation, which made them rife for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.

The documents were concealed, it is true, but the knowledge itself and its actual existence had never been made a secret of by the Hierophants of the Temple, wherein Mysteries have ever been made a discipline and stimulus to virtue. This is very old news, and was repeatedly made known by the great adepts, from Pythagoras and Plato down to the Neoplatonists. It was the new religion of the Nazarenes that wrought a change for the worse—in the policy of centuries.

Moreover, there is a well-known fact, a very curious one, corroborated to the writer by a reverend gentleman attached for years to a Russian Embassy—namely, that there are several documents in the St. Peters-

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burg Imperial Libraries to show that, even so late as during the days when Freemasonry, and Secret Societies of Mystics flourished unimpeded in Russia, i.e., at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, more than one Russian Mystic travelled to Tibet via the Ural mountains in search of knowledge and initiation in the unknown crypts of Central Asia. And more than one returned years later, with a rich store of such information as could never have been given him anywhere in Europe. Several cases could be cited, and well-known names brought forward, but for the fact that such publicity might annoy the surviving relatives of the said late Initiates. Let any one look over the Annals and History of Freemasonry in the archives of the Russian metropolis, and he will assure himself of the fact stated.

This is a corroboration of that which has been stated many times before, and, unfortunately, too indiscreetly. Instead of benefiting humanity, the virulent charges of deliberate invention and imposture with a purpose thrown at those who asserted but a truthful, if even a little known fact, have only generated bad Karma for the slanderers. But now the mischief is done, and truth should no longer be denied, whatever the consequences. Is it a new religion, we are asked? By no means; it is not a religion, nor is its philosophy new; for, as already stated, it is as old as thinking man. Its tenets are not now published for the first time, but have been cautiously given out to, and taught by, more than one European Initiate—especially by the late Ragon.

More than one great scholar has stated that there never was a religious founder, whether Āryan, Semitic or Turanian, who had invented a new religion, or revealed a new truth. These founders were all transmitters, not original teachers. They were the authors of new forms and interpretations, while the truths upon which the latter were based were as old as mankind. Selecting one or more of those grand verities—actualities visible only to the eye of the real Sage and Seer—out of the many orally revealed to man in the beginning, preserved and perpetuated in the adyta of the temples through initiation, during the Mysteries and by personal transmission—they revealed these truths to the masses. Thus every nation received in its turn some of the said truths, under the veil of its own local and special symbolism; which, as time went on, developed into a more or less philosophical cultus, a Pantheon in mythical disguise. Therefore is Confucius [Kǒng​fū​zǐ], a very ancient

XXXVII INTRODUCTORY.

legislator in historical chronology, though a very modern Sage in the World’s History, shown by Dr. Legge¹⁶—who calls him “emphatically a transmitter, not a maker”—as saying: “I only hand on: I cannot create new things. I believe in the ancients and therefore I love them.”¹⁷ (Quoted in Introduction to the Science of Religion, by Max Müller [p. 157])

The writer loves them too, and therefore believes in the ancients, and the modern heirs to their Wisdom. And believing in both, she now transmits that which she has received and learnt herself to all those who will accept it. As to those who may reject her testimony,—i.e., the great majority—she will bear them no malice, for they will be as right in their way in denying, as she is right in hers in affirming, since they look at truth from two entirely different standpoints. Agreeably with the rules of critical scholarship, the Orientalist has to reject a priori whatever evidence he cannot fully verify for himself. And how can a Western scholar accept on hearsay that which he knows nothing about? Indeed, that which is given in these volumes is selected from oral, as much as from written teachings. This first instalment of the esoteric doctrines is based upon Stanzas, which are the records of a people unknown to ethnology; it is claimed that they are written in a tongue absent from the nomenclature of languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted; they are said to emanate from a source (Occultism) repudiated by science; and, finally, they are offered through an agency, incessantly discredited before the world by all those who hate unwelcome truths, or have some special hobby of their own to defend. Therefore, the rejection of these teachings may be expected, and must be accepted beforehand. No one styling himself a “scholar,” in whatever department of exact science, will be permitted to regard these teachings seriously. They will be derided and rejected a priori in this century; but only in this one. For in the twentieth century of our era scholars will begin to recognize that the Secret Doctrine has neither been invented nor exaggerated, but, on the contrary, simply outlined; and finally, that its teachings antedate the Vedas.¹⁸ Have not the latter been derided, rejected, and

 

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called “a modern forgery” even so recently as fifty years ago? Was not Sanskrit proclaimed at one time the progeny of, and a dialect derived from, the Greek, according to Lemprière and other scholars? About 1820, Prof. Max Müller tells us, the sacred books of the Brāhmins, of the Magians, and of the Buddhists, “were all but unknown, their very existence was doubted, and there was not a single scholar who could have translated a line of the Veda . . . of the Zend Avesta, or . . . of the Buddhist Tripiṭaka, and now the Vedas are proved to be the work of the highest antiquity whose ‘preservation amounts almost to a marvel’” (“Lecture on the Vedas,” Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. 1, 1867).

The same will be said of the Secret Archaic Doctrine, when proofs are given of its undeniable existence and records. But it will take centuries before much more is given from it. Speaking of the keys to the Zodiacal mysteries as being almost lost to the world, it was remarked by the writer in Isis Unveiled some ten years ago that: “The said key must be turned seven times before the whole system is divulged. We will give it but one turn, and thereby allow the profane one glimpse into the mystery. Happy he, who understands the whole!”

The same may be said of the whole Esoteric system. One turn of the key, and no more, was given in Isis. Much more is explained in these volumes. In those days the writer hardly knew the language in which the work was written, and the disclosure of many things, freely spoken about now, was forbidden. In Century the Twentieth some disciple more informed, and far better fitted, may be sent by the Masters of Wisdom to give final and irrefutable proofs that there exists a Science called Gupta-Vidya; and that, like the once-mysterious sources of the Nile, the source of all religions and philosophies now known to the world has been for many ages forgotten and lost to men, but is at last found.

Such a work as this has to be introduced with no simple Preface, but with a volume rather; one that would give facts, not mere disquisitions, since The Secret Doctrine is not a treatise, or a series of vague theories, but contains all that can be given out to the world in this century.

It would be worse than useless to publish in these pages even those

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portions of the esoteric teachings that have now escaped from confinement, unless the genuineness and authenticity—at any rate, the probability—of the existence of such teachings was first established. Such statements as will now be made, have to be shown warranted by various authorities: those of ancient philosophers, classics and even certain learned Church Fathers, some of whom knew these doctrines because they had studied them, had seen and read works written upon them; and some of whom had even been personally initiated into the ancient Mysteries, during the performance of which the arcane doctrines were allegorically enacted. The writer will have to give historical and trustworthy names, and to cite well-known authors, ancient and modern, of recognized ability, good judgment, and truthfulness, as also to name some of the famous proficients in the secret arts and science, along with the mysteries of the latter, as they are divulged, or, rather, partially presented before the public in their strange archaic form.

How is this to be done? What is the best way for achieving such an object? was the ever-recurring question. To make our plan clearer, an illustration may be attempted. When a tourist coming from a well-explored country, suddenly reaches the borderland of a terra incognita, hedged in, and shut out from view by a formidable barrier of impassable rocks, he may still refuse to acknowledge himself baffled in his exploratory plans. Ingress beyond is forbidden. But, if he cannot visit the mysterious region personally, he may still find a means of examining it from as short a distance as can be arrived at. Helped by his knowledge of landscapes left behind him, he can get a general and pretty correct idea of the transmural view, if he will only climb to the loftiest summit of the altitudes in front of him. Once there, he can gaze at it, at his leisure, comparing that which he dimly perceives with that which he has just left below, now that he is, thanks to his efforts, beyond the line of the mists and the cloud-capped cliffs.

Such a point of preliminary observation, for those who would like to get a more correct understanding of the mysteries of the pre-archaic periods given in the texts, cannot be offered to them in these two volumes. But if the reader has patience, and would glance at the present state of beliefs and creeds in Europe, compare and check it with what is known to history of the ages directly preceding and

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following the Christian era, then he will find all this in Volume III. of this work.

In that volume a brief recapitulation will be made of all the principal adepts known to history, and the downfall of the mysteries will be described; after which began the disappearance and final and systematic elimination from the memory of men of the real nature of initiation and the Sacred Science. From that time its teachings became Occult, and Magic sailed but too often under the venerable but frequently misleading name of Hermetic philosophy. As real Occultism had been prevalent among the Mystics during the centuries that preceded our era, so Magic, or rather Sorcery, with its Occult Arts, followed the beginning of Christianity.

However great and zealous the fanatical efforts, during those early centuries, to obliterate every trace of the mental and intellectual labour of the Pagans, it was a failure; but the same spirit of the dark demon of bigotry and intolerance has perverted systematically and ever since, every bright page written in the pre-Christian periods. Even in her uncertain records, history has preserved enough of that which has survived to throw an impartial light upon the whole. Let, then, the reader tarry a little while with the writer, on the spot of observation selected. He is asked to give all his attention to that millennium which divided the pre-Christian and the post-Christian periods, by the year One of the Nativity. This event—whether historically correct or not—has nevertheless been made to serve as a first signal for the erection of manifold bulwarks against any possible return of, or even a glimpse into, the hated religions of the Past; hated and dreaded—because throwing such a vivid light on the new and intentionally veiled interpretation of what is now known as the “New Dispensation.”

However superhuman the efforts of the early Christian fathers to obliterate the Secret Doctrine from the very memory of man, they all failed. Truth can never be killed; hence the failure to sweep away entirely from the face of the earth every vestige of that ancient Wisdom, and to shackle and gag every witness who testified to it. Let one only think of the thousands, and perhaps millions, of MSS. burnt; of monuments, with their too indiscreet inscriptions and pictorial symbols, pulverised to dust; of the bands of early hermits and ascetics roaming about among the ruined cities of Upper and Lower Egypt, in desert and

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mountain, valleys and highlands, seeking for and eager to destroy every obelisk and pillar, scroll or parchment they could lay their hands on, if it only bore the symbol of the tau, or any other sign borrowed and appropriated by the new faith; and he will then see plainly how it is that so little has remained of the records of the Past. Verily, the fiendish spirits of fanaticism, of early and mediæval Christianity and of Islam, have from the first loved to dwell in darkness and ignorance; and both have made

“———— the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,
The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom!”

Both creeds have won their proselytes at the point of the sword; both have built their churches on heaven-kissing hecatombs of human victims. Over the gateway of Century I. of our era, the ominous words “the Karma of Israel,” fatally glowed. Over the portals of our own, the future seer may discern other words, that will point to the Karma for cunningly made-up History, for events purposely perverted, and for great characters slandered by posterity, mangled out of recognition, between the two cars of Jagannātha—Bigotry and Materialism; one accepting too much, the other denying all. Wise is he who holds to the golden mid-point, who believes in the eternal justice of things. Says Fayżī’s Dīvān, the “witness to the wonderful speeches of a free-thinker who belongs to a thousand sects”: “In the assembly of the day of resurrection, when past things shall be forgiven, the sins of the Kaʻbah will be forgiven for the sake of the dust of Christian churches.” To this, Professor Max Müller replies: “The sins of Islam are as worthless as the dust of Christianity. On the day of resurrection both Muḥammadans and Christians will see the vanity of their religious doctrines. Men fight about religion on earth; in heaven they shall find out that there is only one true religion—the worship of God’s Spirit.”¹⁹

In other words—“There is no religion (or law) higher than truth”—“SATYĀT NĀSTI PARO DHARMAḤ”—the motto of the Maharajah of Benares, adopted by the Theosophical Society.

As already said in the Preface, The Secret Doctrine is not a version of Isis Unveiled—as originally intended. It is a volume explanatory of

 

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XLII INTRODUCTORY.

it rather, and, though entirely independent of the earlier work, an indispensable corollary to it. Much of what was in Isis could hardly be understood by theosophists in those days. The Secret Doctrine will now throw light on many a problem left unsolved in the first work, especially on the opening pages, which have never been understood.

Concerned simply with the philosophies within our historical times and the respective symbolism of the fallen nations, only a hurried glance could be thrown at the panorama of Occultism in the two volumes of Isis. In the present work, detailed Cosmogony and the evolution of the four races that preceded our Fifth race Humanity are given, and now two large volumes explain that which was stated on the first page of Isis Unveiled alone, and in a few allusions scattered hither and thither throughout that work. Nor could the vast catalogue of the Archaic Sciences be attempted in the present volumes, before we have disposed of such tremendous problems as Cosmic and Planetary Evolution, and the gradual development of the mysterious Humanities and races that preceded our “ʾĀḏāmic” Humanity. Therefore, the present attempt to elucidate some mysteries of the Esoteric philosophy has, in truth, nothing to do with the earlier work. As an instance, the writer must be allowed to illustrate what is said.

Volume I. of Isis begins with a reference to “an old book”—

“So very old that our modern antiquarians might ponder over its pages an indefinite time, and still not quite agree as to the nature of the fabric upon which it is written. It is the only original copy now in existence. The most ancient Hebrew document on occult learning—the Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā—was compiled from it, and that at a time when the former was already considered in the light of a literary relic. One of its illustrations represents the Divine Essence emanating from ʾĀḏām²⁰ like a luminous arc proceeding to form a circle; and then, having attained the highest point of its circumference, the ineffable glory bends back again, and returns to earth, bringing a higher type of humanity in its vortex. As it approaches nearer and nearer to our planet, the Emanation becomes more and more shadowy, until upon touching the ground it is as black as night.”

 

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XLIII INTRODUCTORY.

The “very old Book” is the original work from which the many volumes of Gyü-dé [rgyud sde] were compiled. Not only this latter and the Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā but even the Sēfer Yəṣīrāh,²¹ the work attributed by the Hebrew Qabbālists to their Patriarch ʾAḇrāhām (!), the book of Shū-jīng, China’s primitive Bible, the sacred volumes of the Egyptian Thōth-Hermēs, the Purāṇas in India, and the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch itself, are all derived from that one small parent volume. Tradition says, that it was taken down in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the words of the Divine Beings, who dictated it to the sons of Light, in Central Asia, at the very beginning of the 5th (our) race; for there was a time when its language (the Sen-zar) was known to the Initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the Toltec understood it as easily as the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, who inherited it, in their turn, from the sages of the 3rd Race, the Manuṣyas, who learnt it direct from the Devas of the 2nd and 1st Races. The “illustration” spoken of in Isis relates to the evolution of these Races and of our 4th and 5th Race Humanity in the Vaivasvata Manvantara or “Round”; each Round being composed of the Yugas of the seven periods of Humanity; four of which are now passed in our life cycle, the middle point of the 5th being nearly reached. The illustration is symbolical, as every one can well understand, and covers the ground from the beginning. The old book, having described Cosmic Evolution and explained the origin of everything on earth, including physical man, after giving the true history of the races from the First down to the Fifth (our) race, goes no further. It stops short at the beginning of the Kali Yuga just 4989 years ago at the death of Kṛṣṇa, the bright “Sun-god,” the once living hero and reformer.

But there exists another book. None of its possessors regard it as very ancient, as it was born with, and is only as old as the Black Age,

 

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XLIV INTRODUCTORY.

namely, about 5,000 years. In about nine years hence, the first cycle of the first five millenniums, that began with the great cycle of the Kali-Yuga, will end. And then the last prophecy contained in that book (the first volume of the prophetic record for the Black Age) will be accomplished. We have not long to wait, and many of us will witness the Dawn of the New Cycle, at the end of which not a few accounts will be settled and squared between the races. Volume II. of the Prophecies is nearly ready, having been in preparation since the time of Buddha’s grand successor, Śaṅkarācārya.

One more important point must be noticed, one that stands foremost in the series of proofs given of the existence of one primeval, universal Wisdom—at any rate for the Christian Qabbālists and students. The teachings were, at least, partially known to several of the Fathers of the Church. It is maintained, on purely historical grounds, that Origen, Synesius, and even Clemens Alexandrinus, had been themselves initiated into the mysteries before adding to the Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian school, that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil. More than this, some of the doctrines of the Secret schools—though by no means all—were preserved in the Vatican, and have since become part and parcel of the mysteries, in the shape of disfigured additions made to the original Christian programme by the Latin Church. Such is the now materialised dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This accounts for the great persecutions set on foot by the Roman Catholic Church against Occultism, Masonry, and heterodox mysticism generally.

The days of Constantine were the last turning-point in history, the period of the Supreme struggle that ended in the Western world throttling the old religions in favour of the new one, built on their bodies. From thence the vista into the far distant Past, beyond the “Deluge” and the Garden of ʿĒḏen, began to be forcibly and relentlessly closed by every fair and unfair means against the indiscreet gaze of posterity. Every issue was blocked up, every record that hands could be laid upon, destroyed. Yet there remains enough, even among such mutilated records, to warrant us in saying that there is in them every possible evidence of the actual existence of a Parent Doctrine. Fragments have survived geological and political cataclysms to tell the story; and every survival shows evidence that the now Secret Wisdom was once the

XLV INTRODUCTORY.

one fountain head, the ever-flowing perennial source, at which were fed all its streamlets—the later religions of all nations—from the first down to the last. This period, beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light streaming from the æons of time gone by, unobscured by the hand of bigotry and fanaticism.

This accounts for the necessity under which the writer has laboured to be ever explaining the facts given from the hoariest Past by evidence gathered from the historical period. No other means was at hand, at the risk even of being once more charged with a lack of method and system. The public must be made acquainted with the efforts of many World-adepts, of initiated poets, writers, and classics of every age, to preserve in the records of Humanity the Knowledge of the existence, at least, of such a philosophy, if not actually of its tenets. The Initiates of 1888 would indeed remain incomprehensible and ever a seemingly impossible myth, were not like Initiates shown to have lived in every other age of history. This could be done only by naming Chapter and Verse where may be found mention of these great characters, who were preceded and followed by a long and interminable line of other famous Antediluvian and Postdiluvian Masters in the arts. Thus only could be shown, on semi-traditional and semi-historical authority, that knowledge of the Occult and the powers it confers on man, are not altogether fictions, but that they are as old as the world itself.

To my judges, past and future, therefore—whether they are serious literary critics, or those howling dervishes in literature who judge a book according to the popularity or unpopularity of the author’s name, who, hardly glancing at its contents, fasten like lethal bacilli on the weakest points of the body—I have nothing to say. Nor shall I condescend to notice those crack-brained slanderers—fortunately very few in number—who, hoping to attract public attention by throwing discredit on every writer whose name is better known than their own, foam and bark at their very shadows. These, having first maintained for years that the doctrines taught in The Theosophist, and which culminated in Esoteric Buddhism, had been all invented by the present writer, have finally turned round, and denounced Isis Unveiled and the rest as a plagiarism from Éliphas Lévi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, mirabile

XLVI INTRODUCTORY.

dictu, Buddhism and Brahmanism (!!!) As well charge Renan with having stolen his Vie de Jésus from the Gospels, and Max Müller his “Sacred Books of the East” or his Chips from the philosophies of the Brāhmins and Gautama, the Buddha. But to the public in general and the readers of The Secret Doctrine I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe in the words of Montaigne: Gentlemen, “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.”

Pull the “string” to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will. As for the nosegay of facts—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more.

We may close with a parting word concerning this Volume I. In an Introduction prefacing a Part dealing chiefly with Cosmogony, certain subjects brought forward might be deemed out of place, but one more consideration added to those already given have led me to touch upon them. Every reader will inevitably judge the statements made from the standpoint of his own knowledge, experience, and consciousness, based on what he has already learnt. This fact the writer is constantly obliged to bear in mind: hence, also the frequent references in this first Book to matters which, properly speaking, belong to a later part of the work, but which could not be passed by in silence, lest the reader should look down on this work as a fairy tale indeed—a fiction of some modern brain.

Thus, the Past shall help to realise the Present, and the latter to better appreciate the Past. The errors of the day must be explained and swept away, yet it is more than probable—and in the present case it amounts to certitude—that once more the testimony of long ages and of history will fail to impress anyone but the very intuitional—which is equal to saying the very few. But in this as in all like cases, the true and the faithful may console themselves by presenting the sceptical modern Sadducee with the mathematical proof and memorial of his obdurate obstinacy and bigotry. There still exists somewhere in the archives of the French Academy, the famous law of probabilities worked out by an algebraical process for the benefit of sceptics by certain mathematicians. It runs thus: If two persons give their evidence to

XLVII INTRODUCTORY.

a fact, and thus impart to it each of them 5/6 of certitude; that fact will have then 35/36 of certitude; i.e., its probability will bear to its improbability the ratio of 35 to 1. If three such evidences are joined together the certitude will become 215/216. The agreement of ten persons giving each 1/2 of certitude will produce 1023/1024, etc., etc. The Occultist may remain satisfied, and care for no more.

1

PROEM.

———

PAGES FROM A PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.

An Archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific unknown process—is before the writer’s eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central point. The first, the student knows to represent Kosmos in Eternity, before the re-awakening of still slumbering Energy, the emanation of the Word in later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point in the Mundane Egg (see Part II., “The Mundane Egg”), the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference—a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind—indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one. Only the face of the Disk being white and the ground all around black, shows clearly that its plane is the only knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It is on this plane that the Manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in this soul that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought,²² wherein lies concealed the plan of every future Cosmogony and Theogony.

 

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2 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

It is the one life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, “a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.” Its one absolute attribute, which is itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the “Great Breath,”²³ which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present space. That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.

Almost five centuries b.c. Leucippus, the instructor of Democritus, maintained that Space was filled eternally with atoms actuated by a ceaseless motion, the latter generating in due course of time, when those atoms aggregated, rotatory motion, through mutual collisions producing lateral movements. Epicurus and Lucretius taught the same, only adding to the lateral motion of the atoms the idea of affinity—an occult teaching.

From the beginning of man’s inheritance, from the first appearance of the architects of the globe he lives in, the unrevealed Deity was recognised and considered under its only philosophical aspect—universal motion, the thrill of the creative Breath in Nature. Occultism sums up the “One Existence” thus: “Deity is an arcane, living (or moving) fire, and the eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence are Light, Heat, Moisture,”—this trinity including, and being the cause of, every

 

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3 PROEM.

phenomenon in Nature.²⁴ Intra-Cosmic motion is eternal and ceaseless; cosmic motion (the visible, or that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical. As an eternal abstraction it is the ever-present; as a manifestation, it is finite both in the coming direction and the opposite, the two being the alpha and omega of successive reconstructions. Kosmos—the noumenon—has nought to do with the causal relations of the phenomenal World. It is only with reference to the intra-cosmic soul, the ideal Kosmos in the immutable Divine Thought, that we may say: “It never had a beginning nor will it have an end.” With regard to its body or Cosmic organization, though it cannot be said that it had a first, or will ever have a last construction, yet at each new Manvantara, its organization may be regarded as the first and the last of its kind, as it evolutes every time on a higher plane . . . .

A few years ago only, it was stated that:

“The esoteric doctrine teaches, like Buddhism and Brahmanism, and even the Qabbālāh, that the one infinite and unknown Essence exists from all eternity, and in regular and harmonious successions is either passive or active. In the poetical phraseology of Manu [Manusmṛti] these conditions are called the “Days” and the “Nights” of Brahmā. The latter is either “awake” or “asleep.” The Svābhāvikas, or philosophers of the oldest school of Buddhism (which still exists in Nepal), speculate only upon the active condition of this “Essence,” which they call Svabhāvāt, and deem it foolish to theorise upon the abstract and “unknowable” power in its passive condition. Hence they are called atheists by both Christian theologians and modern scientists, for neither of the

 

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4 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

two are able to understand the profound logic of their philosophy. The former will allow of no other God than the personified secondary powers which have worked out the visible universe, and which became with them the anthropomorphic God of the Christians—the male Jehovah [yəhōwāh], roaring amid thunder and lightning. In its turn, rationalistic science greets the Buddhists and the Svābhāvikas as the “positivists” of the archaic ages. If we take a one-sided view of the philosophy of the latter, our materialists may be right in their own way. The Buddhists maintained that there is no Creator, but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable—hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence from without inwardly and from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and ‘darkness’ solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the ‘deep.’ To use a Metaphor from the Secret Books, which will convey the idea still more clearly, an out-breathing of the ‘unknown essence’ produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end.”—(See Isis Unveiled; also “The Days and Nights of Brahmā” in Part II. [p. 368])

This passage will be explained, as far as it is possible, in the present work. Though, as it now stands, it contains nothing new to the Orientalist, its esoteric interpretation may contain a good deal which has hitherto remained entirely unknown to the Western student.

The first illustration being a plain disc , the second one in the Archaic symbol shows , a disc with a point in it—the first differentiation in the periodical manifestations of the ever-eternal nature, sexless and infinite “Aditi in that” (Ṛgveda), the point in the disc, or potential Space within abstract Space. In its third stage the point is transformed into a diameter, thus . It now symbolises a divine immaculate Mother-Nature within the all-embracing absolute Infinitude.

5 PROEM.

When the diameter line is crossed by a vertical one , it becomes the mundane cross. Humanity has reached its third root-race; it is the sign for the origin of human life to begin. When the circumference disappears and leaves only the  it is a sign that the fall of man into matter is accomplished, and the fourth race begins. The Cross within a circle symbolises pure Pantheism; when the Cross was left uninscribed, it became phallic. It had the same and yet other meanings as a tau inscribed within a circle  or as a “Thor’s hammer,” the Jaina cross, so-called, or simply Svastika within a circle .

By the third symbol—the circle divided in two by the horizontal line of the diameter—the first manifestation of creative (still passive, because feminine) Nature was meant. The first shadowy perception of man connected with procreation is feminine, because man knows his mother more than his father. Hence female deities were more sacred than the male. Nature is therefore feminine, and, to a degree, objective and tangible, and the spirit Principle which fructifies it is concealed. By adding to the circle with the horizontal line in it, a perpendicular line, the tau was formed——the oldest form of the letter. It was the glyph of the third root-race to the day of its symbolical Fall—i.e., when the separation of sexes by natural evolution took place—when the figure became , the circle, or sexless life modified or separated—a double glyph or symbol. With the races of our Fifth Race it became in symbology the sacr’ [zāḵār], and in Hebrew nəqēḇāh, of the first-formed races;²⁵ then it changed into the Egyptian ☥ (emblem of life), and still later into the sign of Venus, ♀. Then comes the Svastika (Thor’s hammer, or the “Hermetic Cross” now), entirely separated from its Circle, thus becoming purely phallic. The esoteric symbol of Kali Yuga is the five-pointed star reversed, thus ⛧—the sign of human sorcery, with its two points (horns) turned heavenward, a position every

 

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6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Occultist will recognise as one of the “left-hand,” and used in ceremonial magic.²⁶

It is hoped that during the perusal of this work the erroneous ideas of the public in general with regard to Pantheism will be modified. It is wrong and unjust to regard the Buddhists and Advaitin Occultists as atheists. If not all of them philosophers, they are, at any rate, all logicians, their objections and arguments being based on strict reasoning. Indeed, if the Parabrahma of the Hindus may be taken as a representative of the hidden and nameless deities of other nations, this absolute Principle will be found to be the prototype from which all the others were copied. Parabrahma is not “God,” because It is not a God. “It is that which is supreme, and not supreme (parāvara),” explains Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (2:2:8). It is “Supreme” as cause, not supreme as effect. Parabrahma is simply, as a “Secondless Reality,” the all-inclusive Kosmos—or, rather, the infinite Cosmic Space—in the highest spiritual sense, of course. Brahma (neuter) being the unchanging, pure, free, undecaying supreme Root, “the one true Existence, Pāramārthika,” and the absolute Cit and Caitanya (intelligence, consciousness) cannot be a cogniser, “for that can have no subject of cognition.” Can the flame be called the essence of Fire? This Essence is “the life and light of the Universe, the visible fire and flame are destruction, death, and evil.” “Fire and Flame destroy the body of an Arhat, their essence makes him immortal.” (Bodhimör, Book II.) “The knowledge of the absolute Spirit, like the effulgence of the sun, or like heat in fire, is naught else than the absolute Essence itself,” says Śaṅkarācārya. IT—is “the Spirit of the Fire,” not fire itself; therefore, “the attributes of the latter, heat or flame, are not the attributes of the Spirit, but of that of which that Spirit is the unconscious cause.” Is not the above sentence the true key-note of later Rosicrucian

 

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7 PROEM.

philosophy? Parabrahma is, in short, the collective aggregate of Kosmos in its infinity and eternity, the “that” and “this” to which distributive aggregates can not be applied.²⁷ “In the beginning this was the Self, one only” (Aitareya Upaniṣad, 1:1:1); the great Śaṅkarācārya explains that “this” referred to the Universe (Jagat); the sense of the words, “In the beginning,” meaning before the reproduction of the phenomenal Universe.

Therefore, when the Pantheists echo the Upaniṣads, which state, as in the Secret Doctrine, that “this” cannot create, they do not deny a Creator, or rather a collective aggregate of creators, but only refuse, very logically, to attribute “creation” and especially formation, something finite, to an Infinite Principle. With them, Parabrahma is a passive because an Absolute Cause, the unconditioned Mukta. It is only limited Omniscience and Omnipotence that are refused to the latter, because these are still attributes (as reflected in man’s perceptions); and because Parabrahma, being the “Supreme all,” the ever invisible spirit and Soul of Nature, changeless and eternal, can have no attributes; absoluteness very naturally precluding any idea of the finite or conditioned from being connected with it. And if the Vedāntin postulates attributes as belonging simply to its emanation, calling it “Īśvara plus Māyā,” and Avidyā (Agnosticism and Nescience rather than ignorance), it is difficult to find any Atheism in this conception.²⁸ Since there can be neither two infinites nor two absolutes in a Universe supposed to be Boundless, this Self-Existence can hardly be conceived of as creating personally. In the sense and perceptions of finite “Beings,” that is Non-“being,” in the sense that it is the one be-ness; for, in this all lies concealed its coeternal and coeval emanation or inherent radiation, which, upon becoming periodically Brahmā (the male-female Potency) becomes or expands itself into the manifested Universe. Nārāyaṇa moving on the (abstract) waters of Space, is transformed into the Waters of concrete substance moved by him, who now becomes the manifested word or Logos.

 

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8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The orthodox Brāhmins, those who rise the most against the Pantheists and Advaitins, calling them Atheists, are forced, if Manu [Manusmṛti] has any authority in this matter, to accept the death of Brahmā, the creator, at the expiration of every “Age” of this (creative) deity (100 Divine years—a period which in our years requires fifteen figures to express it). Yet, no philosopher among them will view this “death” in any other sense than as a temporary disappearance from the manifested plane of existence, or as a periodical rest.

The Occultists are, therefore, at one with the Advaita Vedāntin philosophers as to the above tenet. They show the impossibility of accepting on philosophical grounds the idea of the absolute all creating or even evolving the “Golden Egg,” into which it is said to enter in order to transform itself into Brahmā—the Creator, who expands himself later into gods and all the visible Universe. They say that Absolute Unity cannot pass to infinity; for infinity presupposes the limitless extension of something, and the duration of that “something”; and the One All is like Space—which is its only mental and physical representation on this Earth, or our plane of existence—neither an object of, nor a subject to, perception. If one could suppose the Eternal Infinite All, the Omnipresent Unity, instead of being in Eternity, becoming through periodical manifestation a manifold Universe or a multiple personality, that Unity would cease to be one. Locke’s idea that “pure Space is capable of neither resistance nor Motion”—is incorrect. Space is neither a “limitless void,” nor a “conditioned fulness,” but both: being, on the plane of absolute abstraction, the ever-incognisable Deity, which is void only to finite minds,²⁹ and on that of māyāvic perception, the Plēnum, the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or unmanifested: it is, therefore, that absolute all. There is no difference between the Christian Apostle’s “In Him we live and move and have our being,” and the Hindu Ṛṣi’s “The Universe lives in, proceeds from, and will

 

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9 PROEM.

return to, Brahma (Brahmā)”: for Brahma (neuter), the unmanifested, is that Universe in abscondito, and Brahmā, the manifested, is the Logos, made male-female³⁰ in the symbolical orthodox dogmas. The God of the Apostle-Initiate and of the Ṛṣi being both the Unseen and the Visible space. Space is called in the esoteric symbolism “the Seven-Skinned Eternal Mother-Father.” It is composed from its undifferentiated to its differentiated surface of seven layers.

“What is that which was, is, and will be, whether there is a Universe or not; whether there be gods or none?” asks the esoteric Senzar Catechism. And the answer made is—space.

It is not the One Unknown ever-present God in Nature, or Nature in abscondito, that is rejected, but the God of human dogma and his humanized “Word.” In his infinite conceit and inherent pride and vanity, man shaped it himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material he found in his own small brain-fabric, and forced it upon mankind as a direct revelation from the one unrevealed space.³¹ The Occultist

 

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10 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

accepts revelation as coming from divine yet still finite Beings, the manifested lives, never from the Unmanifestable one life; from those entities, called Primordial Man, Dhyāni-Buddhas, or Dhyāni–Chohans, the “Ṛṣi-Prajāpati” of the Hindus, the ʾĔlōhīm or “Sons of God,” the Planetary Spirits of all nations, who have become Gods for men. He also regards the Ādi-Śakti—the direct emanation of Mūlaprakṛti, the eternal Root of that, and the female aspect of the Creative Cause Brahmā, in her Ākāśic form of the Universal Soul—as philosophically a Māyā, and cause of human Māyā. But this view does not prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it lasts, to wit, for one Mahāmanvantara; nor from applying Ākāśa, the radiation of Mūlaprakṛti,³² to practical purposes, connected as the World-Soul is with all natural phenomena, known or unknown to science.

The oldest religions of the world—exoterically, for the esoteric root or foundation is one—are the Indian, the Mazdean, and the Egyptian. Then comes the Chaldean, the outcome of these—entirely lost to the world now, except in its disfigured Sabeanism as at present rendered by the archæologists; then, passing over a number of religions that will be mentioned later, comes the Jewish, esoterically, as in the Qabbālāh, following in the line of Babylonian Magism; exoterically, as in Genesis and the Pentateuch, a collection of allegorical legends. Read by the light of the Zōhar, the initial four chapters of Genesis are the fragment

 

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11 PROEM.

of a highly philosophical page in the World’s Cosmogony. (See Book III., “Gupta Vidyā and the Zōhar” [H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, “The Eastern Gupta Vidyā and the Kabalah [Qabbālāh],” 14:167-91.]) Left in their symbolical disguise, they are a nursery tale, an ugly thorn in the side of science and logic, an evident effect of Karma. To have let them serve as a prologue to Christianity was a cruel revenge on the part of the Rabbīs, who knew better what their Pentateuch meant. It was a silent protest against their spoliation, and the Jews have certainly now the better of their traditional persecutors. The above-named exoteric creeds will be explained in the light of the Universal doctrine as we proceed with it.

The Occult Catechism contains the following questions and answers:

“What is it that ever is?” “Space, the eternal Aupapāduka.”³³ “What is it that ever was?” “The Germ in the Root.” “What is it that is ever coming and going?” “The Great Breath.” “Then, there are three Eternals?” “No, the three are one. That which ever is is one, that which ever was is one, that which is ever being and becoming is also one: and this is Space.”

“Explain, oh Lanoo (disciple).”—“The One is an unbroken Circle (ring) with no circumference, for it is nowhere and everywhere; the One is the boundless plane of the Circle, manifesting a diameter only during the manvantaric periods; the One is the indivisible point found nowhere, perceived everywhere during those periods; it is the Vertical and the Horizontal, the Father and the Mother, the summit and base of the Father, the two extremities of the Mother, reaching in reality nowhere, for the One is the Ring as also the rings that are within that Ring. Light in darkness and darkness in light: the ‘Breath which is eternal.’ It proceeds from without inwardly, when it is everywhere, and from within outwardly, when it is nowhere—(i.e., māyā,³⁴ one of the centres³⁵). It expands and

 

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12 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

contracts (exhalation and inhalation). When it expands the mother diffuses and scatters; when it contracts, the mother draws back and ingathers. This produces the periods of Evolution and Dissolution, Manvantara and Pralaya. The Germ is invisible and fiery; the Root (the plane of the circle) is cool; but during Evolution and Manvantara her garment is cold and radiant. Hot Breath is the Father who devours the progeny of the many-faced Element (heterogeneous); and leaves the single-faced ones (homogeneous). Cool Breath is the Mother, who conceives, forms, brings forth, and receives them back into her bosom, to reform them at the Dawn (of the Day of Brahmā, or Manvantara). . . . .”

For clearer understanding on the part of the general reader, it must be stated that Occult Science recognises Seven Cosmical Elements—four entirely physical, and the fifth (Ether) semi-material, as it will become visible in the air towards the end of our Fourth Round, to reign supreme over the others during the whole of the Fifth. The remaining two are as yet absolutely beyond the range of human perception. These latter will, however, appear as presentments during the 6th and 7th Races of this Round, and will become known in the 6th and 7th Rounds respectively.³⁶ These seven elements with their numberless Sub-Elements

 

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13 PROEM.

(far more numerous than those known to Science) are simply conditional modifications and aspects of the one and only Element. This latter is not Ether,³⁷ not even Ākāśa but the Source of these. The Fifth Element, now advocated quite freely by Science, is not the Ether hypothesised by Sir Isaac Newton—although he calls it by that name, having associated it in his mind probably with the Æther, “Father-Mother” of Antiquity. As Newton intuitionally says, “Nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, fixed things out of volatile, and volatile out of fixed, subtle out of gross, and gross out of subtle. . . . . Thus, perhaps, may all things be originated from Ether [Æther],” (Isaac Newton, “An Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light discoursed in my several Papers,” Dec. 7, 1675 (Register Book, Vol. 5, p. 65); see History of the Royal Society, Vol. 3, 1757, pp. 250, 251.).

The reader has to bear in mind that the Stanzas given treat only of the Cosmogony of our own planetary System and what is visible around it, after a Solar Pralaya. The secret teachings with regard to the Evolution of the Universal Kosmos cannot be given, since they could not be understood by the highest minds in this age, and there seem to be very few Initiates, even among the greatest, who are allowed to speculate upon this subject. Moreover the Teachers say openly that not even the highest Dhyāni–Chohans have ever penetrated the mysteries beyond those boundaries that separate the milliards of Solar systems from the “Central Sun,” as it is called. Therefore, that which is given, relates only to our visible Kosmos, after a “Night of Brahmā.”

Before the reader proceeds to the consideration of the Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan which form the basis of the present work, it is absolutely necessary that he should be made acquainted with the few fundamental conceptions which underlie and pervade the entire system of thought to which his attention is invited. These basic ideas are few in number, and on their clear apprehension depends the understanding of all that follows; therefore no apology is required for asking the reader to make himself familiar with them first, before entering on the perusal of the work itself.

 

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14 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The Secret Doctrine establishes three fundamental propositions:

(a) An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable Principle on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and could only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the range and reach of thought—in the words of Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad [verse 7], “unthinkable and unspeakable.”

To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause—dimly formulated in the “Unconscious” and “Unknowable” of current European philosophy—is the rootless root of “all that was, is, or ever shall be.” It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is “Be-ness” rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.

This “Be-ness” is symbolised in the Secret Doctrine under two aspects. On the one hand, absolute abstract Space, representing bare subjectivity, the one thing which no human mind can either exclude from any conception, or conceive of by itself. On the other, absolute Abstract Motion representing Unconditioned Consciousness. Even our Western thinkers have shown that Consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change, and motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic. This latter aspect of the one Reality, is also symbolised by the term “The Great Breath,” a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute—Be-ness—symbolised by finite intelligence as the theological Trinity.

It may, however, assist the student if a few further explanations are given here.

Herbert Spencer has of late so far modified his Agnosticism, as to assert that the nature of the “First Cause,”³⁸ which the Occultist more logically derives from the “Causeless Cause,” the “Eternal,” and the “Unknowable,” may be essentially the same as that of the Consciousness which wells up within us: in short, that the impersonal reality pervading

 

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15 PROEM.

the Kosmos is the pure noumenon of thought. This advance on his part brings him very near to the esoteric and Vedāntin tenet.³⁹

Parabrahma (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahma), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.

Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the great Breath assumes the character of precosmic Ideation. It is the fōns et orīgō [source and origin] of force and of all individual consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of cosmic Evolution. On the other hand, precosmic root-substance (Mūlaprakṛti) is that aspect of the Absolute which underlies all the objective planes of Nature.

Just as pre-Cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual consciousness, so pre-Cosmic Substance is the substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation.

Hence it will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the Absolute is essential to the existence of the “Manifested Universe.” Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle⁴⁰ of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue.

The “Manifested Universe,” therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its ex-istence as “manifestation.”

 

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But just as the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the manifested Universe, there is “that” which links spirit to matter, subject to object.

This something, at present unknown to Western speculation, is called by the occultists Fohat. It is the “bridge” by which the “Ideas” existing in the “Divine Thought” are impressed on Cosmic substance as the “laws of Nature.” Fohat is thus the dynamic energy of Cosmic Ideation; or, regarded from the other side, it is the intelligent medium, the guiding power of all manifestation, the “Thought Divine” transmitted and made manifest through the Dhyāni–Chohans,⁴¹ the Architects of the visible World. Thus from Spirit, or Cosmic Ideation, comes our consciousness; from Cosmic Substance the several vehicles in which that consciousness is individualised and attains to self—or reflective—consciousness; while Fohat, in its various manifestations, is the mysterious link between Mind and Matter, the animating principle electrifying every atom into life.

The following summary will afford a clearer idea to the reader.

(1.) The Absolute; the Parabrahma of the Vedāntins or the one Reality, Sat, which is, as Hegel says, both Absolute Being and Non-Being.

(2.) The first manifestation, the impersonal, and, in philosophy, unmanifested Logos, the precursor of the “manifested.” This is the “First Cause,” the “Unconscious” of European Pantheists.

(3.) Spirit-matter, Life; the “Spirit of the Universe,” the Puruṣa and Prakṛti, or the second Logos.

(4.) Cosmic Ideation, Mahat or Intelligence, the Universal World-Soul; the Cosmic Noumenon of Matter, the basis of the intelligent operations in and of Nature, also called Mahā-Buddhi.

The One Reality; its dual aspects in the conditioned Universe.

Further, the Secret Doctrine affirms:

(b) The Eternity of the Universe in tōtō [in total] as a boundless plane; periodically “the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing,” called “the manifesting stars,” and the “sparks of Eternity.” “The Eternity of the Pilgrim”⁴² is like a wink

 

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17 PROEM.

of the Eye of Self-Existence (Book of Dzyan.) “The appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux.” (See Part II., “Days and Nights of Brahmā.”)

This second assertion of the Secret Doctrine is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature. An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.

Moreover, the Secret Doctrine teaches:

(c) The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul—a spark of the former—through the Cycle of Incarnation (or “Necessity”) in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle,—or the over-soul,—has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyāni-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations. This is why the Hindus say that the Universe is Brahma and Brahmā, for Brahma is in every atom of the universe, the six principles in Nature being all the outcome—the variously differentiated aspects—of the seventh and one, the only reality in the Universe whether Cosmical or micro-cosmical; and also why the permutations (psychic, spiritual and physical), on the plane of manifestation and form, of the sixth (Brahmā the vehicle of Brahma) are viewed by metaphysical

18 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

antiphrasis as illusive and Māyāvic. For although the root of every atom individually and of every form collectively, is that seventh principle or the one Reality, still, in its manifested phenomenal and temporary appearance, it is no better than an evanescent illusion of our senses. (See, for clearer definition, Addendum “Gods, Monads and Atoms,” and also “Theophánia,” “Bodhisattvas and Reincarnation,” etc., etc.)

In its absoluteness, the One Principle under its two aspects (of Parabrahma and Mūlaprakṛti) is sexless, unconditioned and eternal. Its periodical (manvantaric) emanation—or primal radiation—is also One, androgynous and phenomenally finite. When the radiation radiates in its turn, all its radiations are also androgynous, to become male and female principles in their lower aspects. After Pralaya, whether the great or the minor Pralaya (the latter leaving the worlds in statu quo⁴³), the first that re-awakes to active life is the plastic Ākāśa, Father-Mother, the Spirit and Soul of Ether, or the plane on the surface of the Circle. Space is called the “Mother” before its Cosmic activity, and Father-Mother at the first stage of re-awakening. (See Comments, Stanza II.) In the Qabbālāh it is also Father-Mother-Son. But whereas in the Eastern doctrine, these are the Seventh Principle of the manifested Universe, or its “Ātmā-Buddhi-Manas” (Spirit, Soul, Intelligence), the triad branching off and dividing into the seven cosmical and seven human principles, in the Western Qabbālāh of the Christian mystics it is the Triad or Trinity, and with their occultists, the male-female Jehovah [yəhōwāh], Jah-Havah [yāh-hawwāh]. In this lies the whole difference between the esoteric and the Christian trinities. The Mystics and the Philosophers, the Eastern and Western Pantheists, synthesize their pregenetic triad in the pure divine abstraction. The orthodox, anthropomorphize it. Hiraṇyagarbha, Hari, and Śaṅkara—the three hypostases of the manifesting “Spirit of the Supreme Spirit” (by which title Pṛthivī—the Earth—greets Viṣṇu in his first Avatāra)—are the purely metaphysical abstract qualities of formation, preservation, and destruction, and are the three divine Avasthās (lit. hypostases) of that which “does

 

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19 PROEM.

not perish with created things” (or Acyuta, a name of Viṣṇu); whereas the orthodox Christian separates his personal creative Deity into the three personages of the Trinity, and admits of no higher Deity. The latter, in Occultism, is the abstract Triangle; with the orthodox, the perfect Cube. The creative god or the aggregate gods are regarded by the Eastern philosopher as Bhrāntidarśanataḥ—“false apprehension,” something “conceived of, by reason of erroneous appearances, as a material form,” and explained as arising from the illusive conception of the Egotistic personal and human Soul (lower fifth principle). It is beautifully expressed in a new translation of Viṣṇu Purāṇa [1:2:14-15]. “That Brahmā in its totality has essentially the aspect of Prakṛti, both evolved and unevolved (Mūlaprakṛti), and also the aspect of Spirit and the aspect of Time. Spirit, O twice born, is the leading aspect of the Supreme Brahma.⁴⁴ The next is a twofold aspect,—Prakṛti, both evolved and unevolved, and time is the last.” Krónos is shown in the Orphic theogony as being also a generated god or agent.

At this stage of the re-awakening of the Universe, the sacred symbolism represents it as a perfect Circle with the (root) point in the Centre. This sign was universal, therefore we find it in the Qabbālāh also. The Western Qabbālāh, however, now in the hands of Christian mystics, ignores it altogether, though it is plainly shown in the Zōhar. These sectarians begin at the end, and show as the symbol of pregenetic Kosmos this sign , calling it “the Union of the Rose and Cross,” the great mystery of occult generation, from whence the name—Rosicrucians (Rose Cross)!

As may be judged, however, from the most important, as the best known of the Rosicrucians’ symbols, there is one which has never been hitherto understood even by modern mystics. It is that of the “Pelican” tearing open its breast to feed its seven little ones—the real creed of the Brothers of the Rosie-Cross and a direct outcome from the Eastern

 

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20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Secret Doctrine. Brahma (neuter) is called Kalahaṃsa, meaning, as explained by Western Orientalists, the Eternal Swan or goose (see Stanza III., Sloka 8, Commentary [p. 77]), and so is Brahmā, the Creator. A great mistake is thus brought under notice; it is Brahma (neuter) who ought to be referred to as Haṃsa-Vāhana (He who uses the swan as his Vehicle) and not Brahmā the Creator, who is the real Kalahaṃsa, while Brahma (neuter) is haṃsa, and “A-haṃsa,” as will be explained in the Commentary. Let it be understood that the terms Brahmā and Parabrahma are not used here because they belong to our Esoteric nomenclature, but simply because they are more familiar to the students in the West. Both are the perfect equivalents of our one, three, and seven vowelled terms, which stand for the One All, and the One “All in all.”

Such are the basic conceptions on which the Secret Doctrine rests.

It would not be in place here to enter upon any defence or proof of their inherent reasonableness; nor can I pause to show how they are, in fact, contained—though too often under a misleading guise—in every system of thought or philosophy worthy of the name.

Once that the reader has gained a clear comprehension of them and realised the light which they throw on every problem of life, they will need no further justification in his eyes, because their truth will be to him as evident as the sun in heaven. I pass on, therefore, to the subject matter of the Stanzas as given in this volume, adding a skeleton outline of them, in the hope of thereby rendering the task of the student more easy, by placing before him in a few words the general conception therein explained.

Stanza I. The history of cosmic evolution, as traced in the Stanzas, is, so to say, the abstract algebraical formula of that Evolution. Hence the student must not expect to find there an account of all the stages and transformations which intervene between the first beginnings of “Universal” evolution and our present state. To give such an account would be as impossible as it would be incomprehensible to men who cannot even grasp the nature of the plane of existence next to that to which, for the moment, their consciousness is limited.

The Stanzas, therefore, give an abstract formula which can be applied, mūtātīs mūtandīs [i.e. “with the necessary changes”], to all evolution: to that of our tiny earth, to

21 PROEM.

that of the chain of planets of which that earth forms one, to the solar Universe to which that chain belongs, and so on, in an ascending scale, till the mind reels and is exhausted in the effort.

The seven Stanzas given in this volume represent the seven terms of this abstract formula. They refer to, and describe the seven great stages of the evolutionary process, which are spoken of in the Purāṇas as the “Seven Creations,” and in the Bible as the “Days” of Creation.

——————

The First Stanza describes the state of the one all during Pralaya, before the first flutter of re-awakening manifestation.

A moment’s thought shows that such a state can only be symbolised; to describe it is impossible. Nor can it be symbolised except in negatives; for, since it is the state of Absoluteness per se, it can possess none of those specific attributes which serve us to describe objects in positive terms. Hence that state can only be suggested by the negatives of all those most abstract attributes which men feel rather than conceive, as the remotest limits attainable by their power of conception.

The stage described in Stanza II. is, to a western mind, so nearly identical with that mentioned in the first Stanza, that to express the idea of its difference would require a treatise in itself. Hence it must be left to the intuition and the higher faculties of the reader to grasp, as far as he can, the meaning of the allegorical phrases used. Indeed it must be remembered that all these Stanzas appeal to the inner faculties rather than to the ordinary comprehension of the physical brain.

Stanza III. describes the Re-awakening of the Universe to life after Pralaya. It depicts the emergence of the “Monads” from their state of absorption within the one; the earliest and highest stage in the formation of “Worlds,” the term Monad being one which may apply equally to the vastest Solar System or the tiniest atom.

Stanza IV. shows the differentiation of the “Germ” of the Universe

22 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

into the septenary hierarchy of conscious Divine Powers, who are the active manifestations of the One Supreme Energy. They are the framers, shapers, and ultimately the creators of all the manifested Universe, in the only sense in which the name “Creator” is intelligible; they inform and guide it; they are the intelligent Beings who adjust and control evolution, embodying in themselves those manifestations of the one law, which we know as “The Laws of Nature.”

Generically, they are known as the Dhyāni–Chohans, though each of the various groups has its own designation in the Secret Doctrine.

This stage of evolution is spoken of in Hindu mythology as the “Creation” of the Gods.

In Stanza V. the process of world-formation is described: First, diffused Cosmic Matter, then the fiery “whirlwind,” the first stage in the formation of a nebula. That nebula condenses, and after passing through various transformations, forms a Solar Universe, a planetary chain, or a single planet, as the case may be.

The subsequent stages in the formation of a “World” are indicated in Stanza VI., which brings the evolution of such a world down to its fourth great period, corresponding to the period in which we are now living.

Stanza VII. continues the history, tracing the descent of life down to the appearance of Man; and thus closes the first Book of the Secret Doctrine.

The development of “Man” from his first appearance on this earth in this Round to the state in which we now find him will form the subject of Book II.

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NOTE.

The Stanzas which form the thesis of every section are given throughout in their modern translated version, as it would be worse

23 PROEM.

than useless to make the subject still more difficult by introducing the archaic phraseology of the original, with its puzzling style and words. Extracts are given from the Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit translations of the original Senzar Commentaries and Glosses on the Book of Dzyan—these being now rendered for the first time into a European language. It is almost unnecessary to state that only portions of the seven Stanzas are here given. Were they published complete they would remain incomprehensible to all save the few higher occultists. Nor is there any need to assure the reader that, no more than most of the profane, does the writer, or rather the humble recorder, understand those forbidden passages. To facilitate the reading, and to avoid the too frequent reference to footnotes, it was thought best to blend together texts and glosses, using the Sanskrit and Tibetan proper names whenever those cannot be avoided, in preference to giving the originals. The more so as the said terms are all accepted synonyms, the former only being used between a Master and his chelas (or disciples).

Thus, were one to translate into English, using only the substantives and technical terms as employed in one of the Tibetan and Senzar versions, Verse [Stanza] 1 would read as follows: “Tho-ag [thog? mtho ‘og?] in Zhi-gyu [gzhi gyu or gzhir gyur?] slept seven Khorlo [‘khor lo]. Zömané zhiwa [gzod ma nas zhi ba]. All Nyuk [snyugs] bosom. Kön-chok [dkon mchog] not; Thyan-Kam not; Lha-Chohan [lha-??] not; Temdrel Chunyi [rten ‘brel bcu gnyis] not; Dharmakāya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang [bar snang] and Sa [sa] in Ngowonyi [ngo bo nyid]; alone Tho-og [thog? mtho ‘og?] Yīxīn in night of Sun-chan [Sien-tchan, tiānxià?] and Yong-drup [yongs grub] (Pariniṣpanna), etc., etc.,” which would sound like pure Abracadabra.

As this work is written for the instruction of students of Occultism, and not for the benefit of philologists, we may well avoid such foreign terms wherever it is possible to do so. The untranslateable terms alone, incomprehensible unless explained in their meanings, are left, but all such terms are rendered in their Sanskrit form. Needless to remind the reader that these are, in almost every case, the late developments of the later language, and pertain to the Fifth Root-Race. Sanskrit, as now known, was not spoken by the Atlanteans, and most of the philosophical terms used in the systems of the India of the post-Mahābhāratan period are not found in the Vedas, nor are they to be met with in the original Stanzas, but only their equivalents. The reader who is not a Theosophist, is once more invited to regard all that which follows as a fairy tale, if he likes; at best as one of the yet unproven speculations of

24 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dreamers; and, at the worst, as an additional hypothesis to the many Scientific hypotheses past, present and future, some exploded, others still lingering. It is not in any sense worse than are many of the so called Scientific theories; and it is in every case more philosophical and probable.

In view of the abundant comments and explanations required, the references to the footnotes are given in the usual way, while the sentences to be commented upon are marked with figures. Additional matter will be found in the Chapters on Symbolism forming Part II., as well as in Part III., these being often more full of information than the text.

25

BOOK I., PART I.

COSMIC EVOLUTION.

—————

SEVEN STANZAS TRANSLATED WITH COMMENTARIES

FROM THE

SECRET BOOK OF DZYAN.

26

27 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

COSMIC EVOLUTION.

In Seven Stanzas translated from the Book of Dzyan.

[See also: “The Stanzas of Dzyan: Cosmogenesis: A ‘Critical Edition’ based on Four Primary Sources”]

STANZA I.

1. The eternal parent wrapped in her ever invisible robes had slumbered once again for seven eternities.

2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration.

3. Universal mind was not, for there were no Ah-hi to contain it.

4. The seven ways to bliss were not. The great causes of misery were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them.

5. Darkness alone filled the boundless all, for father, mother and son were once more one, and the son had not awakened yet for the new wheel, and his pilgrimage thereon.

6. The seven sublime lords and the seven truths had ceased to be, and the Universe, the son of Necessity, was immersed in Pariniṣpanna, to be outbreathed by that which is and yet is not. Naught was.

7. The causes of existence had been done away with; the visible that was, and the invisible that is, rested in eternal non-being—the one being.

8. Alone the one form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in dreamless sleep; and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, throughout that all-presence which is sensed by the opened eye of the Dangma [dwangs ma].

9. But where was the Dangma [dwangs ma] when the Ālaya of the universe was in Paramārtha and the great wheel was Aupapāduka?

28 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA II.

1. . . . Where were the builders, the luminous sons of Manvantaric dawn? . . . In the unknown darkness in their Ah-hi Pariniṣpanna. The producers of form from no-form—the root of the world—the Devamātṛ and Svabhāvāt, rested in the bliss of non-being.

2. . . . Where was silence? Where the ears to sense it? No, there was neither silence nor sound; naught save ceaseless eternal breath, which knows itself not.

3. The hour had not yet struck; the ray had not yet flashed into the Germ; the Mātṛpadma had not yet swollen.

4. Her heart had not yet opened for the one ray to enter, thence to fall, as three into four, into the lap of Māyā.

5. The seven sons were not yet born from the web of light. Darkness alone was father-mother, Svabhāvāt; and Svabhāvāt was in darkness.

6. These two are the Germ, and the Germ is one. The Universe was still concealed in the Divine thought and the Divine bosom. . . .

———

STANZA III.

1. . . . The last vibration of the seventh eternity thrills through infinitude. The mother swells, expanding from within without, like the bud of the lotus.

2. The vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift wing the whole universe and the germ that dwelleth in darkness: the darkness that breathes over the slumbering waters of life. . . .

3. Darkness radiates light, and light drops one solitary ray into the mother-deep. The ray shoots through the virgin egg; the ray causes the eternal egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal germ, which condenses into the world-egg.

29 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

4. Then the three fall into the four. The radiant essence becomes seven inside, seven outside. The luminous egg, which in itself is three, curdles and spreads in milk-white curds throughout the depths of mother, the root that grows in the depths of the ocean of life.

5. The root remains, the light remains, the curds remain, and still Oeaohoo is one.

6. The root of life was in every drop of the ocean of immortality, and the ocean was radiant light, which was fire, and heat, and motion. Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own essence, the body of fire and water, or father and mother.

7. Behold, oh Lanoo! The radiant child of the two, the unparalleled refulgent glory: Bright Space Son of Dark Space, which emerges from the depths of the great dark waters. It is Oeaohoo the younger, the * * * He shines forth as the son; he is the blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom; the One is Four, and Four takes to itself Three,⁴⁵ and the Union produces the Sapta, in whom are the seven which become the Tridaśa (or the hosts and the multitudes). Behold him lifting the veil and unfurling it from east to west. He shuts out the above, and leaves the below to be seen as the great illusion. He marks the places for the shining ones, and turns the upper into a shoreless sea of fire, and the one manifested into the great waters.

8. Where was the germ and where was now darkness? Where is the spirit of the flame that burns in thy lamp, oh Lanoo? The germ is that, and that is light, the white brilliant son of the dark hidden father.

9. Light is cold flame, and flame is fire, and fire produces heat, which yields water: the water of life in the great mother.

10. Father-Mother spin a web whose upper end is fastened to spirit—the light of the one darkness—and the lower one to its shadowy end, matter; and this web is the universe spun out of the two substances made in one, which is Svabhāvāt.

 

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30 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

11. It expands when the breath of fire is upon it; it contracts when the breath of the mother touches it. Then the sons dissociate and scatter, to return into their mother’s bosom at the end of the great day, and re-become one with her; when it is cooling it becomes radiant, and the sons expand and contract through their own selves and hearts; they embrace infinitude.

12. Then Svabhāvāt sends Fohat to harden the atoms. Each is a part of the web. Reflecting the “Self-Existent Lord” like a mirror, each becomes in turn a world.

———

STANZA IV.

1. . . . Listen, ye Sons of the Earth, to your instructors—the Sons of the Fire. Learn, there is neither first nor last, for all is one: number issued from no number.

2. Learn what we who descend from the Primordial Seven, we who are born from the Primordial Flame, have learnt from our fathers. . . .

3. From the effulgency of light—the ray of the ever-darkness—sprung in space the re-awakened energies; the one from the egg, the six, and the five. Then the three, the one, the four, the one, the five—the twice seven the sum total. And these are the essences, the flames, the elements, the builders, the numbers, the arūpa, the rūpa, and the force of Divine Man—the sum total. And from the Divine Man emanated the forms, the sparks, the sacred animals, and the messengers of the sacred fathers within the holy four.

4. This was the army of the voice—the divine mother of the seven. The sparks of the seven are subject to, and the servants of, the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh of the seven. These “sparks” are called spheres, triangles, cubes, lines, and modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidāna—the Oeaohoo, which is:

31 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

5. “Darkness” the boundless, or the no-number, Ādi-Nidāna Svabhāvāt:—

I. The Adi-Sanat, the number, for he is one.

II. The voice of the Lord Svabhāvāt, the numbers, for he is one and nine.

III. The “formless square.”

And these three enclosed within the  are the sacred four; and the ten are the arūpa universe. Then come the “sons,” the seven fighters, the one, the eighth left out, and his breath which is the light-maker.

6. Then the second seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the three. The rejected son is one. The “Son-suns” are countless.

———

STANZA V.

1. The Primordial Seven, the First Seven Breaths of the Dragon of Wisdom, produce in their turn from their Holy Circumgyrating Breaths the Fiery Whirlwind.

2. They make of him the messenger of their will. The Dzyu [rgyus?] becomes Fohat, the swift son of the Divine sons whose sons are the Lipika, runs circular errands. Fohat is the steed and the thought is the rider. He passes like lightning through the fiery clouds; takes three, and five, and seven strides through the seven regions above, and the seven below. He lifts his voice, and calls the innumerable sparks, and joins them.

3. He is their guiding spirit and leader. When he commences work, he separates the sparks of the Lower Kingdom that float and thrill with joy in their radiant dwellings, and forms therewith the germs of wheels. He places them in the six directions of space, and one in the middle—the central wheel.

4. Fohat traces spiral lines to unite the sixth to the seventh—the crown; an army of the Sons of Light stands at each angle, and the Lipika in the middle wheel. They say: This is good, the

32 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

first Divine world is ready, the first is now the second. Then the “Divine Arūpa” reflects itself in Chāyā Loka, the first garment of the Aupapāduka.

5. Fohat takes five strides and builds a winged wheel at each corner of the square, for the four holy ones and their armies.

6. The Lipika circumscribe the triangle, the first one, the cube, the second one, and the pentacle within the egg. It is the ring called “Pass Not” for those who descend and ascend. Also for those who during the Kalpa are progressing towards the great day “Be with us.” Thus were formed the Rūpa and the Arūpa: from one light seven lights; from each of the seven, seven times seven lights. The wheels watch the ring. . . . .

———

STANZA VI.

1. By the power of the Mother of Mercy and Knowledge—Guān-yīn—the “triple” of Guān-shì-yīn, residing in Guān-yīn-Tiān, Fohat, the Breath of their Progeny, the Son of the Sons, having called forth, from the lower abyss, the illusive form of Sien-Tchang [tiānxià?] and the Seven Elements:⁴⁶

2. The Swift and Radiant One produces the Seven Laya Centres, against which none will prevail to the great day “Be-with-Us,” and seats the Universe on these Eternal Foundations surrounding Tsien-Tchan [tiānxià?] with the Elementary Germs.

3. Of the Seven—first one manifested, six concealed, two manifested, five concealed; three manifested, four concealed; four produced, three hidden; four and one tsan [bàn?] revealed, two and one half concealed; six to be manifested, one laid aside. Lastly, seven small wheels revolving; one giving birth to the other.

 

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33 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

4. He builds them in the likeness of older wheels, placing them on the Imperishable Centres.

How does Fohat build them? he collects the fiery dust. He makes balls of fire, runs through them, and round them, infusing life thereinto, then sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine, he fans and cools them. Thus acts Fohat from one twilight to the other, during Seven Eternities.

5. At the fourth, the sons are told to create their images. One third refuses—two obey.

The curse is pronounced; they will be born on the fourth, suffer and cause suffering; this is the first war.

6. The older wheels rotated downwards and upwards. . . . The mother’s spawn filled the whole. There were battles fought between the Creators and the Destroyers, and battles fought for space; the seed appearing and re-appearing continuously.

7. Make thy calculations, Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy small wheel. Its fourth spoke is our mother. Reach the fourth “fruit” of the fourth path of knowledge that leads to Nirvāṇa, and thou shalt comprehend, for thou shalt see . . . . .

———

STANZA VII.

1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless life.

First the Divine, the one from the Mother-Spirit; then the Spiritual; the three from the one, the four from the one, and the five from which the three, the five, and the seven. These are the three-fold, the four-fold downward; the “mind-born” sons of the first Lord; the shining seven.

It is they who are thou, me, him, oh Lanoo. They, who watch over thee, and thy mother earth.

34 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

2. The one ray multiplies the smaller rays. Life precedes form, and life survives the last atom of form. Through the countless rays proceeds the life-ray, the one, like a thread through many jewels.

3. When the one becomes two, the threefold appears, and the three are one; and it is our thread, oh Lanoo, the heart of the man-plant called Saptaparṇa.

4. It is the root that never dies; the three-tongued flame of the four wicks. The wicks are the sparks, that draw from the three-tongued flame shot out by the seven—their flame—the beams and sparks of one moon reflected in the running waves of all the rivers of earth.

5. The spark hangs from the flame by the finest thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Māyā. It stops in the first, and is a metal and a stone; it passes into the second and behold—a plant; the plant whirls through seven changes and becomes a sacred animal. From the combined attributes of these, Manu, the thinker is formed. Who forms him? the seven lives, and the one life. Who completes him? The five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last body? Fish, sin, and soma. . . . .

6. From the first-born the thread between the Silent Watcher and his Shadow becomes more strong and radiant with every change. The morning sun-light has changed into noon-day glory. . . . .

7. This is thy present wheel, said the Flame to the Spark. Thou art myself, my image, and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee, and thou art my Vāhana to the day, “Be with us,” when thou shalt re-become myself and others, thyself and me. Then the builders, having donned their first clothing, descend on radiant earth and reign over men—who are themselves. . . .

Thus ends this portion of the archaic narrative, dark, confused, almost incomprehensible. An attempt will now be made to throw light into this darkness, to make sense out of this apparent non-sense.

35 STANZA I.

COMMENTARIES

ON THE SEVEN STANZAS AND THEIR TERMS, ACCORDING TO THEIR NUMERATION, IN STANZAS AND SLOKAS.

STANZA I.

1. “The Eternal Parent (Space), wrapped in her ever invisible robes, had slumbered once again for seven eternities (a).”

The “Parent Space” is the eternal, ever present cause of all—the incomprehensible deity, whose “invisible robes” are the mystic root of all matter, and of the Universe. Space is the one eternal thing that we can most easily imagine, immovable in its abstraction and uninfluenced by either the presence or absence in it of an objective Universe. It is without dimension, in every sense, and self-existent. Spirit is the first differentiation from That, the causeless cause of both Spirit and Matter. It is, as taught in the esoteric catechism, neither limitless void, nor conditioned fulness, but both. It was and ever will be. (See “Proem” pp. 2 et seq.)

Thus, the “Robes” stand for the noumenon of undifferentiated Cosmic Matter. It is not matter as we know it, but the spiritual essence of matter, and is co-eternal and even one with Space in its abstract sense. Root-nature is also the source of the subtle invisible properties in visible matter. It is the Soul, so to say, of the one infinite Spirit. The Hindus call it Mūlaprakṛti, and say that it is the primordial substance, which is the basis of the Upādhi or vehicle of every phenomenon, whether physical, mental or psychic. It is the source from which Ākāśa radiates.

(a) By the Seven “Eternities,” æons or periods are meant. The word “Eternity,” as understood in Christian theology, has no meaning to the Asiatic ear, except in its application to the one existence; nor is

36 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the term sempiternity, the eternal only in futurity, anything better than a misnomer.⁴⁷ Such words do not and cannot exist in philosophical metaphysics, and were unknown till the advent of ecclesiastical Christianity. The Seven Eternities meant are the seven periods, or a period answering in its duration to the seven periods, of a Manvantara, and extending throughout a Mahākalpa or the “Great Age”—100 years of Brahmā—making a total of 311,040,000,000,000 of years; each year of Brahmā being composed of 360 “days,” and of the same number of “nights” of Brahmā (reckoning by the Cāndrāyaṇa or lunar year); and a “Day of Brahmā” consisting of 4,320,000,000 of mortal years. These “Eternities” belong to the most secret calculations, in which, in order to arrive at the true total, every figure must be 7^x (7 to the power of x); x varying according to the nature of the cycle in the subjective or real world; and every figure or number relating to, or representing all the different cycles from the greatest to the smallest—in the objective or unreal world—must necessarily be multiples of seven. The key to this cannot be given, for herein lies the mystery of esoteric calculations, and for the purposes of ordinary calculation it has no sense. “The number seven,” says the Kabala, “is the great number of the Divine Mysteries”; number ten is that of all human knowledge (Pythagorean decade); 1,000 is the number ten to the third power, and therefore the number 7,000 is also symbolical. In the Secret Doctrine the figure and number 4 are the male symbol only on the highest plane of abstraction; on the plane of matter the 3 is the masculine and the 4 the female: the upright and the horizontal in the fourth stage of symbolism, when the symbols became the glyphs of the generative powers on the physical plane.

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration (a).

 

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37 TIME AND UNIVERSAL MIND.

(a) Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but “lies asleep.” The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second; and the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of “time” known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past. In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth. It is these “sum-totals” that exist from eternity in the “future,” and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the “past.” No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean. Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves, as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that “duration” in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

3. . . . Universal mind was not, for there were no Ah-hi (celestial beings) to contain (hence to manifest) it (a).

38 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(a) Mind is a name given to the sum of the states of Consciousness grouped under Thought, Will, and Feeling. During deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance; thus for the time-being “Mind is not,” because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. A noumenon can become a phenomenon on any plane of existence only by manifesting on that plane through an appropriate basis or vehicle; and during the long night of rest called Pralaya, when all the existences are dissolved, the “Universal Mind” remains as a permanent possibility of mental action, or as that abstract absolute thought, of which mind is the concrete relative manifestation. The Ah-hi (Dhyāni–Chohans) are the collective hosts of spiritual beings—the Angelic Hosts of Christianity, the ʾĔlōhīm and “Messengers” of the Jews—who are the vehicle for the manifestation of the divine or universal thought and will. They are the Intelligent Forces that give to and enact in Nature her “laws,” while themselves acting according to laws imposed upon them in a similar manner by still higher Powers; but they are not “the personifications” of the powers of Nature, as erroneously thought. This hierarchy of spiritual Beings, through which the Universal Mind comes into action, is like an army—a “Host,” truly—by means of which the fighting power of a nation manifests itself, and which is composed of army corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, and so forth, each with its separate individuality or life, and its limited freedom of action and limited responsibilities; each contained in a larger individuality, to which its own interests are subservient, and each containing lesser individualities in itself.

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

4. The seven ways to bliss (Mokṣa⁴⁸ or Nirvāṇa) were not (a). The great causes of misery (Nidāna⁴⁹ and Māyā) were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them (b).

(a) There are seven “Paths” or “Ways” to the bliss of Non-Exist-

 

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39 THE CAUSES OF BEING.

ence, which is absolute Being, Existence, and Consciousness. They were not, because the Universe was, so far, empty, and existed only in the Divine Thought. For it is . . .

(b) The twelve Nidānas or causes of being. Each is the effect of its antecedent cause, and a cause, in its turn, to its successor; the sum total of the Nidānas being based on the four truths, a doctrine especially characteristic of the Hīnayāna System.⁵⁰ They belong to the theory of the stream of catenated law which produces merit and demerit, and finally brings Karma into full sway. It is based upon the great truth that re-incarnation is to be dreaded, as existence in this world only entails upon man suffering, misery and pain; Death itself being unable to deliver man from it, since death is merely the door through which he passes to another life on earth after a little rest on its threshold—Dewachen [bde ba can]. The Hīnayāna System, or School of the “Little Vehicle,” is of very ancient growth; while the Mahāyāna is of a later period, having originated after the death of Buddha. Yet the tenets of the latter are as old as the hills that have contained such schools from time immemorial, and the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna Schools (the latter, that of the “Great Vehicle”) both teach the same doctrine in reality. Yāna, or Vehicle (in Sanskrit, Vāhana) is a mystic expression, both “vehicles” inculcating that man may escape the sufferings of rebirths and even the false bliss of Dewachen [bde ba can], by obtaining Wisdom and Knowledge, which alone can dispel the Fruits of Illusion and Ignorance.

Māyā or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. To the untrained eye of the savage, a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of colour, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape. Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyāni–Chohans, are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cogniser is also a reflection, and the things cognised are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them

 

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40 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached “reality”; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Māyā.

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

5. Darkness alone filled the boundless all (a), for father, mother and son were once more one, and the son had not awakened yet for the new wheel⁵¹ and his pilgrimage thereon (b).

(a) “Darkness is Father-Mother: light their son,” says an old Eastern proverb. Light is inconceivable except as coming from some source which is the cause of it; and as, in the instance of primordial light, that source is unknown, though as strongly demanded by reason and logic, therefore it is called “Darkness” by us, from an intellectual point of view. As to borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be but of a temporary māyāvic character. Darkness, then, is the eternal

 

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41 WHAT IS DARKNESS IN PHILOSOPHY?

matrix in which the sources of light appear and disappear. Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable, and scientifically light is but a mode of darkness and vice versā. Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon—which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the whole universe was plunged in sleep—had returned to its one primordial element—there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light, and darkness necessarily filled the boundless all.

(b) The Father-Mother are the male and female principles in root-nature, the opposite poles that manifest in all things on every plane of Kosmos, or Spirit and Substance, in a less allegorical aspect, the resultant of which is the Universe, or the Son. They are “once more One” when in “The Night of Brahmā,” during Pralaya, all in the objective Universe has returned to its one primal and eternal cause, to reappear at the following Dawn—as it does periodically. “Kāraṇa”—eternal cause—was alone. To put it more plainly: Kāraṇa is alone during the “Nights of Brahmā.” The previous objective Universe has dissolved into its one primal and eternal cause, and is, so to say, held in solution in space, to differentiate again and crystallize out anew at the following Manvantaric dawn, which is the commencement of a new “Day” or new activity of Brahmā—the symbol of the Universe. In esoteric parlance, Brahmā is Father-Mother-Son, or Spirit, Soul and Body at once; each personage being symbolical of an attribute, and each attribute or quality being a graduated efflux of Divine Breath in its cyclic differentiation, involutionary and evolutionary. In the cosmico-physical sense, it is the Universe, the planetary chain and the earth; in the purely spiritual, the Unknown Deity, Planetary Spirit, and Man—the Son of the two, the creature of Spirit and Matter, and a manifestation of them in his periodical appearances on Earth during the “wheels,” or the Manvantaras.—(See Part II., § VII: “Days and Nights of Brahmā” [p. 368])

42 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA I.—Continued.

6. The seven sublime Lords and the seven Truths had ceased to be (a), and the Universe, the son of necessity, was immersed in Pariniṣpanna (b) (absolute perfection, Parinirvāṇa, which is Yong-drup [yongs grub]) to be out-breathed by that which is and yet is not. Naught was (c).

(a) The seven sublime lords are the Seven Creative Spirits, the Dhyāni–Chohans, who correspond to the Hebrew ʾĔlōhīm. It is the same hierarchy of Archangels to which St. Michael [mīḵāʾēl], St. Gabriel [gaḇrīʾēl], and others belong, in the Christian theogony. Only while St. Michael [mīḵāʾēl], for instance, is allowed in dogmatic Latin theology to watch over all the promontories and gulfs, in the Esoteric System, the Dhyānis watch successively over one of the Rounds and the great Root-races of our planetary chain. They are, moreover, said to send their Bodhisattvas, the human correspondents of the Dhyāni-Buddhas (of whom vidē īnfrā) during every Round and Race. Out of the Seven Truths and Revelations, or rather revealed secrets, four only have been handed to us, as we are still in the Fourth Round, and the world also has only had four Buddhas, so far. This is a very complicated question, and will receive more ample treatment later on.

So far “There are only Four Truths, and Four Vedas”—say the Hindus and Buddhists. For a similar reason Irenæus insisted on the necessity of Four Gospels. But as every new Root-race at the head of a Round must have its revelation and revealers, the next Round will bring the Fifth, the following the Sixth, and so on.

(b) “Pariniṣpanna” is the absolute perfection to which all existences attain at the close of a great period of activity, or Mahāmanvantara, and in which they rest during the succeeding period of repose. In Tibetan it is called Yong-drup [yongs grub]. Up to the day of the Yogācāra school the true nature of Parinirvāṇa was taught publicly, but since then it has become entirely esoteric; hence so many contradictory interpretations of it. It is only a true Idealist who can understand it. Everything has to be viewed as ideal, with the exception of Parinirvāṇa, by him who would comprehend that state, and acquire a knowledge of how Non Ego, Voidness, and Darkness are Three in One and alone Self-existent and perfect. It is absolute, however, only in a relative

43 MOTIONS, THE “GREAT BREATH.”

sense, for it must give room to still further absolute perfection, according to a higher standard of excellence in the following period of activity—just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit,—if a somewhat Irish mode of expression may be permitted.

The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end. Our “Universe” is only one of an infinite number of Universes, all of them “Sons of Necessity,” because links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the relation of an effect as regards its predecessor, and being a cause as regards its successor.

The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of “the Great Breath,” which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute—Abstract Space and Duration being the other two. When the “Great Breath” is projected, it is called the Divine Breath, and is regarded as the breathing of the Unknowable Deity—the One Existence—which breathes out a thought, as it were, which becomes the Kosmos. (See Isis Unveiled.) So also is it when the Divine Breath is inspired again the Universe disappears into the bosom of “the Great Mother,” who then sleeps “wrapped in her invisible robes.”

(c) By “that which is and yet is not” is meant the Great Breath itself, which we can only speak of as absolute existence, but cannot picture to our imagination as any form of existence that we can distinguish from Non-existence. The three periods—the Present, the Past, and the Future—are in the esoteric philosophy a compound time; for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane, but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity. As said in the Scriptures: “The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is”; according to a precept in the Prasaṅga Madhyamaka teaching, whose dogmas have been known ever since it broke away from the purely esoteric schools.⁵² Our ideas, in short, on duration and time are all derived from our

 

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44 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

sensations according to the laws of Association. Inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge, they nevertheless can have no existence except in the experience of the individual ego, and perish when its evolutionary march dispels the Māyā of phenomenal existence. What is Time, for instance, but the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness? In the words of a Master, “I feel irritated at having to use these three clumsy words—Past, Present, and Future—miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.” One has to acquire Paramārtha lest one should become too easy a prey to Saṃvṛti—is a philosophical axiom.⁵³

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

7. The causes of existence had been done away with (a); the visible that was, and the invisible that is, rested in eternal non-being, the one being (b).

(a) “The Causes of Existence” mean not only the physical causes known to science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to exist, an outcome of Nidāna and Māyā. This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence, into a law that the Universe should exist. According to esoteric teaching, the real cause of that supposed desire, and of all existence, remains for ever hidden, and its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive. These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect; and they underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which, anthropomorphized, have been worshipped as God and gods by the common herd of every age. It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank.

 

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45 BEING AND NON-BEING.

This is virtually the condition to which the mind must come at last when we try to trace back the chain of causes and effects, but both science and religion jump to this condition of blankness much more quickly than is necessary; for they ignore the metaphysical abstractions which are the only conceivable cause of physical concretions. These abstractions become more and more concrete as they approach our plane of existence, until finally they phenomenalise in the form of the material Universe, by a process of conversion of metaphysics into physics, analogous to that by which steam can be condensed into water, and the water frozen into ice.

(b) The idea of Eternal Non-Being, which is the One Being, will appear a paradox to anyone who does not remember that we limit our ideas of being to our present consciousness of existence; making it a specific, instead of a generic term. An unborn infant, could it think in our acceptation of that term, would necessarily limit its conception of being, in a similar manner, to the intra-uterine life which alone it knows; and were it to endeavour to express to its consciousness the idea of life after birth (death to it), it would, in the absence of data to go upon, and of faculties to comprehend such data, probably express that life as “Non-Being which is Real Being.” In our case the One Being is the noumenon of all the noumena which we know must underlie phenomena, and give them whatever shadow of reality they possess, but which we have not the senses or the intellect to cognize at present. The impalpable atoms of gold scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are not only present there but that they alone give his quartz any appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. But the miner knows what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Māyā which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the “Eye of Dangma [dwangs ma]” toward the essence of things in which no Māyā can have any influence. It is here that the teachings of esoteric philosophy in relation to the Nidānas and the Four Truths become of the greatest importance; but they are secret.

46 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA I.—Continued.

8. Alone, the one form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in dreamless sleep (a); and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, throughout that All-Presence which is sensed by the “Opened Eye” ⁵⁴ of the Dangma [dwangs ma] (b).⁵⁵

(a) The tendency of modern thought is to recur to the archaic idea of a homogeneous basis for apparently widely different things—heterogeneity developed from homogeneity. Biologists are now searching for their homogeneous protoplasm and chemists for their protyle, while science is looking for the force of which electricity, magnetism, heat, and so forth, are the differentiations. The Secret Doctrine carries this idea into the region of metaphysics and postulates a “One Form of Existence” as the basis and source of all things. But perhaps the phrase, the “One Form of Existence,” is not altogether correct. The Sanskrit word is Prabhavāpyaya, “the place, or rather plane, whence emerges the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things,” says a commentator. It is not the “Mother of the World,” as translated by Wilson (see Book I., Viṣṇu Purāṇa); for Jagadyoni (as shown by Fitzedward Hall) is scarcely so much “the Mother of the World” or “the Womb of the World” as the “Material Cause of the Universe.” The Purāṇic Commentators explain it by Kāraṇa—“Cause”—but the Esoteric philosophy, by the ideal spirit of that cause. It is, in its secondary stage, the Svabhāvāt of the Buddhist philosopher, the eternal cause and effect, omnipresent yet abstract, the self-existent plastic Essence and the root of all things, viewed in the same dual light as the Vedāntin views his Parabrahma and Mūlaprakṛti, the one under two aspects. It seems indeed extraordinary to find great scholars speculating on the possibility of the Vedānta, and the Uttaramīmāṃsā especially, having been “evoked by the teachings of the Buddhists,”

 

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47 THE EYE OF DANGMA.

whereas, it is on the contrary Buddhism (of Gautama, the Buddha) that was “evoked” and entirely upreared on the tenets of the Secret Doctrine, of which a partial sketch is here attempted, and on which, also, the Upaniṣads are made to rest.⁵⁶ The above, according to the teachings of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya,⁵⁷ is undeniable.

(b) Dreamless sleep is one of the seven states of consciousness known in Oriental esotericism. In each of these states a different portion of the mind comes into action; or as a Vedāntin would express it, the individual is conscious in a different plane of his being. The term “dreamless sleep,” in this case is applied allegorically to the Universe to express a condition somewhat analogous to that state of consciousness in man, which, not being remembered in a waking state, seems a blank, just as the sleep of the mesmerised subject seems to him an unconscious blank when he returns to his normal condition, although he has been talking and acting as a conscious individual would.

———

STANZA I.—Continued.

9. But where was the Dangma [dwangs ma] when the Ālaya of the Universe (Soul as the basis of all, Anima Mundī) was in Paramārtha (a) (Absolute Being and Consciousness which are Absolute Non-Being and Unconsciousness) and the great wheel was Aupapāduka (b)?

 

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48 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(a) Here we have before us the subject of centuries of scholastic disputations. The two terms “Ālaya” and “Paramārtha” have been the causes of dividing schools and splitting the truth into more different aspects than any other mystic terms. Ālaya is literally the “Soul of the World” or Anima Mundī, the “Over-Soul” of Emerson, and according to esoteric teaching it changes periodically its nature. Ālaya, though eternal and changeless in its inner essence on the planes which are unreachable by either men or Cosmic Gods (Dhyāni-Buddhas), alters during the active life-period with respect to the lower planes, ours included. During that time not only the Dhyāni-Buddhas are one with Ālaya in Soul and Essence, but even the man strong in the Yoga (mystic meditation) “is able to merge his soul with it” (Āryāsaṅga, the Bumapa [dbu ma pa] school). This is not Nirvāṇa, but a condition next to it. Hence the disagreement. Thus, while the Yogācāras (of the Mahāyāna school) say that Ālaya is the personification of the Voidness, and yet Ālaya (Nyingpo [snying po] and Tsang [gtsang] in Tibetan) is the basis of every visible and invisible thing, and that, though it is eternal and immutable in its essence, it reflects itself in every object of the Universe “like the moon in clear tranquil water”; other schools dispute the statement. The same for Paramārtha: the Yogācāras interpret the term as that which is also dependent upon other things (paratantra); and the Madhyamakas say that Paramārtha is limited to Pariniṣpanna or absolute perfection; i.e., in the exposition of these “two truths” (out of four), the former believe and maintain that (on this plane, at any rate) there exists only Saṃvṛtisatya or relative truth; and the latter teach the existence of Paramārthasatya, the “absolute truth.”⁵⁸ “No Arhat, oh mendicants, can reach absolute knowledge before he becomes one with Parinirvāṇa. Parikalpita and Paratantra are his two great enemies” (Aphorisms of the Bodhisattvas). Parikalpita (in Tibetan Kün-tak [kun btags]) is error, made by those unable to realize the emptiness and illusionary nature of all; who believe something to exist which does not—e.g., the Non-Ego. And

 

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49 ĀLAYA, THE UNIVERSAL SOUL.

Paratantra is that, whatever it is, which exists only through a dependent or causal connection, and which has to disappear as soon as the cause from which it proceeds is removed—e.g., the light of a wick. Destroy or extinguish it, and light disappears.

Esoteric philosophy teaches that everything lives and is conscious, but not that all life and consciousness are similar to those of human or even animal beings. Life we look upon as “the one form of existence,” manifesting in what is called matter; or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter. Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence, and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology. Science, it is true, contents itself with tracing or postulating the signs of universal life, and has not yet been bold enough even to whisper “Anima Mundī!” The idea of “crystalline life,” now familiar to science, would have been scouted half a century ago. Botanists are now searching for the nerves of plants; not that they suppose that plants can feel or think as animals do, but because they believe that some structure, bearing the same relation functionally to plant life that nerves bear to animal life, is necessary to explain vegetable growth and nutrition. It hardly seems possible that science can disguise from itself much longer, by the mere use of terms such as “force” and “energy,” the fact that things that have life are living things, whether they be atoms or planets.

But what is the belief of the inner esoteric Schools? the reader may ask. What are the doctrines taught on this subject by the Esoteric “Buddhists”? With them “Ālaya” has a double and even a triple meaning. In the Yogācāra system of the contemplative Mahāyāna school, Ālaya is both the Universal Soul (Anima Mundī) and the Self of a progressed adept. “He who is strong in the Yoga can introduce at will his Ālaya by means of meditation into the true Nature of Existence.” The “Ālaya has an absolute eternal existence,” says Āryāsaṅga—the rival of Nāgārjuna.⁵⁹ In one sense it is Pradhāna; which

 

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50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

is explained in Viṣṇu Purāṇa as: “that which is the unevolved cause, is emphatically called by the most eminent sages Pradhāna, original base, which is subtle Prakṛti, viz., that which is eternal, and which at once is (or comprehends) what is and what is not, or is mere process.” “Prakṛti,” however, is an incorrect word, and Ālaya would explain it better; for Prakṛti is not the “uncognizable Brahma.”⁶⁰ It is a mistake of those who know nothing of the Universality of the Occult doctrines from the very cradle of the human races, and especially so of those scholars who reject the very idea of a “primordial revelation,” to teach that the Anima Mundī, the One Life or “Universal Soul,” was made known only by Anaxagoras, or during his age. This philosopher brought the teaching forward simply to oppose the too materialistic conceptions on Cosmogony of Democritus, based on his exoteric theory of blindly driven atoms. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ was not its inventor but only its propagator, as also was Plato. That which he called Mundane Intelligence, the nous (νοῦς), the principle that according to his views is absolutely separated and free from matter and acts on design,⁶¹ was called Motion, the one life, or Jīvātmā, ages before the year 500 b.c. in India. Only the Āryan philosophers never endowed the principle, which with them is infinite, with the finite “attribute” of “thinking.”

This leads the reader naturally to the “Supreme Spirit” of Hegel and the German Transcendentalists as a contrast that it may be useful to point out. The schools of Schelling and Fichte have diverged widely from the primitive archaic conception of an absolute principle, and have mirrored only an aspect of the basic idea of the Vedanta. Even the “Absoluter Geist” shadowed forth by von Hartmann in his pessimistic philosophy of the Unconscious, while it is, perhaps, the closest approximation made by European speculation to the Hindu Advaitin Doctrines, similarly falls far short of the reality.

 

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51 CAN THE FINITE CONCEIVE THE INFINITE?

According to Hegel, the “Unconscious” would never have undertaken the vast and laborious task of evolving the Universe, except in the hope of attaining clear Self-consciousness. In this connection it is to be borne in mind that in designating Spirit, which the European Pantheists use as equivalent to Parabrahma, as unconscious, they do not attach to that expression of “Spirit”—one employed in the absence of a better to symbolise a profound mystery—the connotation it usually bears.

The “Absolute Consciousness,” they tell us, “behind” phenomena, which is only termed unconsciousness in the absence of any element of personality, transcends human conception. Man, unable to form one concept except in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the majesty of the Absolute. Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realise the nature of the source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return. . . . As the highest Dhyāni-Chohan, however, can but bow in ignorance before the awful mystery of Absolute Being; and since, even in that culmination of conscious existence—“the merging of the individual in the universal consciousness”—to use a phrase of Fichte’s—the Finite cannot conceive the Infinite, nor can it apply to it its own standard of mental experiences, how can it be said that the “Unconscious” and the Absolute can have even an instinctive impulse or hope of attaining clear self-consciousness?⁶² A Vedāntin would never admit this Hegelian idea; and the Occultist would say that it applies perfectly to the awakened mahat, the Universal Mind already projected into the phenomenal world as the first aspect of the changeless absolute, but never to the latter. “Spirit and Matter, or Puruṣa and Prakṛti are but the two primeval aspects of the One and Secondless,” we are taught.

The matter-moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different degrees of power; and this pantheistic idea of a general Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature is the oldest of all the philosophical notions. Nor was the Archæus a discovery of Paracelsus nor of his pupil Van Helmont; for it is again the same Archæus or “Father-Ether,”—the manifested basis

 

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52 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and source of the innumerable phenomena of life—localised. The whole series of the numberless speculations of this kind are but variations on this theme, the key-note of which was struck in this primeval Revelation. (See Part II., “Primordial Substance.”)

(b) The term Aupapāduka, “parentless,” or without progenitors, is a mystical designation having several meanings in the philosophy. By this name celestial beings, the Dhyāni–Chohans or Dhyāni-Buddhas, are generally meant. But as these correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, known as the “Manuṣya (or human) Buddhas,” the latter are also designated “Aupapāduka,” once that their whole personality is merged in their compound sixth and seventh principles—or Ātmā-Buddhi, and that they have become the “diamond-souled” (Vajra-sattvas),⁶³ the full Mahātmās. The “Concealed Lord” (Sangwé Dakpo [gsang ba’i bdag po]), “the one merged with the absolute,” can have no parents since he is Self-existent, and one with the Universal Spirit (Svayambhū),⁶⁴ the Svabhāvāt in the highest aspect. The mystery in the hierarchy of the Aupapāduka is great, its apex being the universal Spirit-Soul, and the lower rung the Manuṣya-Buddha; and even every Soul-endowed man is an Aupapāduka in a latent state. Hence, when speaking of the Universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition, before it was fashioned by the “Builders”—the expression, “the Universe was Aupapāduka.” (See Part II., “Primordial Substance.”)

 

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53 THE STATE OF PARINIRVĀṆA.

STANZA II.

Commentary.

1. . . . Where were the builders, the luminous sons of manvantaric dawn (a)? . . . In the unknown darkness in their Ah-hi (Chohanic, Dhyāni-Buddhic) Pariniṣpanna, the producers of form (rūpa) from no-form (arūpa), the root of the world—the Devamātṛ⁶⁵ and Svabhāvāt, rested in the bliss of non-being (b).

(a) The “Builders,” the “Sons of Manvantaric Dawn,” are the real creators of the Universe; and in this doctrine, which deals only with our Planetary System, they, as the architects of the latter, are also called the “Watchers” of the Seven Spheres, which exoterically are the Seven planets, and esoterically the seven earths or spheres (planets) of our chain also. The opening sentence of Stanza I., when mentioning “Seven Eternities,” is made to apply both to the Mahākalpa or “the (great) Age of Brahmā,” as well as to the Solar pralaya and subsequent resurrection of our Planetary System on a higher plane. There are many kinds of pralaya (dissolution of a thing visible), as will be shown elsewhere.

(b) Pariniṣpanna, remember, is the summum bonum, the Absolute, hence the same as Parinirvāṇa. Besides being the final state it is that condition of subjectivity which has no relation to anything but the one absolute truth (Paramārthasatya) on its plane. It is that state which leads one to appreciate correctly the full meaning of Non-Being, which, as explained, is absolute Being. Sooner or later, all that now seemingly exists, will be in reality and actually in the state of Pariniṣpanna. But there is a great difference between conscious and unconscious “being.” The condition of Pariniṣpanna, without Paramārtha, the Self-analys-

 

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54 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ing consciousness (Svasaṃvedana), is no bliss, but simply extinction (for Seven Eternities). Thus, an iron ball placed under the scorching rays of the sun will get heated through, but will not feel or appreciate the warmth, while a man will. It is only “with a mind clear and undarkened by personality, and an assimilation of the merit of manifold existences devoted to being in its collectivity (the whole living and sentient Universe),” that one gets rid of personal existence, merging into, becoming one with, the Absolute,⁶⁶ and continuing in full possession of Paramārtha.

———

STANZA II.—Continued.

2. . . . Where was silence? Where were the ears to sense it? No! there was neither silence, nor sound (a). Naught save ceaseless, eternal breath (Motion) which knows itself not (b).

(a) The idea that things can cease to exist and still be, is a fundamental one in Eastern psychology. Under this apparent contradiction in terms, there rests a fact of Nature to realise which in the mind, rather than to argue about words, is the important thing. A familiar instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination. The question whether Hydrogen and Oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to form water, is still a moot one, some arguing that since they are found again when the water is decomposed they must be there all the while; others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being; but neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else and yet has not ceased to be itself. Existence as water may be said to be, for Oxygen and Hydrogen, a state of Non-being which is “more real being” than their existence as gases; and it may faintly symbolise the

 

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55 THE ABSOLUTE KNOWS ITSELF NOT.

condition of the Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be, during the “Nights of Brahmā”—to awaken or reappear again, when the dawn of the new Manvantara recalls it to what we call existence.

(b) The “Breath” of the One Existence is used in its application only to the spiritual aspect of Cosmogony by Archaic esotericism; otherwise, it is replaced by its equivalent in the material plane—Motion. The One Eternal Element, or element-containing Vehicle, is Space, dimensionless in every sense; co-existent with which are—endless duration, primordial (hence indestructible) matter, and motion—absolute “perpetual motion” which is the “breath” of the “One” Element. This breath, as seen, can never cease, not even during the Pralayic eternities. (See “Cháos, Theós, Kósmos,” in Part II. [p. 342])

But the “Breath of the One Existence” does not, all the same, apply to the One Causeless Cause or the “All Be-ness” (in contradistinction to All-Being, which is Brahmā, or the Universe). Brahmā (or Hari) the four-faced god who, after lifting the Earth out of the waters, “accomplished the Creation,” is held to be only the instrumental, and not, as clearly implied, the ideal Cause. No Orientalist, so far, seems to have thoroughly comprehended the real sense of the verses in the Purāṇa, that treat of “creation.”

Therein Brahmā is the cause of the potencies that are to be generated subsequently for the work of “creation.” When a translator says, “And from him proceed the potencies to be created, after they had become the real cause”: “and from it proceed the potencies that will create as they become the real cause” (on the material plane) would perhaps be more correct? Save that one (causeless) ideal cause there is no other to which the universe can be referred. “Worthiest of ascetics! through its potency—i.e., through the potency of that cause—every created thing comes by its inherent or proper nature.” If, in the Vedānta and Nyāya, nimitta is the efficient cause, as contrasted with upādāna, the material cause, (and in the Sāṃkhya, pradhāna implies the functions of both); in the Esoteric philosophy, which reconciles all these systems, and the nearest exponent of which is the Vedānta as expounded by the Advaita Vedāntins, none but the upādāna can be speculated upon; that which is in the minds of the Vaiṣṇavas (the Viśiṣṭādvaita) as the ideal in contradistinction to the real—or Parabrahma and Īśvara—can find no room in published speculations, since

56 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

that ideal even is a misnomer, when applied to that of which no human reason, even that of an adept, can conceive.

To know itself or oneself, necessitates consciousness and perception (both limited faculties in relation to any subject except Parabrahma), to be cognized. Hence the “Eternal Breath which knows itself not.” Infinity cannot comprehend Finiteness. The Boundless can have no relation to the bounded and the conditioned. In the occult teachings, the Unknown and the Unknowable mover, or the Self-Existing, is the absolute divine Essence. And thus being Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute Motion—to the limited senses of those who describe this indescribable—it is unconsciousness and immoveableness. Concrete consciousness cannot be predicated of abstract Consciousness, any more than the quality wet can be predicated of water—wetness being its own attribute and the cause of the wet quality in other things. Consciousness implies limitations and qualifications; something to be conscious of, and someone to be conscious of it. But Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized and the cognition, all three in itself and all three one. No man is conscious of more than that portion of his knowledge that happens to have been recalled to his mind at any particular time, yet such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of, from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory. To forget is synonymous with not to remember. How much greater must be the difficulty of finding terms to describe, and to distinguish between, abstract metaphysical facts or differences. It must not be forgotten, also, that we give names to things according to the appearances they assume for ourselves. We call absolute consciousness “unconsciousness,” because it seems to us that it must necessarily be so, just as we call the Absolute, “Darkness,” because to our finite understanding it appears quite impenetrable, yet we recognize fully that our perception of such things does not do them justice. We involuntarily distinguish in our minds, for instance, between unconscious absolute consciousness, and unconsciousness, by secretly endowing the former with some indefinite quality that corresponds, on a higher plane than our thoughts can reach, with what we know as consciousness in ourselves. But this is not any kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconsciousness.

57 THE GERM OF LIFE.

STANZA II.—Continued.

3. The hour had not yet struck; the ray had not yet flashed into the germ (a); the mātṛ-padma (mother lotus) had not yet swollen (b).⁶⁷

The ray of the “Ever Darkness” becomes, as it is emitted, a ray of effulgent light or life, and flashes into the “Germ”—the point in the Mundane Egg, represented by matter in its abstract sense. But the term “Point” must not be understoood as applying to any particular point in Space, for a germ exists in the centre of every atom, and these collectively form “the Germ”; or rather, as no atom can be made visible to our physical eye, the collectivity of these (if the term can be applied to something which is boundless and infinite) forms the noumenon of eternal and indestructible matter.

(b) One of the symbolical figures for the Dual creative power in Nature (matter and force on the material plane) is Padma, the water-lily of India. The Lotus is the product of heat (fire) and water (vapour or Ether); fire standing in every philosophical and religious system as a representation of the Spirit of Deity,⁶⁸ the active, male, generative principle; and Ether, or the Soul of matter, the light of the fire, for the passive female principle from which everything in this Universe emanated. Hence, Ether or Water is the Mother, and Fire is the Father. Sir W. Jones (and before him archaic botany) showed that the seeds of the Lotus contain—even before they germinate—perfectly formed leaves, the miniature shape of what one day, as perfect plants, they will become: nature thus giving us a specimen of the preformation of its production . . . the seed of all phanerogamous plants bearing proper flowers containing an embryo plantlet ready formed.⁶⁹ (See Part II., “The Lotus Flower as an Universal Symbol.”) This explains the sentence “The Mother had not yet swollen”—the form being usually sacrificed to the inner or root idea in Archaic symbology.

The Lotus, or Padma, is, moreover, a very ancient and favourite

 

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58 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

simile for the Kosmos itself, and also for man. The popular reasons given are, firstly, the fact just mentioned, that the Lotus-seed contains within itself a perfect miniature of the future plant, which typefies the fact that the spiritual prototypes of all things exist in the immaterial world before those things become materialised on Earth. Secondly, the fact that the Lotus plant grows up through the water, having its root in the Ilýs, or mud, and spreading its flower in the air above. The Lotus thus typifies the life of man and also that of the Kosmos; for the Secret Doctrine teaches that the elements of both are the same, and that both are developing in the same direction. The root of the Lotus sunk in the mud represents material life, the stalk passing up through the water typifies existence in the astral world, and the flower floating on the water and opening to the sky is emblematical of spiritual being.

———

STANZA II.—Continued.

4. Her heart had not yet opened for the one ray to enter, thence to fall as three into four in the lap of Māyā (a).

(a) The Primordial Substance had not yet passed out of its precosmic latency into differentiated objectivity, or even become the (to man, so far,) invisible Protyle of Science. But, as the hour strikes and it becomes receptive of the Fohatic impress of the Divine Thought (the Lógos, or the male aspect of the Anima Mundī, Ālaya)—its heart opens. It differentiates, and the three (Father, Mother, Son) are transformed into four. Herein lies the origin of the double mystery of the Trinity and the immaculate Conception. The first and Fundamental dogma of Occultism is Universal Unity (or Homogeneity) under three aspects. This led to a possible conception of Deity, which as an absolute unity must remain forever incomprehensible to finite intellects. “If thou wouldst believe in the Power which acts within the root of a plant, or imagine the root concealed under the soil, thou hast to think of its stalk or trunk and of its leaves and flowers. Thou canst not imagine that Power independently of these objects. Life can be known only by the Tree of Life. . . .” (Precepts for Yoga). The idea of Absolute Unity

59 ASTRAL LIGHT IS NOT THE ANIMA MUNDĪ.

would be broken entirely in our conception, had we not something concrete before our eyes to contain that Unity. And the deity being absolute, must be omnipresent, hence not an atom but contains it within itself. The roots, the trunk and its many branches are three distinct objects, yet they are one tree. Say the Qabbālists: “The Deity is one, because It is infinite. It is triple, because it is ever manifesting.” This manifestation is triple in its aspects, for it requires, as Aristotle has it, three principles for every natural body to become objective: privation, form, and matter.⁷⁰ Privation meant in the mind of the great philosopher that which the Occultists call the prototypes impressed in the Astral Light—the lowest plane and world of Anima Mundī. The union of these three principles depends upon a fourth—the life which radiates from the summits of the Unreachable, to become an universally diffused Essence on the manifested planes of Existence. And this quaternary (Father, Mother, Son, as a unity, and a quaternary, as a living manifestation) has been the means of leading to the very archaic Idea of Immaculate Conception, now finally crystallized into a dogma of the Christian Church, which carnalized this metaphysical idea beyond any common sense. For one has but to read the Qabbālāh and study its numerical methods of interpretation to find the origin of that dogma. It is purely astronomical, mathematical, and pre-eminently metaphysical: the Male element in Nature (personified by the male deities and Lógoi—Virāj, or Brahmā; Horus, or Osiris, etc., etc.) is born through, not from, an immaculate source, personified by the “Mother”; because that Male having a Mother cannot have a “Father”—the abstract Deity being sexless, and not even a Being but Be-ness, or Life itself. Let us render this in the mathematical language of the author of The Source of Measures. Speaking of the “Measure of a Man” and his numerical (Qabbālistic) value, he writes that in Genesis 6:1, “It is called the ‘Man even Jehovah [yəhōwāh]’

 

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60 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Measure, and this is obtained in this way, viz.: 113 x 5 = 565, and the value 565 can be placed under the form of expression 56.5 x 10 = 565. Here the Man-number 113 becomes a factor of 56.5 x 10, and the (Kabalistic) reading of this last numbered expression is Yōḏ, Hē, Wāw, Hē, or Jehovah [yəhōwāh]. . . . The expansion of 565 into 56.5 x 10 is purposed to show the emanation of the male (Yōḏ [י]) from the female (Eva [hawwāh, הוה]) principle; or, so to speak, the birth of a male element from an immaculate source, in other words, an immaculate conception.”

Thus is repeated on Earth the mystery enacted, according to the Seers, on the divine plane. The “Son” of the immaculate Celestial Virgin (or the undifferentiated cosmic protyle, Matter in its infinitude) is born again on Earth as the Son of the terrestrial Eve—our mother Earth, and becomes Humanity as a total—past, present, and future—for Jehovah [yəhōwāh] or Yōḏ-hē-wāw-hē is androgyne, or both male and female. Above, the Son is the whole Kosmos; below, he is Mankind. The triad or triangle becomes Tetraktýs, the Sacred Pythagorean number, the perfect Square, and a 6-faced cube on Earth. The Macroprosopus (the Great Face) is now Microprosopus (the lesser face); or, as the Qabbālists have it, the “Ancient of Days,” descending on ʾĀḏām Qaḏmōn whom he uses as his vehicle to manifest through, gets transformed into Tetragrammaton. It is now in the “Lap of Māyā,” the Great Illusion, and between itself and the Reality has the Astral Light, the great Deceiver of man’s limited senses, unless Knowledge through Paramārthasatya comes to the rescue.

———

STANZA II.—Continued.

5. The Seven (Sons) were not yet born from the Web of Light. Darkness alone was Father-Mother, Svabhāvāt, and Svabhāvāt was in darkness (a).

(a) The Secret Doctrine, in the Stanzas given here, occupies itself chiefly, if not entirely, with our Solar System, and especially with our planetary chain. The “Seven Sons,” therefore, are the creators of the latter. This teaching will be explained more fully hereafter. (See Part II., “Theogony of the Creative Gods.” [p. 424])

61 DIVINE THOUGHT, DIVINE THINKERS.

Svabhāvāt, the “Plastic Essence” that fills the Universe, is the root of all things. Svabhāvāt is, so to say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the abstraction called in Hindu philosophy Mūlaprakṛti. It is the body of the Soul, and that which Ether would be to Ākāśa, the latter being the informing principle of the former. Chinese mystics have made of it the synonym of “being.” In the Ekaśloka Śāstra of Nāgārjuna (the Lóngshù of China) called by the Chinese the Yī-shū-lú-jiā-lùn, it is said that the original word of Yǒu is “Being” or “Subhava,” “the Substance giving substance to itself,” also explained by him as meaning “without action and with action,” “the nature which has no nature of its own.” Subhava, from which Svabhāvāt, is composed of two words: Su “fair,” “handsome,” “good”; Sva, “self”; and bhava, “being” or “states of being.”

———

STANZA II.—Continued.

6. These two are the Germ, and the Germ is—one. The Universe was still concealed in the Divine Thought and the Divine Bosom.

The “Divine Thought” does not imply the idea of a Divine thinker. The Universe, not only past, present, and future—which is a human and finite idea expressed by finite thought—but in its totality, the Sat (an untranslateable term), the absolute being, with the Past and Future crystallized in an eternal Present, is that Thought itself reflected in a secondary or manifest cause. Brahma (neuter) as the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus is an absolute mystery to the human mind. Brahmā, the male-female, its aspect and anthropomorphic reflection, is conceivable to the perceptions of blind faith, though rejected by human intellect when it attains its majority. (See Part II., “Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.”)

Hence the statement that during the prologue, so to say, of the drama of Creation, or the beginning of cosmic evolution, the Universe or the “Son” lies still concealed “in the Divine Thought,” which had not yet penetrated “into the Divine Bosom.” This idea, note well, is at the root, and forms the origin of all the allegories about the “Sons of God” born of immaculate virgins.

62 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

STANZA III.

Commentary.

1. The last vibration of the seventh eternity thrills through infinitude (a). The mother swells, expanding from within without like the bud of the lotus (b).

(a) The seemingly paradoxical use of the sentence “Seventh Eternity,” thus dividing the indivisible, is sanctified in esoteric philosophy. The latter divides boundless duration into unconditionally eternal and universal Time and a conditioned one (Khaṇḍakāla). One is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite time (Kāla); the other its phenomenon appearing periodically, as the effect of Mahat (the Universal Intelligence limited by Manvantaric duration). With some schools, Mahat is “the first-born” of Pradhāna (undifferentiated substance, or the periodical aspect of Mūlaprakṛti, the root of Nature), which (Pradhāna) is called Māyā, the Illusion. In this respect, I believe, esoteric teaching differs from the Vedāntin doctrines of both the Advaita and the Viśiṣṭādvaita schools. For it says that, while Mūlaprakṛti, the noumenon, is self-existing and without any origin—is, in short, parentless, Aupapāduka (as one with Brahma)—Prakṛti, its phenomenon, is periodical and no better than a phantasm of the former, so Mahat, with the Occultists, the first-born of Jñāna (or gnōsis) knowledge, wisdom or the Lógos—is a phantasm reflected from the Absolute nirguṇa (Parabrahma, the one reality, “devoid of attributes and qualities”; see Upaniṣads); while with some Vedāntins Mahat is a manifestation of Prakṛti, or Matter.

(b) Therefore, the “last vibration of the Seventh Eternity” was “fore-ordained”—by no God in particular, but occurred in virtue of the eternal and changeless Law which causes the great periods of Activity and Rest, called so graphically, and at the same time so poetically, the “Days and Nights of Brahmā.” The expansion “from within without” of the Mother, called elsewhere the “Waters of Space,” “Universal Matrix,” etc., does not allude to an expansion from a small centre or focus, but, without reference to size or limitation or area, means the development of limitless subjectivity into as limitless objectivity. “The ever (to us) invisible and immaterial Substance present in eternity, threw its periodical shadow from its own plane into the lap

63 THE UNIVERSE, A FLITTING SHADOW.

of Māyā.” It implies that this expansion, not being an increase in size—for infinite extension admits of no enlargement—was a change of condition. It “expanded like the bud of the Lotus”; for the Lotus plant exists not only as a miniature embryo in its seed (a physical characteristic), but its prototype is present in an ideal form in the Astral Light from “Dawn” to “Night” during the Manvantaric period, like everything else, as a matter of fact, in this objective Universe; from man down to mite, from giant trees down to the tiniest blades of grass.

All this, teaches the hidden Science, is but the temporary reflection, the shadow of the eternal ideal prototype in Divine Thought; the word “Eternal,” note well again, standing here only in the sense of “Æon,” as lasting throughout the seemingly interminable, but still limited cycle of activity, called by us Manvantara. For what is the real esoteric meaning of Manvantara, or rather a Manu-Antara? It means, esoterically, “between two Manus,” of whom there are fourteen in every “Day of Brahmā,” such a “Day” consisting of 1,000 aggregates of four ages, or 1,000 “Great Ages,” Mahāyugas. Let us now analyse the word or name Manu. Orientalists and their Dictionaries tell us that the term “Manu” is from the root Man, “to think”; hence “the thinking man.” But, esoterically, every Manu, as an anthropomorphized patron of his special cycle (or Round), is but the personified idea of the “Thought Divine” (as the Hermetic “Pymander” [Poimándrēs]); each of the Manus, therefore, being the special god, the creator and fashioner of all that appears during his own respective cycle of being or Manvantara. Fohat runs the Manus’ (or Dhyāni–Chohans’) errands, and causes the ideal prototypes to expand from within without—viz., to cross gradually, on a descending scale, all the planes from the noumenon to the lowest phenomenon, to bloom finally on the last into full objectivity—the acme of illusion, or the grossest matter.

———

STANZA III.—continued.

2. The vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift wing (simultaneously) the whole universe, and the germ that dwelleth in darkness: the darkness that breathes (moves) over the slumbering waters of life (a).

64 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(a) The Pythagorean Monad is also said to dwell in solitude and darkness like the “germ.” The idea of the “breath” of Darkness moving over “the slumbering Waters of life,” which is primordial matter with the latent Spirit in it, recalls the first chapter of Genesis. Its original is the Brahmanical Nārāyaṇa (the mover on the Waters), who is the personification of the eternal Breath of the unconscious All (or Parabrahma) of the Eastern Occultists. The Waters of Life, or Cháos—the female principle in symbolism—are the vacuum (to our mental sight) in which lie the latent Spirit and Matter. This it was that made Democritus assert, after his instructor Leucippus, that the primordial principles of all were atoms and a vacuum, in the sense of space, but not of empty space, as “Nature abhors a vacuum” according to the Peripatetics, and every ancient philosopher.

In all Cosmogonies “Water” plays the same important part. It is the base and source of material existence. Scientists, mistaking the word for the thing, understood by water the definite chemical combination of oxygen and hydrogen, thus giving a specific meaning to a term used by Occultists in a generic sense, and which is used in Cosmogony with a metaphysical and mystical meaning. Ice is not water, neither is steam, although all three have precisely the same chemical composition.

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

3. “Darkness” radiates light, and light drops one solitary ray into the waters, into the mother deep. The ray shoots through the virgin-egg; the ray causes the eternal egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal (periodical) germ, which condenses into the world egg (a).

(a) The solitary ray dropping into the mother deep may be taken as meaning Divine Thought or Intelligence, impregnating cháos. This, however, occurs on the plane of metaphysical abstraction, or rather the plane whereon that which we call a metaphysical abstraction is a reality. The Virgin-egg being in one sense abstract Egg-ness, or the power of becoming developed through fecundation, is eternal and for ever the same. And just as the fecundation of an egg takes place before it is dropped; so the non-eternal periodical germ which becomes later in

65 NATURE’S SYMBOLS.

symbolism the mundane egg, contains in itself, when it emerges from the said symbol, “the promise and potency” of all the Universe. Though the idea per se is, of course, an abstraction, a symbolical mode of expression, it is a symbol truly, as it suggests the idea of infinity as an endless circle. It brings before the mind’s eye the picture of Kosmos emerging from and in boundless space, a Universe as shoreless in magnitude if not as endless in its objective manifestation. The simile of an egg also expresses the fact taught in Occultism that the primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to globe, from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere having been with all nations the emblem of eternity and infinity—a serpent swallowing its tail. To realize the meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from its centre. The field of vision or of thought is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one’s self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up boundless vistas all around. It is the symbolical circle of Pascal and the Qabbālists, “whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” a conception which enters into the compound idea of this emblem.

The “Mundane Egg” is, perhaps, one of the most universally adopted symbols, highly suggestive as it is, equally in the spiritual, physiological, and cosmological sense. Therefore, it is found in every world-theogony, where it is largely associated with the serpent symbol; the latter being everywhere, in philosophy as in religious symbolism, an emblem of eternity, infinitude, regeneration, and rejuvenation, as well as of wisdom. (See Part II. “Tree and Serpent and Crocodile Worship” [p. 403].) The mystery of apparent self-generation and evolution through its own creative power repeating in miniature the process of Cosmic evolution in the egg, both being due to heat and moisture under the efflux of the unseen creative spirit, justified fully the selection of this graphic symbol. The “Virgin Egg” is the microcosmic symbol of the macrocosmic prototype—the “Virgin Mother”—Cháos or the Primeval Deep. The male Creator (under whatever name) springs forth from the Virgin female, the immaculate root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and natural sciences, can fail to see its suggestiveness? Cosmos as receptive Nature is an Egg fructified—yet left immaculate; once regarded as boundless, it could have no other representation than a spheroid. The Golden Egg was surrounded by seven natural elements (ether, fire, air, water), “four ready, three secret.” It may be found

66 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

stated in Viṣṇu Purāṇa, where elements are translated “Envelopes” and a secret one is added: “Ahaṃkāra” (see Wilson’s Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Book I., p. 40). The original text has no “Ahaṃkāra”; it mentions seven Elements without specifying the last three (see Part II. on “The Mundane Egg”).

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

4. (Then) the three (triangle) fall into the four (quaternary). The radiant essence becomes seven inside, seven outside (a). The luminous egg (Hiraṇyagarbha), which in itself is three (the triple hypostases of Brahmā, or Viṣṇu, the three “Avasthās”), curdles and spreads in milk-white curds throughout the depths of mother, the root that grows in the ocean of life (b).

(a) The use of geometrical figures and the frequent allusions to figures in all ancient scriptures (see Purāṇas, Egyptian papyri, the “Book of the Dead” and even the Bible) must be explained. In the “Book of Dzyan,” as in the Qabbālāh, there are two kinds of numerals to be studied—the figures, often simple blinds, and the Sacred Numbers, the values of which are all known to the Occultists through Initiation. The former is but a conventional glyph, the latter is the basic symbol of all. That is to say, that one is purely physical, the other purely metaphysical, the two standing in relation to each other as matter stands to spirit—the extreme poles of the one Substance.

As Balzac, the unconscious Occultist of French literature, says somewhere, the Number is to Mind the same as it is to matter: “an incomprehensible agent”; (perhaps so to the profane, never to the Initiated mind). Number is, as the great writer thought, an Entity, and, at the same time, a Breath emanating from what he called God and what we call the all; the breath which alone could organize the physical Kosmos, “where naught obtains its form but through the Deity, which is an effect of Number.” It is instructive to quote Balzac’s words upon this subject:

“The smallest as the most immense creations, are they not to be distinguished from each other by their quantities, their qualities, their dimensions, their forces and attributes, all begotten by the Number? The infinitude of the Numbers is a fact proven to our mind, but of which no proof can be physically

67 THE POWER OF NUMBERS.

given. The mathematician will tell us that the infinitude of the numbers exists but is not to be demonstrated. God is a Number endowed with motion, which is felt but not demonstrated. As Unity, it begins the Numbers, with which it has nothing in common. . . . . The existence of the Number depends on Unity, which, without a single Number, begets them all. . . . . What! unable either to measure the first abstraction yielded to you by the Deity, or to get hold of it, you still hope to subject to your measurements the mystery of the Secret Sciences which emanate from that Deity? . . . . And what would you feel, were I to plunge you into the abysses of Motion, the Force which organizes the Number? What would you think, were I to add that Motion and Number⁷¹ are begotten by the Word, the Supreme Reason of the Seers and Prophets, who, in days of old, sensed the mighty Breath of God, a witness to which is the Apocalypse?”

(b) “The radiant essence curdled and spread throughout the depths” of Space. From an astronomical point of view this is easy of explanation: it is the “milky way,” the world-stuff, or primordial matter in its first form. It is more difficult, however, to explain it in a few words or even lines, from the standpoint of Occult Science and Symbolism, as it is the most complicated of glyphs. Herein are enshrined more than a dozen symbols. To begin with, the whole pantheon of mysterious objects,⁷² every one of them having some definite Occult meaning, extracted from the allegorical “churning of the ocean” by the Hindu gods. Besides Amṛta, the water of life or immortality, “Surabhī” the “cow of plenty,” called “the fountain of milk and curds,” was extracted from this “Sea of Milk.” Hence the universal adoration of the cow and bull, one the productive, the other the generative power in Nature: symbols connected with both the Solar and the Cosmic deities. The specific properties, for occult purposes, of the “fourteen precious things,” being explained only at the fourth Initiation, cannot be given here; but the following may be remarked. In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa it is stated that the churning of the “Ocean of Milk” took place in the Satya Yuga, the first age which immediately followed the “Deluge.” As, however, neither the Ṛgveda nor

 

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68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Manu [Manusmṛti]—both preceding Vaivasvata’s “deluge,” that of the bulk of the Fourth Race—mention this deluge, it is evident that it is not the “great” deluge, nor that which carried away Atlantis, nor even the deluge of Nōaḥ, which is meant here. This “churning” relates to a period before the earth’s formation, and is in direct connection with that other universal legend, the various and contradictory versions of which culminated in the Christian dogma of the “War in Heaven,” and the fall of the Angels (see Book II., also Revelation, Chap. 12). The Brāhmaṇas, reproached by the Orientalists with their versions on the same subjects, often clashing with each other, are pre-eminently occult works, hence used purposely as blinds. They were allowed to survive for public use and property only because they were and are absolutely unintelligible to the masses. Otherwise they would have disappeared from circulation as long ago as the days of Akbar.

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

5. The root remains, the light remains, the curds remain, and still Oeaohoo (a) is one (b).

(a) Oeaohoo is rendered “Father-Mother of the Gods” in the Commentaries, or the six in one, or the septenary root from which all proceeds. All depends upon the accent given to these seven vowels, which may be pronounced as one, three, or even seven syllables by adding an e after the letter “o.” This mystic name is given out, because without a thorough mastery of the triple pronunciation it remains for ever ineffectual.

(b) This refers to the Non-Separateness of all that lives and has its being, whether in active or passive state. In one sense, Oeaohoo is the “Rootless Root of All”; hence, one with Parabrahma; in another sense it is a name for the manifested one life, the Eternal living Unity. The “Root” means, as already explained, pure knowledge (Sattva),⁷³

 

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69 THE BLOSSOM OF THE ROOT OF LIFE.

eternal (Nitya) unconditioned reality or sat (Satya), whether we call it Parabrahma or Mūlaprakṛti, for these are the two aspects of the one. The “Light” is the same Omnipresent Spiritual Ray, which has entered and now fecundated the Divine Egg, and calls cosmic matter to begin its long series of differentiations. The curds are the first differentiation, and probably refer also to that cosmic matter which is supposed to be the origin of the “Milky Way”—the matter we know. This “matter,” which, according to the revelation received from the primeval Dhyāni-Buddhas, is, during the periodical sleep of the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity conceivable to the eye of the perfect Bodhisattva—this matter, radical and cool, becomes, at the first reawakening of cosmic motion, scattered through Space; appearing, when seen from the Earth, in clusters and lumps, like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the “Star-stuff.”

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

6. The root of life was in every drop of the ocean of immortality (Amṛta)⁷⁴ and the ocean was radiant light, which was fire and heat and motion. Darkness vanished and was no more.⁷⁵ It disappeared in its own essence, the body of fire and water, of father and mother (a).

(a) The essence of darkness being absolute light, Darkness is taken as the appropriate allegorical representation of the condition of the Universe during Pralaya, or the term of absolute rest, or non-being, as it appears to our finite minds. The “fire,” “heat,” and “motion” here spoken of, are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of physical science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of the essence of these material manifestations—the “things in themselves,” which, as modern science confesses, entirely elude the instruments

 

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70 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the laboratory, and which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally little avoid the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. Fire and Water, or Father⁷⁶ and Mother, may be taken here to mean the divine Ray and Cháos. “Cháos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Prōtogónos (the first-born light),” says a fragment of Hermias. Damascius, in “The Theogony of Hierṓnymos,” calls it Dís [Zeús]—“The disposer of all things.” (See: Cory Ancient Fragments, 1832, p. 314; Damascius, First Principles, Chap. 123.2.)

According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the profane for once correctly, if only partially, so “Light and Darkness are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind”; and according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible” (On Rosenkranz). According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Māyā.

Even in the mind-baffling and science-harassing Genesis, light is created out of darkness “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2)—and not vice versā. “In him (in darkness) was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). A day may come when the eyes of men will be opened; and then they may comprehend better than they do now, that verse in the Gospel of John that says “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” They will see then that the word “darkness” does not apply to man’s spiritual eyesight, but indeed to “Darkness,” the absolute, that comprehendeth not (cannot cognize) transient light, however transcendent to human eyes. Dæmōn est Deus inversus [“the Devil is God inverted”]. The devil is now called Darkness by the Church, whereas, in the Bible he is called the “Son of God” (see Job [1:6]), the bright star of the early morning, Lūcifer (see Isaiah [14:12]). There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Cháos, was called Lūx (Lūcifer), the “Luminous Son of the Morning,” or manvantaric

 

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71 LIGHT EMERGES FROM DARKNESS.

Dawn. He was transformed by the Church into Lūcifer or Satan, because he is higher and older than Jehovah [yəhōwāh], and had to be sacrificed to the new dogma. (See Book II.)

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

7. Behold, oh Lanoo!⁷⁷ the radiant Child of the two, the unparalleled refulgent Glory, Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the * * * (whom thou knowest now as Kwan-Shai-Yin.—Comment) (a). He shines forth as the Sun. He is the blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom. The Eka is Chatur (four), and Chatur takes to itself three, and the union produces the Sapta (seven) in whom are the seven which become the Tridasa⁷⁸ (the thrice ten) the hosts and the multitudes (b). Behold him lifting the Veil, and unfurling it from East to West. He shuts out the above and leaves the below to be seen as the great Illusion. He marks the places for the shining ones (stars) and turns the upper (space) into a shoreless Sea of Fire, and the One manifested (element) into the Great Waters (c).

(a) “Bright Space, son of dark Space,” corresponds to the Ray dropped at the first thrill of the new “Dawn” into the great Cosmic depths, from which it re-emerges differentiated as Oeaohoo the younger, (the “new life”), to become, to the end of the life-cycle, the germ of all things. He is “the Incorporeal man who contains in himself the divine Idea,”—the generator of Light and Life, to use an expression of Philo Judæus. He is called the “Blazing Dragon of Wisdom,”

 

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72 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

because, firstly, he is that which the Greek philosophers called the Logos, the Verbum of the Thought Divine; and secondly, because in Esoteric philosophy this first manifestation, being the synthesis or the aggregate of Universal Wisdom, Oeaohoo, “the Son of the Son,” contains in himself the Seven Creative Hosts (The Sephiroth), and is thus the essence of manifested Wisdom. “He who bathes in the light of Oeaohoo will never be deceived by the veil of Mâyâ.”

Kwan-Shai-Yin is identical with, and an equivalent of the Sanskrit Avalôkitêshwara, and as such he is an androgynous deity, like the Tetragrammaton and all the Logoi⁷⁹ of antiquity. It is only by some sects in China that he is anthropomorphized and represented with female attributes,⁸⁰ when, under his female aspect, he becomes Kwan-Yin, the goddess of mercy, called the “Divine Voice.”⁸¹ The latter is the patron deity of Thibet and of the island of Puto in China, where both deities have a number of monasteries.⁸² (See Part II. Kwan-Shai-Yin and Kwan-yin.)

 

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73 THE DRAGON AND THE LOGOI.

(b) “The “Dragon of Wisdom” is the One, the “Eka” (Sanskrit) or Saka. It is curious that Jehovah’s name in Hebrew should also be One, Echod. “His name is Echod”: say the Rabbins. The philologists ought to decide which of the two is derived from the other—linguistically and symbolically: surely, not the Sanskrit? The “One” and the Dragon are expressions used by the ancients in connection with their respective Logoi. Jehovah—esoterically (as Elohim)—is also the Serpent or Dragon that tempted Eve, and the “Dragon” is an old glyph for “Astral Light” (Primordial Principle), “which is the Wisdom of Chaos.” Archaic philosophy, recognizing neither Good nor Evil as a fundamental or independent power, but starting from the Absolute all (Universal Perfection eternally), traced both through the course of natural evolution to pure Light condensing gradually into form, hence becoming Matter or Evil. It was left with the early and ignorant Christian fathers to degrade the philosophical and highly scientific idea of this emblem (the Dragon) into the absurd superstition called the “Devil.” They took it from the later Zoroastrians, who saw devils or the Evil in the Hindu Devas, and the word Evil thus became by a double transmutation D’Evil in every tongue (Diabolos, Diable, Diavolo, Teufel). But the Pagans have always shown a philosophical discrimination in their symbols. The primitive symbol of the serpent symbolised divine Wisdom and Perfection, and had always stood for psychical Regeneration and Immortality. Hence—Hermes, calling the serpent the most spiritual of all beings; Moses, initiated in the wisdom of Hermes, following suit in Genesis; the Gnostic’s Serpent with the seven vowels over its head, being the emblem of the seven hierarchies of the Septenary or Planetary Creators. Hence, also, the Hindu serpent Sesha or Ananta, “the Infinite,” a name of Vishnu, whose first Vahan or vehicle on the primordial waters is this serpent.⁸³ Yet they all made a difference between the good and the bad Serpent (the Astral Light of

 

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74 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Kabalists)—between the former, the embodiment of divine Wisdom in the region of the Spiritual, and the latter, Evil, on the plane of matter.⁸⁴ Jesus accepted the serpent as a synonym of Wisdom, and this formed part of his teaching: “Be ye wise as serpents,” he says. “In the beginning, before Mother became Father-Mother, the fiery Dragon moved in the infinitudes alone” (Book of Sarparâjni.) The Aitareya Brâhmana calls the Earth Sarparâjni, “the Serpent Queen,” and “the Mother of all that moves.” Before our globe became egg-shaped (and the Universe also) “a long trail of Cosmic dust (or fire mist) moved and writhed like a serpent in Space.” The “Spirit of God moving on Chaos” was symbolized by every nation in the shape of a fiery serpent breathing fire and light upon the primordial waters, until it had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth—which symbolises not only Eternity and Infinitude, but also the globular shape of all the bodies formed within the Universe from that fiery mist. The Universe, as well as the Earth and Man, cast off periodically, serpent-like, their old skins, to assume new ones after a time of rest. The serpent is, surely, a not less graceful or a more unpoetical image than the caterpillar and chrysalis from which springs the butterfly, the Greek emblem of Psyche, the human soul. The “Dragon” was also the symbol of the Logos with the Egyptians, as with the Gnostics. In the “Book of Hermes,” Pymander, the oldest and the most spiritual of the Logoi of the Western Continent, appears to Hermes in the shape of a Fiery Dragon of “Light, Fire, and Flame.” Pymander, the “Thought Divine” personified, says: The Light is me, I am the Nous (the mind or Manu), I am thy God, and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the shadow (“Darkness,” or the concealed Deity). I am the germ of thought, the resplendent Word, the Son of God. All that thus sees and hears in thee is the Verbum of the Master, it is the Thought (Mahat) which is God, the Father.⁸⁵

 

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75 NOUMENAL AND PHENOMENAL LIGHT.

The celestial Ocean, the Æther . . . . is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving principle, the Mother, the Holy Spirit, . . . . for these are not separated, and their union is life.”

Here we find the unmistakeable echo of the Archaic Secret Doctrine, as now expounded. Only the latter does not place at the head and Evolution of Life “the Father,” who comes third and is the “Son of the Mother,” but the “Eternal and Ceaseless Breath of the All.” The Mahat (Understanding, Universal Mind, Thought, etc.), before it manifests itself as Brahmâ or Siva, appears as Vishnu, says Sânkhya Sâra (p. 16); hence Mahat has several aspects, just as the logos has. Mahat is called the Lord, in the Primary Creation, and is, in this sense, Universal Cognition or Thought Divine; but, “That Mahat which was first produced is (afterwards) called Ego-ism, when it is born as “I,” that is said to be the second Creation” (Anugîtâ, ch. xxvi.). And the translator (an able and learned Brahmin, not a European Orientalist) explains in a foot-note (6), “i.e., when Mahat develops into the feeling of Self-Consciousness—I—then it assumes the name of Egoism,” which, translated into our esoteric phraseology, means when Mahat is transformed into the human Manas (or even that of the finite gods), and becomes Aham-ship. Why it is called the Mahat of the Second creation (or the ninth, that of the Kumâra in Vishnu Purâna) will be explained in Book II. The “Sea of Fire” is then the Super-Astral (i.e., noumenal) Light, the first radiation from the Root, the Mulaprakriti, the undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which becomes Astral Matter. It is also called the “Fiery Serpent,” as above described. If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying, and that all the rest—as in the world of phenomena—are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now called) of that One, from Cosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super-human down to human and sub-human beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence—then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered.⁸⁶ All the Kabalists and Occultists, Eastern and Western, recognise (a)

 

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76 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the identity of “Father-Mother” with primordial Æther or Akâsa, (Astral Light)⁸⁷; and (b) its homogeneity before the evolution of the “Son,” cosmically Fohat, for it is Cosmic Electricity. “Fohat hardens and scatters the seven brothers” (Book III. Dzyan); which means that the primordial Electric Entity—for the Eastern Occultists insist that Electricity is an Entity—electrifies into life, and separates primordial stuff or pregenetic matter into atoms, themselves the source of all life and consciousness. “There exists an universal agent unique of all forms and of life, that is called Od,⁸⁸ Ob, and Aour, active and passive, positive and negative, like day and night: it is the first light in Creation” (Eliphas Lévi’s Kabala): the first Light of the primordial Elohim—the Adam, “male and female”—or (scientifically) electricity and life.

(c) The ancients represented it by a serpent, for “Fohat hisses as he glides hither and thither” (in zigzags). The Kabala figures it with the Hebrew letter Teth ט, whose symbol is the serpent which played such a prominent part in the Mysteries. Its universal value is nine, for it is the ninth letter of the alphabet and the ninth door of the fifty portals or gateways that lead to the concealed mysteries of being. It is the magical agent par excellence, and designates in Hermetic philosophy “Life infused into primordial matter,” the essence that composes all things, and the spirit that determines their form. But there are two secret Hermetical operations, one spiritual, the other material-correlative, and for ever united. “Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the solid . . . that which ascends from earth to heaven and descends again from heaven to earth. It (the subtle light), is the strong force of every force, for it conquers every subtle thing and penetrates into every solid. Thus was the world formed” (Hermes).

It was not Zeno alone, the founder of the Stoics, who taught that the

 

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77 DEITY IN SPACE AND TIME.

Universe evolves, when its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that of air, then into water, etc. Heracleitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fires is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years b.c.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine reconciles all those philosophers by showing that though each was right the system of none was complete.

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

8. Where was the germ, and where was now darkness? Where is the spirit of the flame that burns in thy lamp, oh Lanoo? The germ is that, and that is light; the white brilliant son of the dark hidden father (a).

(a) The answer to the first question, suggested by the second, which is the reply of the teacher to the pupil, contains in a single phrase one of the most essential truths of occult philosophy. It indicates the existence of things imperceptible to our physical senses which are of far greater importance, more real and more permanent, than those that appeal to these senses themselves. Before the Lanoo can hope to understand the transcendentally metaphysical problem contained in the first question he must be able to answer the second, while the very answer he gives to the second will furnish him with the clue to the correct reply to the first.

In the Sanscrit Commentary on this Stanza, the terms used for the concealed and the unrevealed Principle are many. In the earliest MSS. of Indian literature this Unrevealed, Abstract Deity has no name. It is called generally “That” (Tad in Sanskrit), and means all that is, was, and will be, or that can be so received by the human mind.

Among such appellations, given, of course, only in esoteric philosophy, as the “Unfathomable Darkness,” the “Whirlwind,” etc.—it is also called the “It of the Kalahansa, the Kala-ham-sa,” and even the “Kali Hamsa,” (Black swan). Here the m and the n are convertible, and

78 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

both sound like the nasal French an or am, or, again, en or em (Ennui, Embarras, etc.). As in the Hebrew Bible, many a mysterious sacred name in Sanscrit conveys to the profane ear no more than some ordinary, and often vulgar word, because it is concealed anagrammatically or otherwise. This word of Hansa or esoterically “hamsa” is just such a case. Hamsa is equal to a-ham-sa, three words meaning “I am he” (in English), while divided in still another way it will read “So-ham,” “he (is) I”—Soham being equal to Sah, “he,” and aham, “I,” or “I am he.” In this alone is contained the universal mystery, the doctrine of the identity of man’s essence with god-essence, for him who understands the language of wisdom. Hence the glyph of, and the allegory about, Kalahansa (or hamsa), and the name given to Brahma neuter (later on, to the male Brahmâ) of “Hansa-Vahana,” “he who uses the Hansa as his vehicle.” The same word may be read “Kalaham-sa” or “I am I” in the eternity of Time, answering to the Biblical, or rather Zoroastrian “I am that I am.” The same doctrine is found in the Kabala, as witness the following extract from an unpublished MS. by Mr. S. Liddell McGregor Mathers, the learned Kabalist:

“The three pronouns, הוא, אתה, אני, Hū, ʾAttāh, ʾĂnī; He, Thou, I; are used to symbolize the ideas of Macroprosopus and Microprosopus in the Hebrew Qabalah. Hū, ‘He,’ is applied to the hidden and concealed Macroprosopus; ʾAttāh, ‘Thou,’ to Microprosopus; and ʾĂnī, ‘I,’ to the latter when He is represented as speaking. (See Lesser Holy Assembly [Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā], 204 et seq. [Zōhar 3:290a.2-4].) It is to be noted that each of these names consists of three letters, of which the letter Aleph א, A, forms the conclusion of the first word Hū, and the commencement of ʾAttāh and ʾĂnī, as if it were the connecting link between them. But א is the symbol of the Unity and consequently of the unvarying Idea of the Divine operating through all these. But behind the א in the name Hū are the letters ו and ה, the symbols of the numbers Six and Five, the Male and the Female, the Hexagram and the Pentagram. And the numbers of these three words, Hū ʾAttāh ʾĂnī, are 12, 406, and 61, which are resumed in the key numbers of 3, 10, and 7, by the Qabalah of the Nine Chambers, which is a form of the exegetical rule of Temura.”

It is useless to attempt to explain the mystery in full. Materialists and the men of modern Science will never understand it, since, in order

79 PRIMEVAL RADIATIONS FROM THE UNITY.

to obtain clear perception of it, one has first of all to admit the postulate of a universally diffused, omnipresent, eternal Deity in Nature; secondly, to have fathomed the mystery of electricity in its true essence; and thirdly, to credit man with being the septenary symbol, on the terrestrial plane, of the One Great Unit (the Logos), which is Itself the Seven-vowelled sign, the Breath crystallized into the Word.⁸⁹ He who believes in all this, has also to believe in the multiple combination of the seven planets of Occultism and of the Kabala, with the twelve zodiacal signs; to attribute, as we do, to each planet and to each constellation an influence which, in the words of Ely Star (a French Occultist), “is proper to it, beneficent or maleficent, and this, after the planetary Spirit which rules it, who, in his turn, is capable of influencing men and things which are found in harmony with him and with which he has any affinity.” For these reasons, and since few believe in the foregoing, all that can now be given is that in both cases the symbol of Hansa (whether “I,” “He,” Goose or Swan) is an important symbol, representing, for instance, Divine Wisdom, Wisdom in darkness beyond the reach of men. For all exoteric purposes, Hansa, as every Hindu knows, is a fabulous bird, which, when given milk mixed with water for its food (in the allegory) separated the two, drinking the milk and leaving the water; thus showing inherent wisdom—milk standing symbolically for spirit, and water for matter.

That this allegory is very ancient and dates from the very earliest archaic period, is shown by the mention (in Bhagavata Purâna) of a certain caste named “Hamsa” or “Hansa,” which was the “one caste” par excellence; when far back in the mists of a forgotten past there was among the Hindus only “One Veda, One Deity, One Caste.” There is also a range in the Himalayas, described in the old books as being situated north of Mount Meru, called “Hamsa,” and connected with episodes pertaining to the history of religious mysteries and initiations. As to the name of Kâla-Hansa being the supposed vehicle of Brahmâ-Prajâpati, in the exoteric texts and translations of the

 

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80 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Orientalists, it is quite a mistake. Brahma, the neuter, is called by them Kala-Hansa and Brahmâ, the male, Hansa-Vahana, because forsooth “his vehicle or Vahan is a swan or goose” (vide “the Hindu Classical Dictionary.”) This is a purely exoteric gloss. Esoterically and logically, if Brahma, the infinite, is all that is described by the Orientalists, namely, agreeably with the Vedantic texts, an abstract deity in no way characterised by the description of any human attributes, and it is still maintained that he or it is called Kala-Hansa—then how can it ever become the Vahan of Brahmâ, the manifested finite god? It is quite the reverse. The “Swan or goose” (Hansa) is the symbol of that male or temporary deity, as he, the emanation of the primordial Ray, is made to serve as a Vahan or vehicle for that divine Ray, which otherwise could not manifest itself in the Universe, being, antiphrastically, itself an emanation of “Darkness”—for our human intellect, at any rate. It is Brahmâ, then, who is Kâla-Hansa, and the Ray, the Hansa-Vahana.

As to the strange symbol chosen, it is equally suggestive; the true mystic significance being the idea of a universal matrix, figured by the primordial waters of the “deep,” or the opening for the reception, and subsequently for the issue, of that one ray (the Logos), which contains in itself the other seven procreative rays or powers (the logoi or builders). Hence the choice by the Rosecroix of the aquatic fowl—whether swan or pelican,⁹⁰ with seven young ones for a symbol, modified and adapted to the religion of every country. En-Soph is called the “Fiery Soul of the Pelican” in the Book of Numbers.⁹¹ (See Part II. “The Hidden Deity and its Symbols and Glyphs.”) Appearing with every Manvantara as Narâyan, or Swayambhuva (the

 

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81 PRIMEVAL DIFFERENTIATIONS.

Self-Existent), and penetrating into the Mundane Egg, it emerges from it at the end of the divine incubation as Brahmâ or Prajâpati, a progenitor of the future Universe into which he expands. He is Purusha (spirit), but he is also Prakriti (matter). Therefore it is only after separating himself into two halves—Brahmâ-vâch (the female) and Brahmâ-Virâj (the male), that the Prajâpati becomes the male Brahmâ.

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STANZA III.—Continued.

9. Light is cold flame, and flame is fire, and the fire produces heat, which yields water, the water of life in the great mother (Chaos) (a).

(a) It must be remembered that the words “Light,” “Fire,” and “Flame” used in the Stanzas have been adopted by the translators thereof from the vocabulary of the old “Fire philosophers,”⁹² in order to render better the meaning of the archaic terms and symbols employed in the original. Otherwise they would have remained entirely unintelligible to a European reader. But to a student of the Occult the terms used will be sufficiently clear.

All these—“Light,” “Flame,” “Hot,” “Cold,” “Fire,” “Heat,” “Water,” and the “water of life” are all, on our plane, the progeny; or as a modern physicist would say, the correlations of electricity. Mighty word, and a still mightier symbol! Sacred generator of a no less sacred progeny; of fire—the creator, the preserver and the destroyer; of light—the essence of our divine ancestors; of flame—the Soul of things. Electricity, the one Life at the upper rung of Being, and Astral Fluid, the Athanor of the Alchemists, at its lowest; god and devil, good and evil. . . .

 

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82 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Now, why is Light called in the Stanzas “cold flame”? Because in the order of Cosmic evolution (as taught by the Occultist), the energy that actuates matter after its first formation into atoms is generated on our plane by Cosmic heat; and because Kosmos, in the sense of dissociated matter, was not, before that period. The first primordial matter, eternal and coeval with Space, “which has neither a beginning nor an end,” is “neither hot nor cold, but is of its own special nature,” says the Commentary (Book II). Heat and cold are relative qualities and pertain to the realms of the manifested worlds, which all proceed from the manifested Hyle, which, in its absolutely latent aspect, is referred to as the “cold Virgin,” and when awakened to life, as the “Mother.” The ancient Western Cosmogonic myths state that at first there was but cold mist which was the Father, and the prolific slime (the Mother, Ilus or Hyle), from which crept forth the Mundane snake-matter, (Isis, vol. i., p. 146). Primordial matter, then, before it emerges from the plane of the never-manifesting, and awakens to the thrill of action under the impulse of Fohat, is but “a cool Radiance, colourless, formless, tasteless, and devoid of every quality and aspect.” Even such are her first-born, the “four sons,” who “are One, and become Seven,”—the entities, by whose qualifications and names the ancient Eastern Occultists called the four of the seven primal “centres of Forces,” or atoms, that develop later into the great Cosmic “Elements,” now divided into the seventy or so sub-elements, known to science. The four primal natures of the first Dhyan Chohans, are the so-called (for want of better terms) “Akasic,” “Ethereal,” “Watery,” and “Fiery,” answering, in the terminology of practical occultism, to scientific definitions of gases, which, to convey a clear idea to both Occultists and laymen, must be defined as Parahydrogenic,⁹³ Paraoxygenic, Oxyhydrogenic, and Ozonic, or perhaps Nitr-ozonic; the latter forces or gases (in Occultism, supersensuous, yet atomic substances) being the most effective and active when energising on the plane of more grossly differentiated matter.⁹⁴ These are both electro-positive and electro-negative.

 

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83 THE WEB OF BEING.

STANZA III.—Continued.

10. Father-Mother spin a web whose upper end is fastened to Spirit (Purusha), the light of the one Darkness, and the lower one to Matter (Prakriti) its (the Spirit’s) shadowy end; and this web is the Universe spun out of the two substances made in one, which is Swâbhâvat (a).

(a) In the Mandukya (Mundaka) Upanishad it is written, “As a spider throws out and retracts its web, as herbs spring up in the ground . . . so is the Universe derived from the undecaying one” (I. 1. 7). Brahmâ, as “the germ of unknown Darkness,” is the material from which all evolves and develops “as the web from the spider, as foam from the water,” etc. This is only graphic and true, if Brahmâ the “Creator” is, as a term, derived from the root brih, to increase or expand. Brahmâ “expands” and becomes the Universe woven out of his own substance.

The same idea has been beautifully expressed by Goethe, who says:

“Thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou see’st Him by.”

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STANZA III.—Continued.

11. It (the Web) expands when the breath of fire (the Father) is upon it; it contracts when the breath of the mother (the root of Matter) touches it. Then the sons (the Elements with their respective Powers, or Intelligences) dissociate and scatter, to return into their mother’s bosom at the end of the “great day” and rebecome one with her (a). When it (the Web) is cooling, it becomes radiant, its sons expand and contract through their own selves and hearts; they embrace infinitude. (b)

(a) The expanding of the Universe under the breath of Fire is very suggestive in the light of the “Fire mist” period of which modern science speaks so much, and knows in reality so little.

Great heat breaks up the compound elements and resolves the

84 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

heavenly bodies into their primeval one element, explains the commentary. Once disintegrated into its primal constituent by getting within the attraction and reach of a focus, or centre of heat (energy), of which many are carried about to and fro in space, a body, whether alive or dead, will be vapourised and held in “the bosom of the Mother” until Fohat, gathering a few of the clusters of Cosmic matter (nebulæ) will, by giving it an impulse, set it in motion anew, develop the required heat, and then leave it to follow its own new growth.

(b) The expanding and contracting of the Web—i.e., the world stuff or atoms—expresses here the pulsatory movement; for it is the regular contraction and expansion of the infinite and shoreless Ocean of that which we may call the noumenon of matter emanated by Swâbhâvat, which causes the universal vibration of atoms. But it is also suggestive of something else. It shows that the ancients were acquainted with that which is now the puzzle of many scientists and especially of astronomers: the cause of the first ignition of matter or the world-stuff, the paradox of the heat produced by the refrigerative contraction and other such Cosmic riddles. For it points unmistakeably to a knowledge by the ancients of such phenomena. “There is heat internal and heat external in every atom,” say the manuscript Commentaries, to which the writer has had access; “the breath of the Father (or Spirit) and the breath (or heat) of the Mother (matter)”; and they give explanations which show that the modern theory of the extinction of the solar fires by loss of heat through radiation, is erroneous. The assumption is false even on the Scientists’ own admission. For as Professor Newcomb points out (Popular Astronomy, pp. 506-508), “by losing heat, a gaseous body contracts, and the heat generated by the contraction exceeds that which it had to lose in order to produce the contraction.” This paradox, that a body gets hotter as the shrinking produced by its getting colder is greater, led to long disputes. The surplus of heat, it was argued, was lost by radiation, and to assume that the temperature is not lowered pari passu with a decrease of volume under a constant pressure, is to set at nought the law of Charles (Nebular Theory, Winchell). Contraction develops heat, it is true; but contraction (from cooling) is incapable of developing the whole amount of heat at any time existing in the mass, or even of maintaining a body at a constant temperature, etc. Professor Winchell tries to reconcile the paradox—only a seeming one in fact, as

85 CONSCIOUS ELECTRICITY.

Homer Lanes proved,—by suggesting “something besides heat.” “May it not be,” he asks, “simply a repulsion among the molecules, which varies according to some law of the distance?” But even this will be found irreconcileable, unless this “something besides heat” is ticketed “Causeless Heat,” the “Breath of Fire,” the all-creative Force plus absolute intelligence, which physical science is not likely to accept.

However it may be, the reading of this Stanza shows it, notwithstanding its archaic phraseology, to be more scientific than even modern science.

———

STANZA III.—Continued.

12. Then Svâbhâvat sends Fohat to harden the atoms. Each (of these) is a part of the web (Universe). Reflecting the “Self-Existent Lord” (Primeval Light) like a mirror, each becomes in turn a world.⁹⁵ . . .

“Fohat hardens the atoms”; i.e., by infusing energy into them: he scatters the atoms or primordial matter. “He scatters himself while scattering matter into atoms” (MSS. Commentaries.)

It is through Fohat that the ideas of the Universal Mind are impressed upon matter. Some faint idea of the nature of Fohat may be gathered from the appellation “Cosmic Electricity” sometimes applied to it; but to the commonly known properties of electricity must, in this case, be added others, including intelligence. It is of interest to note that modern science has come to the conclusion, that all cerebration and brain-activity are attended by electrical phenomena. (For further details as to “Fohat” See Stanza V. and Comments.”)

 

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86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

STANZA IV.

Commentary.

1. Listen, ye Sons of the Earth, to your instructors—the Sons of the Fire (a). Learn there is neither first nor last; for all is one number, issued from no number (b).

(a) These terms, the “Sons of the Fire,” the “Sons of the Fire-Mist,” and the like, require explanation. They are connected with a great primordial and universal mystery, and it is not easy to make it clear. There is a passage in the Bhagavatgîtâ (ch. viii.) wherein Krishna, speaking symbolically and esoterically, says: “I will state the times (conditions) . . . at which devotees departing (from this life) do so never to return (be reborn), or to return (to incarnate again). The Fire, the Flame, the day, the bright (lucky) fortnight, the six months of the Northern solstice, departing (dying) in these, those who know the Brahman (Yogis) go to the Brahman. Smoke, night, the dark (unlucky) fortnight, the six months of the Southern solstice, (dying) in these, the devotee goes to the lunar light (or mansion the astral light also) and returns (is reborn). These two paths, bright and dark, are said to be eternal in this world (or great kalpa, ‘Age’). By the one a man goes never to come back, by the other he returns.” Now these names, “Fire,” “Flame,” “Day,” the “bright fortnight,” etc., as “Smoke,” “Night,” and so on, leading only to the end of the lunar path are incomprehensible without a knowledge of Esotericism. These are all names of various deities which preside over the Cosmo-psychic Powers. We often speak of the Hierarchy of “Flames” (see Book II.), of the “Sons of Fire,” etc. Sankarachârya the greatest of the Esoteric masters of India, says that fire means a deity which presides over Time (kâla). The able translator of Bhagavatgitâ, Kashinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A., of Bombay, confesses he has “no clear notion of the meaning of these verses” (p. 81, footnote). It seems quite clear, on the contrary, to him who knows the occult doctrine. With these verses the mystic sense of the solar and lunar symbols are connected: the Pitris are lunar deities and our ancestors, because they created the physical man.

87 THE SEVEN MYSTIC SENSES.

The Agnishwatha, the Kumara (the seven mystic sages), are solar deities, though the former are Pitris also; and these are the “fashioners of the Inner Man.” (See Book II.) They are:

“The Sons of Fire”—because they are the first Beings (in the Secret Doctrine they are called “Minds”), evolved from Primordial Fire. “The Lord is a consuming Fire” (Deuteronomy iv. 24); “The Lord (Christos) shall be revealed with his mighty angels in flaming fire” (2 Thessal. i. 7, 8). The Holy Ghost descended on the Apostles like “cloven tongues of fire,” (Acts ii. v. 3); Vishnu will return on Kalki, the White Horse, as the last Avatar amid fire and flames; and Sosiosh will be brought down equally on a White Horse in a “tornado of fire.” “And I saw heaven open and behold a white horse, and he that sat upon him . . . . is called the Word of God,” (Rev. xix. 13) amid flaming Fire. Fire is Æther in its purest form, and hence is not regarded as matter, but it is the unity of Æther—the second manifested deity—in its universality. But there are two “Fires” and a distinction is made between them in the Occult teachings. The first, or the purely Formless and invisible Fire concealed in the Central Spiritual Sun, is spoken of as “triple” (metaphysically); while the Fire of the manifested Kosmos is Septenary, throughout both the Universe and our Solar System. “The fire of knowledge burns up all action on the plane of illusion,” says the commentary. “Therefore, those who have acquired it and are emancipated, are called ‘Fires.’” Speaking of the seven senses symbolised as Hotris, priests, the Brâhmana says in Anugîtâ: “Thus these seven (senses, smell and taste, and colour, and sound, etc., etc.) are the causes of emancipation”; and the commentator adds: “It is from these seven from which the Self is to be emancipated. ‘I’ (am here devoid of qualities) must mean the Self, not the Brâhmana who speaks.” (“Sacred Books of the East,” ed. by Max Müller, Vol. VIII., 278.)

(b) The expression “All is One Number, issued from No Number” relates again to that universal and philosophical tenet just explained in Stanza III. (Comm. 4). That which is absolute is of course No Number; but in its later significance it has an application in Space as in Time. It means that not only every increment of time is part of a larger increment, up to the most indefinitely prolonged duration conceivable by the human intellect, but also that no manifested thing can

88 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

be thought of except as part of a larger whole: the total aggregate being the One manifested Universe that issues from the unmanifested or Absolute—called Non-Being or “No-Number,” to distinguish it from Being or “the One Number.”

———

STANZA IV.—Continued.

2. Learn what we, who descend from the Primordial Seven, we, who are born from the Primordial Flame, have learned from our Fathers (a).

(a) This is explained in Book II., and this name, “Primordial Flame,” corroborates what is said in the first paragraph of the preceding commentary on Stanza IV.

The distinction between the “Primordial” and the subsequent seven Builders is this: The former are the Ray and direct emanation of the first “Sacred Four,” the Tetraktis, that is, the eternally Self-Existent One (Eternal in Essence note well, not in manifestation, and distinct from the universal one). Latent, during Pralaya, and active, during Manvantara, the “Primordial” proceed from “Father-Mother” (Spirit-Hyle, or Ilus); whereas the other manifested Quaternary and the Seven proceed from the Mother alone. It is the latter who is the immaculate Virgin-Mother, who is overshadowed, not impregnated, by the Universal Mystery—when she emerges from her state of Laya or undifferentiated condition. In reality, they are, of course, all one; but their aspects on the various planes of being are different. (See Part II., “Theogony of the Creative Gods.”)

The first “Primordial” are the highest Beings on the Scale of Existence. They are the Archangels of Christianity, those who refuse—as Michael did in the latter system, and as did the eldest “Mind-born sons” of Brahmâ (Veddhas)—to create or rather to multiply.

———

STANZA IV.—Continued.

3. From the effulgency of light—the ray of the ever-darkness—sprung in space the re-awakened energies (Dhyan Chohans): the one from the egg, the six and the five (a); then the three, the one,

89 THE VEHICLE OF THE UNIVERSE.

the four, the one, the five—the twice seven, the sum total (b). And these are: the essences, the flames, the elements, the builders, the numbers, the arupa (formless), the rupa (with bodies), and the force or divine man—the sum total. And from the divine man emanated the forms, the sparks, the sacred animals, and the messengers of the sacred fathers (the Pitris) within the holy four (c).⁹⁶

(a) This relates to the sacred Science of the Numerals: so sacred, indeed, and so important in the study of Occultism that the subject can hardly be skimmed, even in such a large work as the present. It is on the Hierarchies and correct numbers of these Beings invisible (to us) except upon very rare occasions, that the mystery of the whole Universe is built. The Kumaras, for instance, are called the “Four” though in reality seven in number, because Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatana and Sanat-Kumara are the chief Vaidhâtra (their patronymic name), as they spring from the “four-fold mystery.” To make the whole clearer we have to turn for our illustrations to tenets more familiar to some of our readers, namely, the Brahminical.

According to Manu, Hiranyagarbha is Brahmâ the first male formed by the undiscernible Causeless cause in a “Golden Egg resplendent as the Sun,” as states the Hindu Classical Dictionary. “Hiranyagarbha”—means the golden, or rather the “Effulgent Womb” or Egg. The meaning tallies awkwardly with the epithet of “male.” Surely the esoteric meaning of the sentence is clear enough. In the Rig Veda it is said: “That, the one Lord of all beings . . . . the one animating principle of gods and man,” arose, in the beginning, in the Golden Womb, Hiranyagarbha—which is the Mundane Egg or sphere of our Universe. That Being is surely androgynous, and the allegory of Brahmâ separating into two and recreating in one of his halves (the female Vâch) himself as Virâj, is a proof of it.

“The One from the Egg, the Six and the Five,” give the number 1065, the value of the first-born (later on the male and female Brahmâ-Prajâpati), who answers to the numbers 7, and 14, and 21 respectively. The Prajâpati are, like the Sephiroth, only seven, including the

 

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90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

synthetic Sephira of the triad from which they spring. Thus from Hiranyagarbha or Prajâpati, the triune (primeval Vedic Trimurti, Agni, Vayu, and Surya), emanate the other seven, or again ten, if we separate the first three which exist in one, and one in three, all, moreover, being comprehended within that one “supreme” Parama, called Guhya or “secret,” and Sarvâtma, the “Super-Soul.” “The seven Lords of Being lie concealed in Sarvâtma like thoughts in one brain.” So are the Sephiroth. It is either seven when counting from the upper Triad headed by Kether, or ten—exoterically. In the Mahabhârata the Prajâpati are 21 in number, or ten, six, and five (1065), thrice seven.⁹⁷

(b) “The Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five” (in their totality—twice seven) represent 31415—the numerical hierarchy of the Dhyan-Chohans of various orders, and of the inner or circumscribed world.⁹⁸ When placed on the boundary of the great circle of “Pass not” (see Stanza V.), called also the Dhyanipasa, the “rope of the Angels,” the “rope” that hedges off the phenomenal from the noumenal Kosmos, (not falling within the range of our present objective consciousness); this number, when not enlarged by permutation and expansion, is ever 31415 anagrammatically and Kabalistically, being both the number of the circle and the mystic Svastica, the twice seven once more; for whatever way the two sets of figures are counted, when added separately, one figure after another, whether crossways, from right or from left, they will always yield fourteen. Mathematically they represent the well-known calculation, namely, that the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle is as 1 to 3.1415, or the value of the π (pi), as this ratio is called—the symbol π being always used in

 

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91 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTIONS.

mathematical formulæ to express it. This set of figures must have the same meaning, since the 1:314,159, and then again 1:3:1,415,927 are worked out in the secret calculations to express the various cycles and ages of the “first born,” or 311,040,000,000,000 with fractions, and yield the same 13,415 by a process we are not concerned with at present. And it may be shown that Mr. Ralston Skinner, author of The Source of Measures, reads the Hebrew word Alhim in the same number values, by omitting, as said, the ciphers and by permutation—13,514: since א (a) is 1; ל (l) is 3 (or 30); ה (h) is 5; י (i) 1 for 10; and ם (m) is 4 (40), and anagrammatically—31,415 as explained by him.

Thus, while in the metaphysical world, the circle with the one central Point in it has no number, and is called Anupadaka (parentless and numberless)—viz., it can fall under no calculation,—in the manifested world the mundane Egg or Circle is circumscribed within the groups called the Line, the Triangle, the Pentacle, the second Line and the Cube (or 13514); and when the Point having generated a Line, thus becomes a diameter which stands for the androgynous Logos, then the figures become 31415, or a triangle, a line, a cube, the second line, and a pentacle. “When the Son separates from the Mother he becomes the Father,” the diameter standing for Nature, or the feminine principle. Therefore it is said: “In the world of being, the one Point fructifies the Line—the Virgin Matrix of Kosmos (the egg-shaped zero)—and the immaculate Mother gives birth to the form that combines all forms.” Prajâpati is called the first procreating male, and “his Mother’s husband.”⁹⁹ This gives the key-note to all the later divine sons from immaculate mothers. It is greatly corroborated by the significant fact that Anna (the name of the Mother of the Virgin Mary) now represented by the Roman Catholic church as having given birth to her daughter in an immaculate way (“Mary conceived without sin”), is derived from the Chaldean Ana, heaven, or Astral Light, Anima Mundi; whence Anaitia, Devi-durga, the wife of Siva, is also called Annapurna,

 

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92 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and Kanya, the Virgin; “Uma-Kanya” being her esoteric name, and meaning the “Virgin of light,” Astral Light in one of its multitudinous aspects.

(c) The Devas, Pitris, Rishis; the Suras and the Asuras; the Daityas and Adityas; the Danavas and Gandharvas, etc., etc., have all their synonyms in our Secret Doctrine, as well as in the Kabala and the Hebrew Angelology; but it is useless to give their ancient names, as it would only create confusion. Many of these may be also found now, even in the Christian hierarchy of divine and celestial powers. All those Thrones and Dominions, Virtues and Principalities, Cherubs, Seraphs and demons, the various denizens of the Sidereal World, are the modern copies of archaic prototypes. The very symbolism in their names, when transliterated and arranged in Greek and Latin, are sufficient to show it, as will be proved in several cases further on.

The “Sacred Animals” are found in the Bible as well as in the Kabala, and they have their meaning (a very profound one, too) on the page of the origins of Life. In the Sepher Jezirah it is stated that “God engraved in the Holy Four the throne of his glory, the Ophanim (Wheels or the World-Spheres), the Seraphim,¹⁰⁰ the Sacred Animals, and the ministering angels, and from these three (the Air, Water, and Fire or Ether) he formed his habitation.” Thus was the world made “through three Seraphim—Sepher, Saphar, and Sipur,” or “through Number, Numbers, and Numbered.” With the astronomical key these “Sacred Animals” become the signs of the Zodiac.

 

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93 THE POTENCY OF SPEECH AND SOUND.

STANZA IV.—Continued.

4. This was the Army of the Voice—the Divine Septenary. The sparks of the seven are subject to, and the servants of, the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and the seventh of the seven (a). These (“sparks”) are called spheres, triangles, cubes, lines, and modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidana—the Oi-Ha-Hou (the permutation of Oeaohoo) (b).¹⁰¹

(a) This Sloka gives again a brief analysis of the Hierarchies of the Dhyan Chohans, called Devas (gods) in India, or the conscious intelligent powers in Nature. To this Hierarchy correspond the actual types into which humanity may be divided; for humanity, as a whole, is in reality a materialized though as yet imperfect expression thereof. The “army of the Voice” is a term closely connected with the mystery of Sound and Speech, as an effect and corollary of the cause—Divine Thought. As beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of “The History of Magic” and of “L’Homme Rouge des Tuileries,” the word spoken by, as well as the name of, every individual largely determine his future fate. Why? Because—

—“When our Soul (mind) creates or evokes a thought, the representative sign of that thought is self-engraved upon the astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the mirror of all the manifestations of being.

“The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the (hidden or occult) virtue of the sign.

“To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of the human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being (an Entity), but to place it under and condemn it through the emission of the Word (Verbum), to the influence of one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it (the Word) makes them while naming them. The Word (Verbum) or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a blessing or a curse; this is why our present ignorance about the properties or attributes of the idea as well as about the attributes and properties of matter, is often fatal to us.

 

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94 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Yes, names (and words) are either beneficent or maleficent; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health-giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the letters which compose them, and the numbers correlative to these letters.”

This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale; it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The Mantras (esoterically, magical rather than religious) are chanted by the Brahmins and so are the Vedas and other Scriptures.

The “Army of the Voice,” is the prototype of the “Host of the Logos,” or the “word” of the Sepher Jezirah, called in the Secret Doctrine “the One Number issued from No-Number”—the One Eternal Principle. The esoteric theogony begins with the One, manifested, therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence; the number of the numbers and numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, Satarupa “of the hundred forms,” or Nature. It is from this number 10, or creative nature, the Mother (the occult cypher, or “nought,” ever procreating and multiplying in union with the Unit “I,” one, or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeded.

In the Anugîtâ a conversation is given (ch. vi., 15) between a Brâhmana and his wife, on the origin of Speech and its occult properties.¹⁰² The wife asks how Speech came into existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or Mind. The Brâhmana tells her that the Apâna (inspirational breath) becoming lord, changes that intelligence, which does not understand Speech or Words, into the state of Apâna, and thus opens the mind. Thereupon he tells her a story, a dialogue between Speech and Mind. “Both went to the Self of Being (i.e., to the individual Higher Self, as Nilakantha thinks, to Prajâpati, according to the commentator Arjûna Misra), and asked him to destroy their doubts and decide which of them preceded and was superior to the

 

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95 SPEECH AND MIND.

other. To this the lord said: ‘Mind is superior.’ But Speech answered the Self of Being, by saying: ‘I verily yield (you) your desires,’ meaning that by speech he acquired what he desired. Thereupon again, the Self told her that there are two minds, the ‘movable’ and the ‘immovable.’ ‘The immovable is with me,’ he said, ‘the movable is in your dominion’ (i.e., of Speech) on the plane of matter. To that you are superior. But inasmuch, O beautiful one, as you came personally to speak to me (in the way you did, i.e., proudly), therefore, O, Sarasvati! you shall never speak after (hard) exhalation.” “The goddess Speech” (Sarasvati, a later form or aspect of Vâch, the goddess also of secret learning or Esoteric Wisdom), “verily, dwelt always between the Prâna and the Apâna. But O noble one! going with the Apâna wind (vital air), though impelled, without the Prâna (expirational breath), she ran up to Prajâpati (Brahmâ), saying, ‘Be pleased, O venerable sir!’ Then the Prâna appeared again, nourishing Speech. And, therefore, Speech never speaks after (hard or inspirational) exhalation. It is always noisy or noiseless. Of these two, the noiseless is the superior to the noisy (Speech). . . . . The (speech) which is produced in the body by means of the Prâna, and which then goes (is transformed) into Apâna, and then becoming assimilated with the Udâna (physical organs of Speech) . . . then finally dwells in the Samâna (‘at the navel in the form of sound, as the material cause of all words,’ says Arjûna Misra). So Speech formerly spoke. Hence the mind is distinguished by reason of its being immovable, and the Goddess (Speech) by reason of her being movable.”

This allegory is at the root of the Occult law, which prescribes silence upon the knowledge of certain secret and invisible things perceptible only to the spiritual mind (the 6th sense), and which cannot be expressed by “noisy” or uttered speech. This chapter of Anugîtâ explains, says Arjuna Misra, Prânâyâma, or regulation of the breath in Yoga practices. This mode, however, without the previous acquisition of, or at least full understanding of the two higher senses, of which there are seven, as will be shown, pertains rather to the lower Yoga. The Hâtha so called was and still is discountenanced by the Arhats. It is injurious to the health and alone can never develop into Raj Yoga. This story is quoted to show how inseparably connected are, in the metaphysics of old, intelligent beings, or rather “Intelligences,” with every sense or

96 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

function whether physical or mental. The Occult claim that there are seven senses in man, as in nature, as there are seven states of consciousness, is corroborated in the same work, chapter vii., on Pratyâhâra (the restraint and regulation of the senses, Prânâyâma being that of the “vital winds” or breath). The Brâhmana speaks in it “of the institution of the seven sacrificial Priests (Hotris). He says: “The nose and the eyes, and the tongue, and the skin and the ear as the fifth (or smell, sight, taste, touch and hearing), mind and understanding are the seven sacrificial priests separately stationed”; and which “dwelling in a minute space (still) do not perceive each other” on this sensuous plane, none of them except mind. For mind says: “The nose smells not without me, the eye does not take in colour, etc., etc. I am the eternal chief among all elements (i.e., senses). Without me, the senses never shine, like an empty dwelling, or like fires the flames of which are extinct. Without me, all beings, like fuel half dried and half moist, fail to apprehend qualities or objects even with the senses exerting themselves.”¹⁰³

This, of course, with regard only to mind on the sensuous plane. Spiritual mind (the upper portion or aspect of the impersonal manas) takes no cognisance of the senses in physical man. How well the ancients were acquainted with the correlation of forces and all the recently discovered phenomena of mental and physical faculties and functions, with many more mysteries also—may be found in reading chapters vii. and viii. of this (in philosophy and mystic learning) priceless work. See the quarrel of the senses about their respective superiority and their taking the Brahman, the lord of all creatures, for their arbiter. “You are all greatest and not greatest,” or superior to objects, as A. Misra says, none being independent of the other. “You are all possessed of one another’s qualities. All are greatest in their own spheres and all support one another. There is one unmoving (life-wind or breath, the ‘Yoga inhalation,’ so called, which is the breath of the One or Higher Self). That is the (or my) own Self, accumulated in numerous (forms).”

This Breath, Voice, Self or “Wind” (pneuma?) is the Synthesis of the Seven Senses, noumenally all minor deities and esoterically—the septenary and the “Army of the Voice.”

 

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97 NATURE, THE PERPETUAL MOTION.

(b) Next we see Cosmic matter scattering and forming itself into elements; grouped into the mystic four within the fifth element—Ether, the lining of Akasa, the Anima Mundi or Mother of Kosmos. “Dots, Lines, Triangles, Cubes, Circles” and finally “Spheres”—why or how? Because, says the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature geometrizes universally in all her manifestations. There is an inherent law—not only in the primordial, but also in the manifested matter of our phenomenal plane—by which Nature correlates her geometrical forms, and later, also, her compound elements; and in which there is no place for accident or chance. It is a fundamental law in Occultism, that there is no rest or cessation of motion in Nature.¹⁰⁴ That which seems rest is only the change of one form into another; the change of substance going hand in hand with that of form—as we are taught in Occult physics, which thus seem to have anticipated the discovery of the “Conservation of matter” by a considerable time. Says the ancient Commentary¹⁰⁵ to Stanza IV.:

“The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life. She scatters her spawn and the Breath (Motion) heats and quickens it. The grains (of spawn) are soon attracted to each other and form the curds in the Ocean (of Space). The larger lumps coalesce and receive new spawn—in fiery dots, triangles and cubes, which ripen, and at the appointed time some of the lumps detach themselves and assume spheroidal form, a process which they effect only when not interfered with by the others. After which, law No. * * * comes into operation. Motion (the Breath) becomes the whirlwind and sets them into rotation.” ¹⁰⁶

 

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98 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA IV.—Continued.

5. . . . . . which is:—

“Darkness,” the Boundless or the No-Number, Adi-Nidana Svâbhâvat: the  (for x, unknown quantity):

I. The Adi-Sanat, the Number, for he is One (a).

II. The Voice of the Word, Svâbhâvat, the Numbers, for he is One and Nine.¹⁰⁷

III. The “Formless Square.” (Arupa.) (b).

And these three enclosed within the  (boundless circle), are the sacred four, and the ten are the Arupa (subjective, formless) Universe (c); then come the “Sons,” the seven Fighters, the One, the eighth left out, and his Breath which is the Light-Maker (Bhâskara) (d).

(a) “Adi-Sanat,” translated literally is the First or “primeval” ancient, which name identifies the Kabalistic “Ancient of Days” and the “Holy Aged” (Sephira and Adam Kadmon) with Brahmâ the Creator, called also Sanat among his other names and titles.

Svâbhâvat is the mystic Essence, the plastic root of physical Nature—“Numbers” when manifested; the Number, in its Unity of Substance, on the highest plane. The name is of Buddhist use and a synonym for the four-fold Anima Mundi, the Kabalistic “Archetypal World,” from whence proceed the “Creative, Formative, and the

 

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99 THE OGDOAD AND HEPTAD.

Material Worlds”; the Scintillæ or Sparks,—the various other worlds contained in the last three. The Worlds are all subject to Rulers or Regents—Rishis and Pitris with the Hindus, Angels with the Jews and Christians, Gods, with the Ancients in general.

(b)  This means that the “Boundless Circle” (Zero) becomes a figure or number, only when one of the nine figures precedes it, and thus manifests its value and potency, the Word or Logos in union with voice and Spirit¹⁰⁸ (the expression and source of Consciousness) standing for the nine figures and thus forming, with the Cypher, the Decade which contains in itself all the Universe. The triad forms within the circle the Tetraktis or Sacred Four, the Square within the Circle being the most potent of all the magical figures.

(c) The “One Rejected” is the Sun of our system. The exoteric version may be found in the oldest Sanskrit Scriptures. In the Rig Veda, Aditi, “The Boundless” or infinite Space, translated by Mr. Max Müller, “the visible infinite, visible by the naked eye (!!); the endless expanse beyond the Earth, beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,” is the equivalent of “Mother-Space” coeval with “Darkness.” She is very properly called “The Mother of the Gods,” Deva-Matri, as it is from her Cosmic matrix that all the heavenly bodies of our system were born—Sun and Planets. Thus she is described, allegorically, in this wise: “Eight Sons were born from the body of Aditi; she approached the gods with seven, but cast away the eighth, Mârttânda,” our sun. The seven sons called the Aditya are, cosmically or astronomically, the seven planets; and the Sun being excluded from their number shows plainly that the Hindus may have known, and in fact knew of a seventh planet, without calling it Uranus.¹⁰⁹ But esoterically and theologically,

 

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100 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

so to say, the Adityas are, in their primitive most ancient meanings, the eight, and the twelve great gods of the Hindu Pantheon. “The Seven allow the mortals to see their dwellings, but show themselves only to the Arhats,” says an old proverb, “their dwellings” standing here for planets. The ancient Commentary gives an allegory and explains it:

“Eight houses were built by Mother. Eight houses for her Eight Divine sons; four large and four small ones. Eight brilliant suns, according to their age and merits. Bal-ilu (Mârrtânda) was not satisfied, though his house was the largest. He began (to work) as the huge elephants do. He breathed (drew in) into his stomach the vital airs of his brothers. He sought to devour them. The larger four were far away; far, on the margin of their kingdom.¹¹⁰ They were not robbed (affected), and laughed. Do your worst, Sir, you cannot reach us, they said. But the smaller wept. They complained to the Mother. She exiled Bal-i-lu to the centre of her Kingdom, from whence he could not move. (Since then) he (only) watches and threatens. He pursues them, turning slowly around himself, they turning swiftly from him, and he following from afar the direction in which his brothers move on the path that encircles their houses.¹¹¹ From that day he feeds on the sweat of the Mother’s body. He fills himself with her breath and refuse. Therefore, she rejected him.”

Thus the “rejected Son” being our Sun, evidently, as shown above, the “Sun-Sons” refer not only to our planets but to the heavenly bodies in general. Himself only a reflection of the Central Spiritual Sun, Surya is the prototype of all those bodies that evolved after him. In the Vedas he is called Loka-Chakshuh, “the Eye of the World” (our

 

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101 FIRE, THE GREAT SYMBOL OF DEITY.

planetary world), and he is one of the three chief deities. He is called indifferently the Son of Dyaus and of Aditi, because no distinction is made with reference to, or scope allowed for, the esoteric meaning. Thus he is depicted as drawn by seven horses, and by one horse with seven heads; the former referring to his seven planets, the latter to their one common origin from the One Cosmic Element. This “One Element” is called figuratively “Fire.” The Vedas (Aitareya-Brâhmana of Haug also; p. i) teach “that the fire verily is all the deities.” (Narada in Anugîtâ).

The meaning of the allegory is plain, for we have both the Dzyan Commentary and modern science to explain it, though the two differ in more than one particular. The Occult Doctrine rejects the hypothesis born out of the Nebular Theory, that the (seven) great planets have evolved from the Sun’s central mass, not of this our visible Sun, at any rate. The first condensation of Cosmic matter of course took place about a central nucleus, its parent Sun; but our sun, it is taught, merely detached itself earlier than all the others, as the rotating mass contracted, and is their elder, bigger brother therefore, not their father. The eight Adityas, “the gods,” are all formed from the eternal substance (Cometary matter¹¹²—the Mother) or the “World-Stuff” which is both the fifth and the sixth cosmic Principle, the Upadhi or basis of the Universal Soul, just as in man, the Microcosm, Manas¹¹³ is the Upadhi of Buddhi.¹¹⁴

There is a whole poem on the pregenetic battles fought by the growing planets before the final formation of Kosmos, thus accounting for the seemingly disturbed position of the systems of several planets, the plane of the satellites of some (of Neptune and Uranus, for instance, of which the ancients knew nothing, it is said) being tilted over, thus giving them an appearance of retrograde motion. These planets are called the warriors, the Architects, and are accepted by the

 

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102 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Roman Church as the leaders of the heavenly Hosts, thus showing the same traditions. Having evolved from Cosmic Space, and before the final formation of the primaries and the annulation of the planetary nebula, the Sun, we are taught, drew into the depths of its mass all the Cosmic vitality he could, threatening to engulf his weaker “brothers” before the law of attraction and repulsion was finally adjusted; after which he began feeding on “The Mother’s refuse and sweat”; in other words, on those portions of Ether (the “breath of the Universal Soul”) of the existence and constitution of which science is as yet absolutely ignorant. A theory of this kind having been propounded by Sir William Grove (see “Correlation of the Physical Forces,” 1843, p. 81; and “Address to the British Association, 1866”), who theorized that the systems “are gradually changing by atmospheric additions or subtractions, or by accretions and diminutions arising from nebular substances”

. . . and again that “the Sun may condense gaseous matter as it travels in Space and so heat may be produced”—the archaic teaching seems scientific enough, even in this age.¹¹⁵ Mr. W. Mattieu Williams suggested that the diffused matter or Ether which is the recipient of the heat radiations of the Universe is thereby drawn into the depths of the solar mass. Expelling thence the previously condensed and thermally exhausted Ether, it becomes compressed and gives up its heat, to be in turn itself driven out in a rarified and cooled state, to absorb a fresh supply of heat, which he supposes to be in this way taken up by the Ether, and again concentrated and redistributed by the Suns of the Universe.¹¹⁶

This is about as close an approximation to the Occult teachings as Science ever imagined; for Occultism explains it by “the dead breath” given back by Mârttânda and his feeding on the “sweat and refuse” of “Mother Space.” What could affect Neptune,¹¹⁷ Saturn and Jupiter,

 

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103 THE STELLAR “SONS OF LIGHT.”

but little, would have killed such comparatively small “Houses” as Mercury, Venus and Mars. As Uranus was not known before the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the fourth planet mentioned in the allegory must remain to us, so far, a mystery.

The “Breath” of all the “seven” is said to be Bhâskara (light-making), because they (the planets) were all comets and suns in their origin. They evolve into Manvantaric life from primæval Chaos (now the noumenon of irresolvable nebulæ) by aggregation and accumulation of the primary differentiations of the eternal matter, according to the beautiful expression in the Commentary, “Thus the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the fabric of Darkness.” They are called allegorically “the Heavenly Snails,” on account of their (to us) formless intelligences inhabiting unseen their starry and planetary homes, and, so to speak, carrying them as the snails do along with themselves in their revolution. The doctrine of a common origin for all the heavenly bodies and planets, was, as we see, inculcated by the Archaic astronomers, before Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, Kant, Herschel and Laplace. Heat (the Breath), attraction and repulsion—the three great factors of Motion—are the conditions under which all the members of all this primitive family are born, developed, and die, to be reborn after a “Night of Brahmâ,” during which eternal matter relapses periodically into its primary undifferentiated state. The most attenuated gases can give no idea of its nature to the modern physicist. Centres of Forces at first, the invisible sparks of primordial atoms differentiate into molecules, and become Suns—passing gradually into objectivity—gaseous, radiant, cosmic, the one “Whirlwind” (or motion) finally giving the impulse to the form, and the initial motion, regulated and sustained by the never-resting Breaths—the Dhyan Chohans.

———

STANZA IV.—Continued.

6. . . . . Then the Second Seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the three (Word, Voice, and Spirit). The rejected Son is One, the “Son-Suns” are countless.

The Lipi-ka, from the word lipi, “writing,” means literally the

104 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Scribes.”¹¹⁸ Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma, the Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders or Annalists who impress on the (to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, “the great picture-gallery of eternity”—a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man, of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in “Isis,” this divine and unseen canvas is the Book of Life. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the universe, upon which the “Builders” reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who stand parallel to the Seven Angels of the Presence, whom the Christians recognise in the Seven “Planetary Spirits” or the “Spirits of the Stars”; for thus it is they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal Ideation—or, as called by Plato, the “Divine Thought.” The Eternal Record is no fantastic dream, for we meet with the same records in the world of gross matter. “A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes,” says Dr. Draper. . . . “The portraits of our friends or landscape-views may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or a glassy surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.”¹¹⁹ Drs. Jevons and Babbage believe that every thought, displacing the particles of the brain and setting them in motion, scatters them throughout the Universe, and they think that “each particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened.” (Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 455.) Thus the ancient doctrine has begun to acquire rights of citizenship in the speculations of the scientific world.

The forty “Assessors” who stand in the region of Amenti as the accusers of the Soul before Osiris, belong to the same class of deities as the Lipika, and might stand paralleled, were not the Egyptian gods so

 

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105 THE DIVINE RECORDERS.

little understood in their esoteric meaning. The Hindu Chitra-Gupta who reads out the account of every Soul’s life from his register, called Agra-Sandhani; the “Assessors” who read theirs from the heart of the defunct, which becomes an open book before (whether) Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma—are all so many copies of, and variants from the Lipika, and their Astral Records. Nevertheless, the Lipi-ka are not deities connected with Death, but with Life Eternal.

Connected as the Lipika are with the destiny of every man and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light—not fatalistically, but only because the future, like the past, is ever alive in the present—they may also be said to exercise an influence on the Science of Horoscopy. We must admit the truth of the latter whether we will or not. For, as observed by one of the modern adepts of Astrology, “Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of the Sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover them, it becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the birth of a child, influence his brain—virgin of any impression—in a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of such or another zodiacal constellation.”¹²⁰

 

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106 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA V.

Commentary.

1. The Primordial Seven, the first seven Breaths of the Dragon of Wisdom, produce in their turn from their holy circumgyrating Breaths the Fiery Whirlwind (a).

(a) This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all the Stanzas to explain. Its language is comprehensible only to him who is thoroughly versed in Eastern allegory and its purposely obscure phraseology. The question will surely be asked, “Do the Occultists believe in all these ‘Builders,’ ‘Lipika,’ and ‘Sons of Light’ as Entities, or are they merely imageries?” To this the answer is given as plainly: “After due allowance for the imagery of personified Powers, we must admit the existence of these Entities, if we would not reject the existence of spiritual humanity within physical mankind. For the hosts of these Sons of Light and ‘Mind-born Sons’ of the first manifested Ray of the Unknown All, are the very root of spiritual man.” Unless we want to believe the unphilosophical dogma of a specially created soul for every human birth—a fresh supply of these pouring in daily, since “Adam”—we have to admit the occult teachings. This will be explained in its place. Let us see, now, what may be the occult meaning of this Stanza.

The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious god,—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual primeval Intelligences must pass through the human stage. And when we say human, this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed. Each Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through self-experience. Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth when saying, as he did, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only “in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness,” of becoming, in other words, man; for this is also the secret meaning of the usual Purânic phrase about

107 NO MAN—NO GOD.

Brahmâ being constantly “moved by the desire to create.” This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the saying: “The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.” The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and the preceding Manvantaras.

This subject, being so very mystical, is therefore the most difficult to explain in all its details and bearings; since the whole mystery of evolutionary creation is contained in it. A sentence or two in it vividly recalls to mind similar ones in the Kabala and the phraseology of the King Psalmist (civ.), as both, when speaking of God, show him making the wind his messenger and his “ministers a flaming fire.” But in the Esoteric doctrine it is used figuratively. The “fiery Wind” is the incandescent Cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as the iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the “Creative Forces.” Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself. It is an atom and an angel.

In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of the modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of “natural selection” as the sole factor in the development of physical man, practically concedes the whole point here discussed. He holds that the evolution of man was directed and furthered by superior Intelligences, whose agency is a necessary factor in the scheme of Nature. But once the operation of these Intelligences is admitted in one place, it is only a logical deduction to extend it still further. No hard and fast line can be drawn.

———

STANZA V.—Continued.

2. They make of him the messenger of their will (a). The Dzyu becomes Fohat; the Swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose sons are the Lipika,¹²¹ runs circular errands. He is the steed, and

 

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108 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Thought is the rider (i.e., he is under the influence of their guiding thought). He passes like lightning through the fiery clouds (cosmic mists) (b); takes three, and five, and seven strides through the seven regions above and the seven below (the world to be). He lifts his voice, and calls the innumerable sparks (atoms) and joins them together (c).

(a) This shows the “Primordial Seven” using for their Vahan (vehicle, or the manifested subject which becomes the symbol of the Power directing it), Fohat, called in consequence, the “Messenger of their will”—the fiery whirlwind.

“Dzyu becomes Fohat”—the expression itself shows it. Dzyu is the one real (magical) knowledge, or Occult Wisdom; which, dealing with eternal truths and primal causes, becomes almost omnipotence when applied in the right direction. Its antithesis is Dzyu-mi, that which deals with illusions and false appearances only, as in our exoteric modern sciences. In this case, Dzyu is the expression of the collective Wisdom of the Dhyani-Buddhas.

(b) As the reader is supposed not to be acquainted with the Dhyani-Buddhas, it is as well to say at once that, according to the Orientalists, there are five Dhyanis who are the “celestial” Buddhas, of whom the human Buddhas are the manifestations in the world of form and matter. Esoterically, however, the Dhyani-Buddhas are seven, of whom five only have hitherto manifested,¹²² and two are to come in the sixth and seventh Root-races. They are, so to speak, the eternal prototypes of the Buddhas who appear on this earth, each of whom has his particular divine prototype. So, for instance, Amitâbha is the Dhyani-Buddha of Gautama Sakyamuni, manifesting through him whenever this great Soul incarnates on earth as He did in Tzon-kha-pa.¹²³ As the synthesis of the seven Dhyani-Buddhas, Avalôkitêswara was the first Buddha (the Logos), so Amitâbha is the inner “God” of Gautama, who, in China, is called Amita(-Buddha). They are, as Mr. Rhys Davids

 

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109 THEOGONY OF THE CREATORS.

correctly states, “the glorious counterparts in the mystic world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life” of every earthly mortal Buddha—the liberated Manushi-Buddhas appointed to govern the Earth in this Round. They are the “Buddhas of Contemplation,” and are all Anupadaka (parentless), i.e., self-born of divine essence. The exoteric teaching which says that every Dhyani-Buddha has the faculty of creating from himself, an equally celestial son—a Dhyani-Bodhisattva—who, after the decease of the Manushi (human) Buddha, has to carry out the work of the latter, rests on the fact that owing to the highest initiation performed by one overshadowed by the “Spirit of Buddha”—(who is credited by the Orientalists with having created the five Dhyani-Buddhas!),—a candidate becomes virtually a Bodhisattva, created such by the High Initiator.

(c) Fohat, being one of the most, if not the most important character in esoteric Cosmogony, should be minutely described. As in the oldest Grecian Cosmogony, differing widely from the later mythology, Eros is the third person in the primeval trinity: Chaos, Gæa, Eros: answering to the Kabalistic En-Soph (for Chaos is Space, χαὶνο, “void”) the Boundless All, Shekinah and the Ancient of Days, or the Holy Ghost; so Fohat is one thing in the yet unmanifested Universe and another in the phenomenal and Cosmic World. In the latter, he is that Occult, electric, vital power, which, under the Will of the Creative Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first impulse which becomes in time law. But in the unmanifested Universe, Fohat is no more this, than Eros is the later brilliant winged Cupid, or Love. Fohat has naught to do with Kosmos yet, since Kosmos is not born, and the gods still sleep in the bosom of “Father-Mother.” He is an abstract philosophical idea. He produces nothing yet by himself; he is simply that potential creative power in virtue of whose action the Noumenon of all future phenomena divides, so to speak, but to reunite in a mystic supersensuous act, and emit the creative ray. When the “Divine Son” breaks forth, then Fohat becomes the propelling force, the active Power which causes the One to become Two and Three—on the Cosmic plane of manifestation. The triple One differentiates into the many, and then Fohat is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms and makes them aggregate and combine. We find an echo of this primeval teaching

110 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in early Greek mythology. Erebos and Nux are born out of Chaos, and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Æther and Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior or terrestrial regions. Darkness generates light. See in the Purânas Brahmâ’s “Will” or desire to create; and in the Phœnician Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon the doctrine that Desire, πόθος, is the principle of creation.

Fohat is closely related to the “one life.” From the Unknown One, the Infinite totality, the manifested one, or the periodical, Manvantaric Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its Fountain-Source, is the Demiurgos or the creative Logos of the Western Kabalists, and the four-faced Brahmâ of the Hindu religion. In its totality, viewed from the standpoint of manifested Divine Thought in the esoteric doctrine, it represents the Hosts of the higher creative Dhyan Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind, the concealed Wisdom of Adi-Buddha—the One Supreme and eternal—manifests itself as Avalôkitêshwara (or manifested Iswara), which is the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of the Hermetic philosopher, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Atman of the Vedantins.¹²⁴ By the action of the manifested Wisdom, or Mahat, represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual Energy in the Kosmos, the reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and the intellectual Force accompanying such ideation, becomes objectively the Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven principles of Akasa, acts upon manifested substance or the One Element, as declared above, and by differentiating it into various centres of Energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various states of being in the manifested Solar System.

The Solar System, brought into existence by these agencies, consists of Seven Principles, like everything else within these centres. Such is the teaching of the trans-Himalayan Esotericism. Every philosophy, however, has its own way of dividing these principles.

 

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111 THE PROTEAN SPIRIT-SUBSTANCE.

Fohat, then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental binding Unity of all Cosmic Energies, on the unseen as on the manifested planes, the action of which resembles—on an immense scale—that of a living Force created by will, in those phenomena where the seemingly subjective acts on the seemingly objective and propels it to action. Fohat is not only the living Symbol and Container of that Force, but is looked upon by the Occultists as an Entity—the forces he acts upon being cosmic, human and terrestrial, and exercising their influence on all those planes respectively. On the earthly plane his influence is felt in the magnetic and active force generated by the strong desire of the magnetizer. On the Cosmic, it is present in the constructive power that carries out, in the formation of things—from the planetary system down to the glow-worm and simple daisy—the plan in the mind of nature, or in the Divine Thought, with regard to the development and growth of that special thing. He is, metaphysically, the objectivised thought of the gods; the “Word made flesh,” on a lower scale, and the messenger of Cosmic and human ideations: the active force in Universal Life. In his secondary aspect, Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric vital fluid,¹²⁵ and the preserving fourth

 

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112 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

principle, the animal Soul of Nature, so to say, or—Electricity. In India, Fohat is connected with Vishnu and Surya in the early character of the (first) God; for Vishnu is not a high god in the Rig Veda. The name Vishnu is from the root vish, “to pervade,” and Fohat is called the “Pervader” and the Manufacturer, because he shapes the atoms from crude material.¹²⁶ In the sacred texts of the Rig Veda, Vishnu, also, is “a manifestation of the Solar Energy,” and he is described as striding through the Seven regions of the Universe in three steps, the Vedic God having little in common with the Vishnu of later times. Therefore the two are identical in this particular feature, and one is the copy of the other.

The “three and seven” strides refer to the Seven spheres inhabited by man, of the esoteric Doctrine, as well as to the Seven regions of the Earth. Notwithstanding the frequent objections made by would-be Orientalists, the Seven Worlds or spheres of our planetary chain are distinctly referred to in the exoteric Hindu scriptures. But how strangely all these numbers are connected with like numbers in other Cosmogonies and with their symbols, can be seen from comparisons and parallelisms made by students of old religions. The “three strides of Vishnu” through the “seven regions of the Universe,” of the Rig Veda, have been variously explained by commentators as meaning “fire, lightning and the Sun” cosmically; and as having been taken in the Earth, the atmosphere, and the sky; also as the “three steps” of the dwarf (Vishnu’s incarnation), though more philosophically—and in the astronomical sense, very correctly—they are explained by Aurnavâbha as being the various positions of the sun, rising, noon, and setting. Esoteric philosophy alone explains it clearly, and the Zohar laid it down very philosophically and comprehensively. It is said and plainly demonstrated therein that in the beginning the Elohim (Elhim) were called Echod, “one,” or the “Deity is one in many,” a very simple idea in a pantheistic conception (in its philosophical sense, of course). Then came the change, “Jehovah is Elohim,” thus unifying the multiplicity and taking the first step towards Monotheism. Now to the query, “How is Jehovah Elohim?” the answer is, “By three Steps” from below.

 

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113 THE CORRELATION OF THE GODS.

The meaning is plain.¹²⁷ They are all symbols, and emblematic, mutually and correlatively, of Spirit, Soul and Body (man); of the circle transformed into Spirit, the Soul of the World, and its body (or Earth). Stepping out of the Circle of Infinity, that no man comprehendeth, Ain-Soph (the Kabalistic synonym for Parabrahm, for the Zeroana Akerne, of the Mazdeans, or for any other “Unknowable”) becomes “One”—the Echod, the Eka, the Ahu—then he (or it) is transformed by evolution into the One in many, the Dhyani-Buddhas or the Elohim, or again the Amshaspends, his third Step being taken into generation of the flesh, or “Man.” And from man, or Jah-Hova, “male female,” the inner divine entity becomes, on the metaphysical plane, once more the Elohim.

The Kabalistic idea is identical with the Esotericism of the Archaic period. This esotericism is the common property of all, and belongs neither to the Aryan 5th Race, nor to any of its numerous Sub-races. It cannot be claimed by the Turanians, so-called, the Egyptians, Chinese, Chaldeans, nor any of the Seven divisions of the Fifth Root Race, but really belongs to the Third and Fourth Root Races, whose descendants we find in the Seed of the Fifth, the earliest Aryans. The Circle was with every nation the symbol of the Unknown—“Boundless Space,” the abstract garb of an ever present abstraction—the Incognisable Deity. It represents limitless Time in Eternity. The Zeroana Akerne is also the “Boundless Circle of the Unknown Time,” from which Circle issues the radiant light—the Universal Sun, or Ormazd¹²⁸—and the latter

 

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114 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

is identical with Kronos, in his Æolian form, that of a Circle. For the circle is Sar, and Saros, or cycle, and was the Babylonian god whose circular horizon was the visible symbol of the invisible, while the sun was the one Circle from which proceeded the Cosmic orbs, and of which he was considered the leader. Zero-ana, is the Chakra or circle of Vishnu, the mysterious emblem which is, according to the definition of a mystic, “a curve of such a nature that as to any, the least possible part thereof, if the curve be protracted either way it will proceed and finally re-enter upon itself, and form one and the same curve—or that which we call the circle.” No better definition could thus be given of the natural symbol and the evident nature of Deity, which having its circumference everywhere (the boundless) has, therefore, its central point also everywhere; in other words, is in every point of the Universe. The invisible Deity is thus also the Dhyan Chohans, or the Rishis, the primitive seven, and the nine, without, and ten, including, their synthetical unit; from which it steps into Man. Returning to the Commentary (b) of Stanza IV., Sloka 3, [p. 90] the reader will understand why, while the trans-Himalayan Cakra has inscribed within it △     (triangle, first line, cube, second line, and a pentacle with a dot in the centre thus: , and some other variations), the Kabalistic circle of the Elohim reveals, when the letters of the word אלהים (Alhim or Elohim) are numerically read, the famous numerals 13514, or by anagram 31415—the astronomical π (pi) number, or the hidden meaning of Dhyani-Buddhas, of the Gebers, the Geborim, the Kabeiri, and the Elohim, all signifying “great men,” “Titans,” “Heavenly Men,” and, on earth, “the giants.”

The Seven was a Sacred Number with every nation; but none applied it to more physiologically materialistic uses than the Hebrews. With these it was pre-eminently the generative number and 9 the male causative one, forming as shown by the Kabalists the צ(90) ע(70) or otz—“the Tree of the Garden of Eden,”¹²⁹ the “double hermaphrodite rod” of the fourth race. Whereas with the Hindus and Aryans generally, the significance was manifold, and related almost entirely to purely metaphysical

 

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115 MANIFESTED SYMBOLS.

and astronomical truths.¹³⁰ Their Rishis and gods, their Demons and Heroes, have historical and ethical meanings, and the Aryans never made their religion rest solely on physiological symbols, as the old Hebrews have done. This is found in the exoteric Hindu Scriptures. That these accounts are blinds is shown by their contradicting each other, a different construction being found in almost every Purâna and epic poem. Read esoterically—they will all yield the same meaning. Thus one account enumerates Seven worlds, exclusive of the nether worlds, also seven in number; these fourteen upper and nether worlds have

 

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116 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

nothing to do with the classification of the septenary chain and belong to the purely æthereal, invisible worlds. These will be noticed elsewhere. Suffice for the present to show that they are purposely referred to as though they belonged to the chain. “Another enumeration calls the Seven worlds—earth, sky, heaven, middle region, place of birth, mansion of the blest, and abode of truth; placing the ‘Sons of Brahmâ’ in the sixth division, and stating the fifth, or Jana Loka, to be that where animals destroyed in the general conflagration are born again.” (see Hindu Classical Dictionary.) Some real esoteric teaching is given in the “Symbolism.” He who is prepared for it will understand the hidden meaning.

———

STANZA V.—Continued.

3. He is their guiding spirit and leader. When he commences work, he separates the sparks of the lower kingdom (mineral atoms) that float and thrill with joy in their radiant dwellings (gaseous clouds), and forms therewith the germs of wheels. He places them in the six directions of space and one in the middle—the central wheel (a).

(a) “Wheels,” as already explained, are the centres of force, around which primordial Cosmic matter expands, and, passing through all the six stages of consolidation, becomes spheroidal and ends by being transformed into globes or spheres. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of Esoteric Cosmogony, that during the Kalpas (or æons) of life, motion, which, during the periods of Rest “pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom”¹³¹ (Commentary on Dzyan), assumes an evergrowing

 

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117 THE ANTIQUITY OF PHYSICAL SCIENCES.

tendency, from the first awakening of Kosmos to a new “Day,” to circular movement. The “Deity becomes a whirlwind.” They are also called Rotæ—the moving wheels of the celestial orbs participating in the world’s creation—when the meaning refers to the animating principle of the stars and planets; for in the Kabala, they are represented by the Ophanim, the Angels of the Spheres and stars, of which they are the informing Souls. (See Kabala Denudata, “De Anima,” p. 113.)

This law of vortical movement in primordial matter, is one of the oldest conceptions of Greek philosophy, whose first historical Sages were nearly all Initiates of the Mysteries. The Greeks had it from the Egyptians, and the latter from the Chaldeans, who had been the pupils of Brahmins of the esoteric school. Leucippus, and Democritus of Abdera—the pupil of the Magi—taught that this gyratory movement of the atoms and spheres existed from eternity.¹³² Hicetas, Heraclides, Ecphantus, Pythagoras, and all his pupils, taught the rotation of the earth; and Aryabhata of India, Aristarchus, Seleucus, and Archimedes calculated its revolution as scientifically as the astronomers do now; while the theory of the Elemental Vortices was known to Anaxagoras, and maintained by him 500 years b.c., or nearly 2,000 before it was taken up by Galileo, Descartes, Swedenborg, and finally, with slight modifications, by Sir W. Thomson. (See his “Vortical Atoms.”) All such knowledge, if justice be only done to it, is an echo of the archaic doctrine, an attempt to explain which is now being made. How men of the last few centuries have come to the same ideas and conclusions that were taught as axiomatic truths in the secrecy of the Adyta dozens of

 

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118 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

millenniums ago, is a question that is treated separately. Some were led to it by the natural progress in physical science and by independent observation; others—such as Copernicus, Swedenborg, and a few more—their great learning notwithstanding, owed their knowledge far more to intuitive than to acquired ideas, developed in the usual way by a course of study.¹³³ (See “A Mystery about Buddha.”)

By the “Six directions of Space” is here meant the “Double Triangle,” the junction and blending together of pure Spirit and Matter, of the Arupa and the Rupa, of which the Triangles are a Symbol. This double Triangle is a sign of Vishnu, as it is Solomon’s seal, and the Sri-Antara of the Brahmins.

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STANZA V.—(Continued.)

4. Fohat traces spiral lines to unite the six to the seventh—the Crown (a); an Army of the Sons of Light stands at each angle (and) the Lipika—in the middle wheel. They (the Lipika) say, “This is good” (b). The first Divine World is ready, the first (is now), the second (world), then the “Divine Arupa” (the formless Universe

 

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119 THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCIPLES.

of Thought) reflects itself in Chhayaloka (the shadowy world of primal form, or the intellectual) the first garment of (the) Anupadaka (c).

(a) This tracing of “Spiral lines” refers to the evolution of man’s as well as Nature’s principles; an evolution which takes place gradually (as will be seen in Book II., on “The origin of the Human Races”), as does everything else in nature. The Sixth principle in Man (Buddhi, the Divine Soul) though a mere breath, in our conceptions, is still something material when compared with divine “Spirit” (Atma) of which it is the carrier or vehicle. Fohat, in his capacity of Divine Love (Eros), the electric Power of affinity and sympathy, is shown allegorically as trying to bring the pure Spirit, the Ray inseparable from the one absolute, into union with the Soul, the two constituting in Man the Monad, and in Nature the first link between the ever unconditioned and the manifested. “The first is now the second” (world)—of the Lipikas—has reference to the same.

(b) The “Army” at each angle is the Host of angelic Beings (Dhyan-Chohans) appointed to guide and watch over each respective region from the beginning to the end of Manvantara. They are the “Mystic Watchers” of the Christian Kabalists and Alchemists, and relate, symbolically as well as cosmogonically, to the numerical system of the Universe. The numbers with which these celestial Beings are connected are extremely difficult to explain, as each number refers to several groups of distinct ideas, according to the particular group of “Angels” which it is intended to represent. Herein lies the nodus in the study of symbology, with which, unable to untie by disentangling it, so many scholars have preferred dealing as Alexander dealt with the Gordian knot; hence erroneous conceptions and teachings, as a direct result.

The “First is the Second,” because the “First” cannot really be numbered or regarded as the First, as that is the realm of noumena in its primary manifestation: the threshold to the World of Truth, or Sat, through which the direct energy that radiates from the one reality—the Nameless Deity—reaches us. Here again, the untranslateable term Sat (Be-ness) is likely to lead into an erroneous conception, since that which is manifested cannot be Sat, but is something phenomenal, not everlasting, nor, in truth, even sempiternal. It is coeval and

120 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

coexistent with the One Life, “Secondless,” but as a manifestation it is still a Maya—like the rest. This “World of Truth” can be described only in the words of the Commentary as “A bright star dropped from the heart of Eternity; the beacon of hope on whose Seven Rays hang the Seven Worlds of Being.” Truly so; since those are the Seven Lights whose reflections are the human immortal Monads—the Atma, or the irradiating Spirit of every creature of the human family. First, this septenary Light; then:

(c) The “Divine World”—the countless Lights lit at the primeval Light—the Buddhis, or formless divine Souls, of the last Arupa (formless) world; the “Sum Total,” in the mysterious language of the old Stanza. In the Catechism, the Master is made to ask the pupil:

“Lift thy head, oh Lanoo; dost thou see one, or countless lights above thee, burning in the dark midnight sky?”

“I sense one Flame, oh Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks shining in it.”

“Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That light which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in anywise from the light that shines in thy Brother-men?”

“It is in no way different, though the prisoner is held in bondage by Karma, and though its outer garments delude the ignorant into saying, ‘Thy Soul and My Soul.’”

The radical unity of the ultimate essence of each constituent part of compounds in Nature—from Star to mineral Atom, from the highest Dhyan Chohan to the smallest infusoria, in the fullest acceptation of the term, and whether applied to the spiritual, intellectual, or physical worlds—this is the one fundamental law in Occult Science. “The Deity is boundless and infinite expansion,” says an Occult axiom; and hence, as remarked, the name of Brahmâ.¹³⁴ There is a deep philosophy underlying the earliest worship in the world, that of the Sun and of Fire. Of all the Elements known to physical science, Fire is the one that has ever eluded definite analysis. It is confidently asserted that

 

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121 THE MYSTERY OF THE FIRE.

Air is a mixture containing the gases Oxygen and Nitrogen. We view the Universe and the Earth as matter composed of definite chemical molecules. We speak of the primitive ten Earths, endowing each with a Greek or Latin name. We say that water is, chemically, a compound of Oxygen and Hydrogen. But what is Fire? It is the effect of combustion, we are gravely answered. It is heat and light and motion, and a correlation of physical and chemical forces in general. And this scientific definition is philosophically supplemented by the theological one in Webster’s Dictionary, which explains fire as “the instrument of punishment, or the punishment of the impenitent in another state”—the “state,” by the bye, being supposed to be spiritual; but, alas! the presence of fire would seem to be a convincing proof of its material nature. Yet, speaking of the illusion of regarding phenomena as simple, because they are familiar, Professor Bain says (Logic. Part II.): “Very familiar facts seem to stand in no need of explanation themselves and to be the means of explaining whatever can be assimilated to them. Thus, the boiling and evaporation of a liquid is supposed to be a very simple phenomenon requiring no explanation, and a satisfactory explanation of rarer phenomena. That water should dry up is, to the uninstructed mind, a thing wholly intelligible; whereas to the man acquainted with physical science the liquid state is anomalous and inexplicable. The lighting of a fire by a flame is a great scientific difficulty, yet few people think so” (p. 125).

What says the esoteric teaching with regard to fire? “Fire,” it says, “is the most perfect and unadulterated reflection, in Heaven as on Earth, of the One Flame. It is Life and Death, the origin and the end of every material thing. It is divine ‘Substance.’” Thus, not only the Fire-Worshipper, the Parsee, but even the wandering savage tribes of America, which proclaim themselves “born of fire,” show more science in their creeds and truth in their superstitions, than all the speculations of modern physics and learning. The Christian who says: “God is a living Fire,” and speaks of the Pentecostal “Tongues of Fire” and of the “burning bush” of Moses, is as much a fire-worshipper as any other “heathen.” The Rosicrucians, among all the mystics and Kabalists, were those who defined Fire in the right and most correct way. Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles,

122 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and fires of the whole globe without diminishing that flame. If the Deity, the radical One, is eternal and an infinite substance (“the Lord thy God is a consuming fire”) and never consumed, then it does not seem reasonable that the Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says: “Thus were the Arupa and Rupa worlds formed: from One light seven lights; from each of the seven, seven times seven,” etc., etc.

———

STANZA V.—Continued.

5. Fohat takes five strides (having already taken the first three) (a), and builds a winged wheel at each corner of the square for the four holy ones . . . . . and their armies (hosts) (b).

(a) The “strides,” as already explained (see Commentary on Stanza IV.), refer to both the Cosmic and the Human principles—the latter of which consist, in the exoteric division, of three (Spirit, Soul, and Body), and, in the esoteric calculation, of seven principles—three rays of the Essence and four aspects.¹³⁵ Those who have studied Mr. Sinnett’s “Esoteric Buddhism” can easily grasp the nomenclature. There are two esoteric schools—or rather one school, divided into two parts—one for the inner Lanoos, the other for the outer or semi-lay chelas beyond the Himalayas; the first teaching a septenary, the other a six-fold division of human principles.

From a Cosmic point of view, Fohat taking “five strides” refers here to the five upper planes of Consciousness and Being, the sixth and the seventh (counting downwards) being the astral and the terrestrial, or the two lower planes.

(b) “Four winged wheels at each corner . . . . . for the four holy ones and their armies (hosts)” . . . . . These are the “four Maharajahs” or great Kings of the Dhyan-Chohans, the Devas who preside, each over one of the four cardinal points. They are the Regents or Angels who rule over the Cosmical Forces of North, South,

 

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123 THE SECRET OF THE ELEMENTS.

East and West, Forces having each a distinct occult property. These beings are also connected with Karma, as the latter needs physical and material agents to carry out her decrees, such as the four kinds of winds, for instance, professedly admitted by Science to have their respective evil and beneficent influences upon the health of Mankind and every living thing. There is occult philosophy in that Roman Catholic doctrine which traces the various public calamities, such as epidemics of disease, and wars, and so on, to the invisible “Messengers” from North and West. “The glory of God comes from the way of the East” says Ezekiel; while Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalmist assure their readers that all the evil under the Sun comes from the North and the West—which proposition, when applied to the Jewish nation, sounds like an undeniable prophecy for themselves. And this accounts also for St. Ambrose (On Amos, ch. iv.) declaring that it is precisely for that reason that “we curse the North-Wind, and that during the ceremony of baptism we begin by turning towards the West (Sidereal), to renounce the better him who inhabits it; after which we turn to the East.”

Belief in the “Four Maharajahs”—the Regents of the Four cardinal points—was universal and is now that of Christians,¹³⁶ who call them, after St. Augustine, “Angelic Virtues,” and “Spirits” when enumerated by themselves, and “Devils” when named by Pagans. But where is the difference between the Pagans and the Christians in this cause? Following Plato, Aristotle explained that the term στοιχεῖα was understood only as meaning the incorporeal principles placed at each of the four great divisions of our Cosmical world to supervise them. Thus, no more than the Christians did, do they adore and worship the Elements and the cardinal (imaginary) points, but the “gods” that ruled these respectively. For the Church there are two kinds of Sidereal beings, the

 

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124 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Angels and the Devils. For the Kabalist and Occultist there is but one; and neither of them makes any difference between “the Rectors of Light” and the Cosmocratores, or “Rectores tenebrarum harum,” whom the Roman Church imagines and discovers in a “Rector of Light” as soon as he is called by another name than the one she addresses him by. It is not the “Rector” or “Maharajah” who punishes or rewards, with or without “God’s” permission or order, but man himself—his deeds or Karma, attracting individually and collectively (as in the case of whole nations sometimes), every kind of evil and calamity. We produce causes, and these awaken the corresponding powers in the sidereal world; which powers are magnetically and irresistibly attracted to—and react upon—those who produced these causes; whether such persons are practically the evil-doers, or simply Thinkers who brood mischief. Thought is matter,¹³⁷ we are taught by modern Science; and “every particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened,” as in their “Principles of Science” Messrs. Jevons and Babbage tell the profane. Modern Science is drawn more every day into the maëlstrom of Occultism; unconsciously, no doubt, still very sensibly The two main theories of science—re the relations between Mind and Matter—are Monism and Materialism. These two cover the whole ground of negative psychology with the exception of the quasi-occult views of the pantheistic German schools.¹³⁸

 

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125 THE REAL MEANING OF THE TABERNACLE.

In the Egyptian temples, according to Clemens Alexandrinus, an immense curtain separated the tabernacle from the place for the congregation. The Jews had the same. In both, the curtain was drawn over five pillars (the Pentacle) symbolising our five senses and five Root-races esoterically, while the four colours of the curtain represented the four cardinal points and the four terrestrial elements. The whole was an allegorical symbol. It is through the four high Rulers over the four points and Elements that our five senses may become cognisant of the hidden truths of Nature; and not at all, as Clemens would have it, that it is the elements per se that furnished the Pagans with divine Knowledge or the knowledge of God.¹³⁹ While the Egyptian emblem was spiritual, that of the Jews was purely materialistic, and, indeed, honoured only the blind Elements and the imaginary “Points.” For what was the meaning of the square tabernacle raised by Moses in the wilderness, if it had not the same cosmical significance? “Thou shalt make an hanging . . . of blue, purple, and scarlet” and “five pillars of shittim wood for the hanging . . . four brazen rings in the four corners thereof . . . boards of fine wood for the four sides, North, South, West, and East . . . of the Tabernacle . . . with Cherubims of cunning work.” (Exodus, ch. xxvi., xxvii.) The Tabernacle and the square courtyard, Cherubim and all, were precisely the same as those in the Egyptian temples. The square form of the Tabernacle meant just the same thing as it still means, to this day, in the exoteric worship of the Chinese and Tibetans—the four cardinal points signifying that which the four sides of the pyramids, obelisks, and other such square erections mean. Josephus takes care to explain the whole thing. He declares that the Tabernacle pillars are the same

 

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126 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

as those raised at Tyre to the four Elements, which were placed on pedestals whose four angles faced the four cardinal points: adding that “the angles of the pedestals had equally the four figures of the Zodiac” on them, which represented the same orientation (Antiquities I., VIII., ch. xxii.).

The idea may be traced in the Zoroastrian caves, in the rock-cut temples of India, as in all the sacred square buildings of antiquity that have survived to this day. This is shown definitely by Layard, who finds the four cardinal points, and the four primitive elements, in the religion of every country, under the shape of square obelisks, the four sides of the pyramids, etc., etc. Of these elements and their points the four Maharajahs were the regents and the directors.

If the student would know more of them, he has but to compare the Vision of Ezekiel (chap. i.) with what is known of Chinese Buddhism (even in its exoteric teachings); and examine the outward shape of these “Great Kings.” In the opinion of the Rev. Joseph Edkins, they are “the Devas who preside each over one of the four continents into which the Hindus divide the world.”¹⁴⁰ Each leads an army of spiritual beings to protect mankind and Buddhism. With the exception of favouritism towards Buddhism, the four celestial beings are precisely this. They are the protectors of mankind and also the Agents of Karma on Earth, whereas the Lipika are concerned with Humanity’s hereafter. At the same time they are the four living creatures “who have the likeness of a man” of Ezekiel’s visions, called by the translators of the Bible, “Cherubim,” “Seraphim,” etc.; and by the Occultists, “the winged Globes,” the “Fiery Wheels,” and in the Hindu Pantheon by a number of different names. All these Gandharvas, the “Sweet Songsters,” the Asuras, Kinnaras, and Nagas, are the allegorical descriptions of the “four Maharajahs.” The Seraphim are the fiery Serpents of Heaven which we find in a passage describing Mount Meru as: “the exalted mass of glory, the venerable haunt of gods and heavenly choristers . . . . not to be reached by sinful men . . . . because guarded by Serpents.” They are called the Avengers, and the “Winged Wheels.” Their mission and character being explained, let us see what the

 

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127 THE DRAGONS OF SECRET WISDOM.

Christian Bible-interpreters say of the Cherubim: “The word signifies in Hebrew, fullness of knowledge; these angels are so called from their exquisite Knowledge, and were therefore used for the punishment of men who affected divine Knowledge.” (Interpreted by Cruden in his Concordance, from Genesis iii., 24.) Very well; and vague as the information is, it shows that the Cherub placed at the gate of the garden of Eden after the “Fall,” suggested to the venerable Interpreters the idea of punishment connected with forbidden Science or divine Knowledge—one that generally leads to another “Fall,” that of the gods, or “God,” in man’s estimation. But as the good old Cruden knew nought of Karma, he may be forgiven. Yet the allegory is suggestive. From Meru, the abode of gods, to Eden, the distance is very small, and from the Hindu Serpents to the Ophite Cherubim, the third out of the seven of which was the Dragon, the separation is still smaller, for both watched the entrance to the realm of Secret Knowledge. But Ezekiel plainly describes the four Cosmic Angels: “I looked, and behold, a whirlwind, a cloud and fire infolding it . . . also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures . . . they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces and four wings . . . the face of a man, and the face of a lion, the face of an ox, and the face of an eagle . . .” (“Man” was here substituted for “Dragon.” Compare the “Ophite Spirits.”¹⁴¹) . . . “Now as I beheld the living creatures behold one wheel upon the Earth with his four faces . . . as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel . . . for the support of the living creature was in the wheel . . . their appearance was like coals of fire . . .” etc. (Ezekiel, ch. i.)

There are three chief groups of Builders and as many of the Planetary Spirits and the Lipika, each group being again divided into Seven sub-groups. It is impossible, even in such a large work as this, to enter into a minute examination of even the three principal groups, as it would demand an extra volume. The “Builders” are the representatives of the first “Mind-Born” Entities, therefore of the primeval Rishi-Prajapati: also of the Seven great Gods of Egypt, of which Osiris is the chief: of the Seven Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians, with

 

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128 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Ormazd at their head: or the “Seven Spirits of the Face”: the Seven Sephiroth separated from the first Triad, etc., etc.¹⁴²

They build or rather rebuild every “System” after the “Night.” The Second group of the Builders is the Architect of our planetary chain exclusively; and the third, the progenitor of our Humanity—the Macrocosmic prototype of the microcosm.

The Planetary Spirits are the informing spirits of the Stars in general, and of the Planets especially. They rule the destinies of men who are all born under one or other of their constellations; the second and third groups pertaining to other systems have the same functions, and all rule various departments in Nature. In the Hindu exoteric Pantheon they are the guardian deities who preside over the eight points of the compass—the four cardinal and the four intermediate points—and are called Loka-Pâlas, “Supporters or guardians of the World” (in our visible Kosmos), of which Indra (East), Yama (South), Varuna (West), and Kuvera (North) are the chief; their elephants and their spouses pertaining of course to fancy and afterthought, though all of them have an occult significance.

The Lipika (a description of whom is given in the Commentary on Stanza IV. No. 6) are the Spirits of the Universe, whereas the Builders are only our own planetary deities. The former belong to the most occult portion of Cosmogenesis, which cannot be given here. Whether the Adepts (even the highest) know this angelic order in the completeness of its triple degrees, or only the lower one connected with the records of our world, is something which the writer is unprepared to say, and she would incline rather to the latter supposition. Of its highest grade one thing only is taught: the Lipika are connected with Karma—being its direct Recorders.¹⁴³

 

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129 THE LIPIKA.

STANZA V.—Continued.

6. The Lipika circumscribe the triangle, the first one (the vertical line or the figure I.), the cube, the second one, and the pentacle within the egg (circle) (a). It is the ring called “Pass not,” for those who descend and ascend (as also for those) who, during the Kalpa, are progressing toward the great day “Be with us” (b). . . . Thus were formed the Arupa and the Rupa (the Formless World and the World of Forms); from one light seven lights; from each of the seven, seven times seven lights. The “Wheels” watch the Ring.

The Stanza proceeds with a minute classification of the Orders of Angelic Hierarchy. From the group of Four and Seven emanates the “mind-born” group of Ten, of Twelve, of Twenty-one, etc., all these divided again into sub-groups of septenaries, novems, duodecimals, and so on, until the mind is lost in this endless enumeration of celestial hosts and Beings, each having its distinct task in the ruling of the visible Kosmos during its existence.

(a) The esoteric meaning of the first sentence of the Sloka is, that those who have been called Lipikas, the Recorders of the Karmic ledger, make an impassible barrier between the personal Ego and the impersonal Self, the Noumenon and Parent-Source of the former. Hence the allegory. They circumscribe the manifested world of matter within the Ring “Pass-Not.” This world is the symbol (objective) of the One divided into the many, on the planes of Illusion, of Adi (the “First”) or of Eka (the “One”); and this One is the collective aggregate, or totality, of the principal Creators or Architects of this visible universe. In Hebrew Occultism their name is both Achath, feminine, “One,” and Achod, “One” again, but masculine. The monotheists have taken (and are still taking) advantage of the profound esotericism of the Kabala to apply the name by which the One Supreme Essence is known to its manifestation, the Sephiroth-Elohim, and call it Jehovah. But this is

130 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

quite arbitrary and against all reason and logic, as the term Elohim is a plural noun, identical with the plural word Chiim, often compounded with the Elohim.¹⁴⁴ Moreover, in Occult metaphysics there are, properly speaking, two “Ones”—the One on the unreachable plane of Absoluteness and Infinity, on which no speculation is possible, and the Second “One” on the plane of Emanations. The former can neither emanate nor be divided, as it is eternal, absolute, and immutable. The Second, being, so to speak, the reflection of the first One (for it is the Logos, or Eswara, in the Universe of Illusion), can do all this.¹⁴⁵ It emanates from itself—as the upper Sephirothal Triad emanates the lower seven Sephiroth—the seven Rays or Dhyan Chohans; in other words, the Homogeneous becomes the Heterogeneous, the “Protyle” differentiates into the Elements. But these, unless they return into their primal Element, can never cross beyond the Laya, or zero-point.

Hence the allegory. The Lipika separate the world (or plane) of pure spirit from that of Matter. Those who “descend and ascend”—the incarnating Monads, and men striving towards purification and “ascending,” but still not having quite reached the goal—may cross the “circle of the Pass-Not,” only on the day “Be-With-Us”; that day when man, freeing himself from the trammels of ignorance, and recog-

 

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131 THE SIDEREAL BOOK OF LIFE.

nising fully the non-separateness of the Ego within his personality—erroneously regarded as his own—from the Universal Ego (Anima Supra-Mundi), merges thereby into the One Essence to become not only one “with us” (the manifested universal lives which are “one” life), but that very life itself.

Astronomically, the “Ring Pass-Not” that the Lipika trace around the Triangle, the First One, the Cube, the Second One, and the Pentacle to circumscribe these figures, is thus shown to contain the symbol of 31415 again, or the coefficient constantly used in mathematical tables (the value of π, pi), the geometrical figures standing here for numerical figures. According to the general philosophical teachings, this ring is beyond the region of what are called nebulæ in astronomy. But this is as erroneous a conception as that of the topography and the descriptions, given in Purânic and other exoteric Scriptures, about the 1008 worlds of the Devaloka worlds and firmaments. There are worlds, of course, in the esoteric as well as in the profane scientific teachings, at such incalculable distances that the light of the nearest of them which has just reached our modern Chaldees, had left its luminary long before the day on which the words “Let there be Light” were pronounced; but these are no worlds on the Devaloka plane, but in our Kosmos.

The chemist goes to the laya or zero point of the plane of matter with which he deals, and then stops short. The physicist or the astronomer counts by billions of miles beyond the nebulæ, and then they also stop short; the semi-initiated Occultist will represent this laya-point to himself as existing on some plane which, if not physical, is still conceivable to the human intellect. But the full Initiate knows that the ring “Pass-Not” is neither a locality nor can it be measured by distance, but that it exists in the absoluteness of infinity. In this “Infinity” of the full Initiate there is neither height, breadth nor thickness, but all is fathomless profundity, reaching down from the physical to the “para-para-metaphysical.” In using the word “down,” essential depth—“nowhere and everywhere”—is meant, not depth of physical matter.

If one searches carefully through the exoteric and grossly anthropomorphic allegories of popular religions, even in these the doctrine embodied in the circle of “Pass-Not” thus guarded by the Lipika, may be dimly perceived. Thus one finds it even in the teachings of

132 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Vedantin sect of the Visishtadwaita, the most tenaciously anthropomorphic in all India. For we read of the released soul that:

After reaching Moksha (a state of bliss meaning “release from Bandha” or bondage), bliss is enjoyed by it in a place called Paramapadha, which place is not material, but made of Suddasatwa (the essence, of which the body of Iswara—“the Lord”—is formed). There, Muktas or Jivatmas (Monads) who have attained Moksha, are never again subject to the qualities of either matter or Karma. “But if they choose, for the sake of doing good to the world, they may incarnate on Earth.”¹⁴⁶ The way to Paramapadha, or the immaterial worlds, from this world, is called Devayana. When a person has attained Moksha and the body dies:

“The Jiva (Soul) goes with Sukshma Sarira¹⁴⁷ from the heart of the body, to the Brahmarandra in the crown of the head, traversing Sushumna, a nerve connecting the heart with the Brahmarandra. The Jiva breaks through the Brahmarandra and goes to the region of the Sun (Suryamandala) through the solar Rays. Then it goes, through a dark spot in the Sun, to Paramapadha. The Jiva is directed on its way by the Supreme Wisdom acquired by Yoga.¹⁴⁸ The Jiva thus proceeds to Paramapadha by the aid of Athivahikas (bearers in transit), known by the names of Archi-Ahas . . . Aditya, Prajapati, etc. The Archis here mentioned are certain pure Souls, etc., etc.” (Visishtadwaita Catechism, by Pundit Bhashyacharya, F.T.S.)

No Spirit except the “Recorders” (Lipika) has ever crossed its forbidden line, nor will any do so until the day of the next Pralaya, for it is the boundary that separates the finite—however infinite in man’s sight—from the truly Infinite. The Spirits referred to, therefore, as those who “ascend and descend” are the “Hosts” of what we loosely call “celestial Beings.” But they are, in fact, nothing of the kind.

 

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133 THE GOD OF MAN AND THE GOD OF THE ANT.

They are Entities of the higher worlds in the hierarchy of Being, so immeasurably high that, to us, they must appear as Gods, and collectively—God. But so we, mortal men, must appear to the ant, which reasons on the scale of its special capacities. The ant may also, for all we know, see the avenging finger of a personal God in the hand of the urchin who, in one moment, under the impulse of mischief, destroys its anthill, the labour of many weeks—long years in the chronology of insects. The ant, feeling it acutely, and attributing the undeserved calamity to a combination of Providence and sin, may also, like man, see in it the result of the sin of its first parent. Who knows and who can affirm or deny? The refusal to admit in the whole Solar system of any other reasonable and intellectual beings on the human plane, than ourselves, is the greatest conceit of our age. All that science has a right to affirm, is that there are no invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as we do. It cannot deny point-blank the possibility of there being worlds within worlds, under totally different conditions to those that constitute the nature of our world; nor can it deny that there may be a certain limited communication¹⁴⁹ between some of those worlds and our own. To the highest, we are taught, belong the seven orders of the purely divine Spirits; to the six lower ones belong hierarchies that can occasionally be seen and heard by men, and who do communicate with their progeny of the Earth; which progeny is indissolubly linked with them, each principle in man having its direct source in the nature of those great Beings, who furnish us with the respective invisible elements in us. Physical Science is welcome to speculate upon the physiological mechanism of living beings, and to continue her fruitless efforts in trying to resolve our feelings, our sensations, mental and spiritual, into functions of their inorganic vehicles. Nevertheless, all that will ever be accomplished in this direction has already been done, and Science will go no farther.

 

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134 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

She is before a dead wall, on the face of which she traces, as she imagines, great physiological and psychic discoveries, but every one of which will be shown later on to be no better than the cobwebs spun by her scientific fancies and illusions. The tissues of our objective framework alone are subservient to the analysis and researches of physiological science.¹⁵⁰ The six higher principles in them will evade for ever the hand that is guided by an animus that purposely ignores and rejects the Occult Sciences.

The “Great Day of Be-with-us,” then, is an expression the only merit of which lies in its literal translation. Its significance is not so easily revealed to a public, unacquainted with the mystic tenets of Occultism, or rather of Esoteric Wisdom or “Budhism.” It is an expression peculiar to the latter, and as hazy for the profane as that of the Egyptians who called the same the “Day of Come-to-us,”¹⁵¹ which

 

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135 THE SOUL’S PILGRIMAGE.

is identical with the former, though the verb “be” in this sense, might be still better replaced with either of the two words “Remain” or “Rest-with-us,” as it refers to that long period of Rest which is called Paranirvana. As in the exoteric interpretation of the Egyptian rites the soul of every defunct person—from the Hierophant down to the sacred bull Apis—became an Osiris, was Osirified, though the Secret Doctrine had always taught, that the real Osirification was the lot of every Monad only after 3,000 cycles of Existences; so in the present case. The “Monad,” born of the nature and the very Essence of the “Seven” (its highest principle becoming immediately enshrined in the Seventh Cosmic Element), has to perform its septenary gyration throughout the Cycle of Being and forms, from the highest to the lowest; and then again from man to God. At the threshold of Paranirvana it reassumes its primeval Essence and becomes the Absolute once more.

136‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA VI.

1. By the power of the Mother of Mercy and Knowledge (a), Kwan-Yin,¹⁵² the “Triple” of Kwan-Shai-Yin, residing in Kwan-Yin-Tien (b), Fohat, the breath of their progeny, the Son of the Sons, having called forth from the lower abyss (chaos) the illusive form of Sien-Tchan (our Universe) and the seven elements:

(a) The Mother of Mercy and Knowledge is called “the triple” of Kwan-Shai-Yin because in her correlations, metaphysical and cosmical, she is the “Mother, the Wife and the Daughter” of the Logos, just as in the later theological translations she became “the Father, Son and (the female) Holy Ghost”—the Sakti or Energy—the Essence of the three. Thus in the Esotericism of the Vedantins, Daiviprakriti, the Light manifested through Eswara, the Logos,¹⁵³ is at one and the same time the Mother and also the Daughter of the Logos or Verbum of Parabrahmam; while in that of the trans-Himalayan teachings it is—in the hierarchy of allegorical and metaphysical theogony—“the Mother” or abstract, ideal matter, Mulaprakriti, the Root of Nature;—from the metaphysical standpoint, a correlation of Adi-Bhûta, manifested in the Logos, Avalokitêshwâra;—and from the purely occult and

 

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137 THE MYSTERY OF THE FEMALE LOGOS.

Cosmical, Fohat,¹⁵⁴ the “Son of the Son,” the androgynous energy resulting from this “Light of the Logos,” and which manifests in the plane of the objective Universe as the hidden, as much as the revealed, Electricity—which is Life.

(b) Kwan-Yin-Tien means the “melodious heaven of Sound,” the abode of Kwan-Yin, or the “Divine Voice” literally. This “Voice” is a synonym of the Verbum or the Word: “Speech,” as the expression of thought. Thus may be traced the connection with, and even the origin of the Hebrew Bath-Kol, the “daughter of the Divine Voice,” or Verbum, or the male and female Logos, the “Heavenly Man” or Adam Kadmon, who is at the same time Sephira. The latter was surely anticipated by the Hindu Vâch, the goddess of Speech, or of the Word. For Vâch—the daughter and the female portion, as is stated, of Brahmâ, one “generated by the gods”—is, in company with Kwan-Yin, with Isis (also the daughter, wife and sister of Osiris) and other goddesses, the female Logos, so to speak, the goddess of the active forces in Nature, the Word, Voice or Sound, and Speech. If Kwan-Yin is the “melodious Voice,” so is Vâch; “the melodious cow who milked forth sustenance and water” (the female principle)—“who yields us nourishment and sustenance,” as Mother-Nature. She is associated in the work of creation with the Prajâpati. She is male and female ad libitum, as Eve is with Adam. And she is a form of Aditi—the principle higher than Ether—in Akâsa, the synthesis of all the forces in Nature; thus Vâch and Kwan-Yin are both the magic potency of Occult sound in Nature and Ether—which “Voice” calls forth Sien-Tchan, the illusive form of the Universe out of Chaos and the Seven Elements.

Thus in Manu Brahmâ (the Logos also) is shown dividing his body into two parts, male and female, and creating in the latter, who is Vâch, Viraj, who is himself, or Brahmâ again—it is in this way a learned Vedantin Occultist speaks of that “goddess,” explaining the reason why Eswara (or Brahmâ) is called Verbum or Logos; why in fact it is called Sabda Brahmam:

 

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138 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“The explanation I am going to give you will appear thoroughly mystical; but if mystical, it has a tremendous significance when properly understood. Our old writers said that Vâch is of four kinds (see Rig Veda and the Upanishads). Vaikhari-Vâch is what we utter. Every kind of Vaikhari-Vâch exists in its Madhyama, further in its Pasyanti, and ultimately in its Para form.¹⁵⁵ The reason why this Pranava is called Vâch is this, that the four principles of the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vâch. Now the whole manifested solar System exists in its Sukshma form in the light or energy of the Logos, because its energy is caught up and transferred to Cosmic matter. . . . The whole Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikhari-Vâch, the light of the Logos is the Madhyama form, and the Logos itself the Pasyanti form, and Parabrahm the Para form or aspect of that Vâch. It is by the light of this explanation that we must try to understand certain statements made by various philosophers to the effect that the manifested Kosmos is the Verbum manifested as Kosmos” (see Lecture on the Bhagavadgita, referred to above).

———

STANZA VI.—(Continued.)

2. The Swift and the Radiant One produces the seven Layu¹⁵⁶ (a) centres, against which none will prevail to the great day “Be with us”—and seats the universe on these eternal foundations, surrounding Sien-Tchan with the Elementary Germs (b).

(a) The seven Layu centres are the seven Zero points, using the term Zero in the same sense that Chemists do, to indicate a point at which, in Esotericism, the scale of reckoning of differentiation begins. From the Centres—beyond which Esoteric philosophy allows us to perceive the dim metaphysical outlines of the “Seven Sons” of Life and Light, the Seven Logoi of the Hermetic and all other philosophers—begins

 

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139 FROM NO-NUMBER TO NUMBER SEVEN.

the differentiation of the elements which enter into the constitution of our Solar System. It has often been asked what was the exact definition of Fohat and his powers and functions, as he seems to exercise those of a Personal God as understood in the popular religions. The answer has just been given in the comment on Stanza V. As well said in the Bhagavadgita Lectures, “The whole Kosmos must necessarily exist in the One Source of energy from which this light (Fohat) emanates.” Whether we count the principles in Kosmos and man as seven or only as four, the forces of, and in, physical Nature are Seven; and it is stated by the same authority that “Pragna, or the capacity of perception, exists in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter” (Personal and impersonal God). For, “just as a human being is composed of seven principles, differentiated matter in the Solar System exists in seven different conditions” (ibid). So does Fohat.¹⁵⁷ He is One and Seven, and on the Cosmic plane is behind all such manifestations as light, heat, sound, adhesion, etc., etc., and is the “spirit” of Electricity, which is the Life of the Universe. As an abstraction, we call it the One Life; as an objective and evident Reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which begins at the upper rung with the One Unknowable Causality, and ends as Omnipresent Mind and Life immanent in every atom of Matter. Thus, while science speaks of its evolution through brute matter, blind force, and senseless motion, the Occultists point to intelligent Law and sentient Life, and add that Fohat is the guiding Spirit of all this. Yet he is no personal god at all, but the emanation of those other Powers behind him whom the Christians call the “Messengers” of their God (who is in reality only the Elohim, or rather one of the Seven Creators called Elohim), and we, the “Messenger of the primordial Sons of Life and Light.”

(b) The “Elementary Germs” with which he fills Sien-Tchan (the “Universe”) from Tien-Sin (the “Heaven of Mind,” literally, or that which is absolute) are the Atoms of Science and the Monads of Leibnitz.

 

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140 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA VI.—Continued.

3. Of the seven (elements)—first one manifested, six concealed; two manifested—five concealed; three manifested—four concealed; four produced—three hidden; four and one tsan (fraction) revealed—two and one half concealed; six to be manifested—one laid aside (a). lastly, seven small wheels revolving; one giving birth to the other (b).

(a) Although these Stanzas refer to the whole Universe after a Mahapralaya (universal destruction), yet this sentence, as any student of Occultism may see, refers also by analogy to the evolution and final formation of the primitive (though compound) Seven Elements on our Earth. Of these, four elements are now fully manifested, while the fifth—Ether—is only partially so, as we are hardly in the second half of the Fourth Round, and consequently the fifth Element will manifest fully only in the Fifth Round. The Worlds, including our own, were of course, as germs, primarily evolved from the one Element in its second stage (“Father-Mother,” the differentiated World’s Soul, not what is termed the “Over-Soul” by Emerson), whether we call it, with modern Science, Cosmic dust and Fire Mist, or with Occultism—Akâsa, Jivâtma, divine Astral Light, or the “Soul of the World.” But this first stage of Evolution was in due course of time followed by the next. No world, as no heavenly body, could be constructed on the objective plane, had not the Elements been sufficiently differentiated already from their primeval Ilus, resting in Laya. The latter term is a synonym of Nirvana. It is, in fact, the Nirvanic dissociation of all substances, merged after a life-cycle into the latency of their primary conditions. It is the luminous but bodiless shadow of the matter that was, the realm of negativeness—wherein lie latent during their period of rest the active Forces of the Universe. Now, speaking of Elements, it is made the standing reproach of the Ancients, that they “supposed their Elements simple and undecomposable.”¹⁵⁸ Once more this is an unwarrantable state-

 

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141 WERE THE ANCIENTS IGNORANT OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES?

ment; as, at any rate, their initiated philosophers can hardly come under such an imputation, since it is they who have invented allegories and religious myths from the beginning. Had they been ignorant of the Heterogeneity of their Elements they would have had no personifications of Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Æther; their Cosmic gods and goddesses would never have been blessed with such posterity, with so many sons and daughters, elements born from and within each respective Element. Alchemy and occult phenomena would have been a delusion and a snare, even in theory, had the Ancients been ignorant of the potentialities and correlative functions and attributes of every element that enters into the composition of Air, Water, Earth, and even Fire—the latter a terra incognita to this day to modern Science, which is obliged to call it Motion, evolution of light and heat, state of ignition,—defining it by its outward aspects in short, and remaining ignorant of its nature. But that which

142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

modern Science seems to fail to perceive is that, differentiated as may have been those simple chemical atoms—which archaic philosophy called “the creators of their respective Parents,” fathers, brothers, husbands of their mothers, and those mothers the daughters of their own sons, like Aditi and Daksha, for example—differentiated as these elements were in the beginning, still, they were not the compound bodies known to science, as they are now. Neither Water, Air, Earth (synonym for solids generally) existed in their present form, representing the three states of matter alone recognised by Science; for all these are the productions already recombined by the atmospheres of globes completely formed—even to fire—so that in the first periods of the earth’s formation they were something quite sui generis. Now that the conditions and laws ruling our solar system are fully developed; and that the atmosphere of our earth, as of every other globe, has become, so to say, a crucible of its own, Occult Science teaches that there is a perpetual exchange taking place in space of molecules, or of atoms rather, correlating, and thus changing their combining equivalents on every planet. Some men of Science, and those among the greatest physicists and chemists, begin to suspect this fact, which has been known for ages to the Occultists. The spectroscope only shows the probable similarity (on external evidence) of terrestrial and sidereal substance; it is unable to go any farther, or to show whether atoms gravitate towards one another in the same way and under the same conditions as they are supposed to do on our planet, physically and chemically. The scale of temperature, from the highest degree to the lowest that can be conceived of, may be imagined to be one and the same in and for the whole Universe; nevertheless, its properties, other than those of dissociation and re-association, differ on every planet; and thus atoms enter into new forms of existence, undreamt of, and incognizable to, physical Science. As already expressed in “Five Years of Theosophy,” the essence of Cometary matter, for instance, “is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest chemists and physicists of the earth are acquainted” (p. 242). And even that matter, during rapid passage through our atmosphere, undergoes a certain change in its nature. Thus not alone the elements of our planets, but even those of all its sisters in the Solar System, differ as widely from each other in their combinations, as from the Cosmic elements beyond our

143 THE SLEEP OF THE ETERNAL MOTHER.

Solar limits.¹⁵⁹ Therefore, they cannot be taken as a standard for comparison with the same in other worlds.¹⁶⁰ Enshrined in their virgin, pristine state within the bosom of the Eternal Mother, every atom born beyond the threshold of her realm is doomed to incessant differentiation. “The Mother sleeps, yet is ever breathing.” And every breath sends out into the plane of manifestation her Protean products, which, carried on by the wave of the efflux, are scattered by Fohat, and driven toward and beyond this or another planetary atmosphere. Once caught by the latter, the atom is lost; its pristine purity is gone for ever, unless Fate dissociates it by leading it to “a current of efflux” (an occult term meaning quite a different process from that which the ordinary term implies); when it may be carried once more to the borderland where it had perished, and taking its flight, not into Space above but into Space within, it will be brought under a state of differential equilibrium and happily re-absorbed. Were a truly learned Occultist-alchemist to write the “Life and Adventures of an Atom” he would secure thereby the eternal scorn of the modern chemist, perchance also his subsequent

 

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144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

gratitude.¹⁶¹ However it may be, “The Breath of the Father-Mother issues cold and radiant and gets hot and corrupt, to cool once more, and be purified in the eternal bosom of inner Space,” says the Commentary. Man absorbs cold pure air on the mountain-top, and throws it out impure, hot and transformed. Thus—the higher atmosphere being the mouth, and the lower one the lungs of every globe—the man of our planet breathes only the refuse of “Mother”; therefore, “he is doomed to die on it.”¹⁶²

(b) The process referred to as “the small wheels giving birth, one to the other,” takes place in the sixth region from above, and on the plane of the most material world of all in the manifested Kosmos—our terrestrial plane. These “Seven Wheels” are our planetary chain (see Commentary Nos. 5 and 6). By “Wheels” the various spheres and centres of forces are generally meant; but in this case they refer to our septenary ring.

———

STANZA VI.—Continued.

4. He builds them in the likeness of older Wheels (worlds), placing them on the imperishable centres (a).

How does Fohat build them? He collects the fiery dust. He makes balls of fire, runs through them and round them, infusing life thereinto; then sets them into motion, some one, some the other way. They are cold—he makes them hot. They are dry—he makes them moist. They shine—he fans and cools them (b).

Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the other during Seven Eternities.¹⁶³

The Worlds are built “in the likeness of older Wheels”—i.e., those that existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya,

 

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145 THE COSMIC PLANE, AN ILLUSION.

because the Law for the birth, growth, and decay of everything in Kosmos, from the Sun to the glow-worm in the grass, is One. It is an everlasting work of perfection with every new appearance, but the Substance-Matter and Forces are all one and the same. But this Law acts on every planet through minor and varying laws. The “imperishable Laya Centres” have a great importance, and their meaning must be fully understood if we would have a clear conception of the Archaic Cosmogony, whose theories have now passed into Occultism. At present, one thing may be stated. The worlds are built neither upon, nor over, nor in the Laya centres, the zero-point being a condition, not any mathematical point.

(b) Bear in mind that Fohat, the constructive Force of Cosmic Electricity, is said, metaphorically, to have sprung like Rudra from Brahmâ “from the brain of the Father and the bosom of the Mother,” and then to have metamorphosed himself into a male and a female, i.e., polarity, into positive and negative electricity. He has seven sons who are his brothers; and Fohat is forced to be born time after time whenever any two of his son-brothers indulge in too close contact—whether an embrace or a fight. To avoid this, he binds together and unites those of unlike nature and separates those of similar temperaments. This, of course, relates, as any one can see, to electricity generated by friction and to the law involving attraction between two objects of unlike, and repulsion between those of like polarity. The Seven “Sons-brothers,” however, represent and personify the seven forms of Cosmic magnetism called in practical Occultism the “Seven Radicals,” whose co-operative and active progeny are, among other energies, Electricity, Magnetism, Sound, Light, Heat, Cohesion, etc. Occult Science defines all these as Super-sensuous effects in their hidden behaviour, and as objective phenomena in the world of senses; the former requiring abnormal faculties to perceive them—the latter, our ordinary physical senses. They all pertain to, and are the emanations of, still more supersensuous spiritual qualities, not personated by, but belonging to, real and conscious causes. To attempt a description of such entities would be worse than useless. The reader must bear in mind that, according to our teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a great Illusion, the nearer a body is to the Unknown Substance, the more it approaches reality, as being removed the farther

146 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

from this world of Maya. Therefore, though the molecular constitution of their bodies is not deducible from their manifestations on this plane of consciousness, they nevertheless (from the standpoint of the adept Occultist) possess a distinctive objective if not material structure, in the relatively noumenal—as opposed to the phenomenal—Universe. Men of science may term them Force or Forces generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism sees in the effects “Elemental” (forces), and, in the direct causes producing them, intelligent Divine Workmen. The intimate connection of those Elementals (guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers)—their correlation we might call it—with the elements of pure Matter, results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc. Of course we shall never agree with the American Substantialists¹⁶⁴ who call every Force and Energy—whether Light, Heat, Electricity or Cohesion—an “Entity”; for this would be equivalent to calling the noise produced by the rolling of the wheels of a vehicle an Entity—thus confusing and identifying that “noise” with the driver outside, and the guiding Master Intelligence within the vehicle. But we certainly give that name to the “drivers” and to these guiding Intelligences—the ruling Dhyan Chohans, as shown. The “Elementals,” the Nature-Forces, are the acting, though invisible, or rather imperceptible, secondary Causes and in themselves the effects of primary Causes behind the Veil of all terrestrial phenomena. Electricity, light, heat, etc., have been aptly termed the “Ghost or Shadow of Matter in Motion,” i.e., supersensuous states of matter whose effects only we are able to cognize. To expand, then, the simile given above. The sensation of light is like the sound of the rolling wheels—a purely phenomenal effect, having no existence outside the observer; the proximate exciting cause of the sensation is comparable to the driver—a supersensuous state of matter in motion, a Nature-Force or Elemental. But, behind even this, stand—just as the owner of the carriage directs the driver from within—the higher and noumenal causes, the Intelligences from whose essence radiate these States of “Mother,” generating the countless milliards of Elementals or psychic Nature-Spirits, just as every drop of water generates its physical

 

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147 PRIMORDIAL SUBSTANCE, A REALITY.

infinitesimal Infusoria. (See “Gods, Monads, and Atoms,” in Part III.) It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the principles from one planet to the other, from one star to another—child-star. When a planet dies, its informing principles are transferred to a laya or sleeping centre, with potential but latent energy in it, which is thus awakened into life and begins to form itself into a new sidereal body. (Vide infra, “A Few Theosophical Misconceptions, etc.”)

It is most remarkable that, while honestly confessing their entire ignorance of the true Nature of even terrestrial matter—primordial substance being regarded more as a dream than as a sober reality—the physicists should set themselves up as judges, nevertheless, of that matter, and claim to know what it is able and is not able to do, in various combinations. Scientists know it (matter) hardly skin-deep, and yet they will dogmatise. It is “a mode of motion” and nothing else. But the force that is inherent in a living person’s breath, when blowing a speck of dust from the table, is also, and undeniably, “a mode of motion”; and it is as undeniably not a quality of the matter, or the particles of that speck, and it emanates from the living and thinking Entity that breathed, whether the impulse originated consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, to endow matter—something of which nothing is known so far—with an inherent quality called Force, of the nature of which still less is known, is to create a far more serious difficulty than that which lies in the acceptation of the intervention of our “Nature-Spirits” in every natural phenomenon.

The Occultists, who do not say—if they would express themselves correctly—that matter, but only the substance or essence of matter, is indestructible and eternal, (i.e., the Root of all, Mulaprakriti): assert that all the so-called Forces of Nature, Electricity, Magnetism, Light, Heat, etc., etc., far from being modes of motion of material particles, are in esse, i.e., in their ultimate constitution, the differentiated aspects of that Universal Motion which is discussed and explained in the first pages of this volume (See Proem). When Fohat is said to produce “Seven Laya Centres,” it means that for formative or creative purposes, the Great Law (Theists may call it God) stops, or rather modifies its perpetual motion on seven invisible points within the area of the manifested Universe. “The great Breath digs through Space seven holes into Laya to cause them to circumgyrate during Manvantara” (Occult Catechism). We

148 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

have said that Laya is what Science may call the Zero-point or line; the realm of absolute negativeness, or the one real absolute Force, the noumenon of the Seventh State of that which we ignorantly call and recognise as “Force”; or again the Noumenon of Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance which is itself an unreachable and unknowable object to finite perception; the root and basis of all states of objectivity and subjectivity too; the neutral axis, not one of the many aspects, but its centre. It may serve to elucidate the meaning if we attempt to imagine a neutral centre—the dream of those who would discover perpetual motion. A “neutral centre” is, in one aspect, the limiting point of any given set of senses. Thus, imagine two consecutive planes of matter as already formed; each of these corresponding to an appropriate set of perceptive organs. We are forced to admit that between these two planes of matter an incessant circulation takes place; and if we follow the atoms and molecules of (say) the lower in their transformation upwards, these will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the range of the faculties we are using on the lower plane. In fact, to us the matter of the lower plane there vanishes from our perception into nothing—or rather it passes on to the higher plane, and the state of matter corresponding to such a point of transition must certainly possess special and not readily discoverable properties. Such “Seven Neutral Centres,”¹⁶⁵ then, are produced by Fohat, who, when, as Milton has it—

“Fair foundations (are) laid whereon to build . . .”

quickens matter into activity and evolution.

The Primordial Atom (anu) cannot be multiplied either in its pregenetic state, or its primogeneity; therefore it is called “sum total,” figuratively, of course, as that “sum total” is boundless. (See Addendum to this Book.) That which is the abyss of nothingness to the physicist, who knows only the world of visible causes and effects, is the boundless Space of the Divine Plenum to the Occultist. Among many other objections to the doctrine of an endless evolution and re-involution (or re-absorption) of the Kosmos, a process which, according to the Brahminical and Esoteric Doctrine, is without a beginning or an end, the Occultist is told that it cannot be, since “by all the admissions of

 

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149 THE MOON IS NOT DEAD, BUT ONLY SLEEPETH.

modern scientific philosophy it is a necessity of Nature to run down.” If the tendency of Nature “to run down” is to be considered so forcible an objection to Occult Cosmogony, “How,” we may ask, “do your Positivists and Free-thinkers and Scientists account for the phalanx around us of active stellar systems?” They had eternity to “run down” in; why, then, is not the Kosmos a huge inert mass? Even the moon is only hypothetically believed to be a dead planet, “run down,” and astronomy does not seem to be acquainted with many such dead planets.¹⁶⁶ The query is unanswerable. But apart from this it must be noted that the idea of the amount of “transformable energy” in our little system coming to an end is based purely on the fallacious conception of a “white-hot, incandescent Sun” perpetually radiating away his heat without compensation into Space. To this we reply that nature runs down and disappears from the objective plane, only to re-emerge after a time of rest out of the subjective and to reascend once more. Our Kosmos and Nature will run down only to reappear on a more perfect plane after every Pralaya. The matter of the Eastern philosophers is not the “matter” and Nature of the Western metaphysicians. For what is Matter? And above all, what is our scientific philosophy but that which was so justly and so politely defined by Kant as “the Science of the limits to our Knowledge?” Where have the many attempts made by Science to bind, to connect, and define all the phenomena of organic life by mere physical and chemical manifestations, brought it to? To speculation generally—mere soap-bubbles, that burst one after the other before the men of Science were permitted to discover real facts. All this would have been avoided, and the progress of knowledge would have proceeded with gigantic strides, had only Science and its philosophy abstained from accepting hypotheses on the mere one-sided Knowledge of their Matter.¹⁶⁷

 

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150 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

If no physical intellect is capable of counting the grains of sand covering a few miles of sea-shore; or to fathom the ultimate nature and essence of those grains, palpable and visible on the palm of the naturalist, how can any materialist limit the laws changing the conditions and being of the atoms in primordial chaos, or know anything certain about the capabilities and potency of their atoms and molecules before and after their formation into worlds? These changeless and eternal molecules—far thicker in space than the grains on the ocean shore—may differ in their constitution along the line of their planes of existence, as the soul-substance differs from its vehicle, the body. Each atom has seven planes of being or existence, we are taught; and each plane is governed by its specific laws of evolution and absorption. Ignorant of any, even approximate, chronological data from which to start in attempting to decide the age of our planet or the origin of the solar system, astronomers, geologists, and physicists are drifting with each new hypothesis farther and farther away from the shores of fact into the fathomless depths of speculative ontology.¹⁶⁸ The Law of Analogy in the plan of structure between the trans-Solar systems and the intra-Solar planets, does not necessarily bear upon the finite conditions to which every visible body is subject, in this our plane of being. In Occult Science this law is the first and most important key to Cosmic physics; but it has to be studied in its minutest details and, “to be

 

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151 NATURE CAN NEVER CEASE.

turned seven times,” before one comes to understand it. Occult philosophy is the only science that can teach it. How, then, can anyone hang the truth or the untruth of the Occultist’s proposition that “the Kosmos is eternal in its unconditioned collectivity, and finite but in its conditioned manifestations” on this one-sided physical enunciation that “it is a necessity of Nature to run down?”

—————

With these verses—the 4th Sloka of Stanza VI.—ends that portion of the Stanzas which relates to the Universal Cosmogony after the last Mahapralaya or Universal destruction, which, when it comes, sweeps out of Space every differentiated thing, Gods as atoms, like so many dry leaves. From this verse onwards, the Stanzas are concerned only with our Solar System in general, with the planetary chains therein, inferentially, and with the history of our globe (the 4th and its chain) especially. All the Stanzas and verses which follow in this Book I. refer only to the evolution of, and on, our Earth. With regard to the latter, a strange tenet—strange from the modern scientific standpoint only, of course—is held, which ought to be made known.

But before entirely new and rather startling theories are presented to the reader, they must be prefaced by a few words of explanation. This is absolutely necessary, as these theories clash not only with modern science, but contradict, on certain points, earlier statements made by other Theosophists, who claim to base their explanations and renderings of these teachings on the same authority as we do.¹⁶⁹

This may give rise to the idea that there is a decided contradiction between the expounders of the same doctrine; whereas the difference, in reality, arises from the incompleteness of the information given to earlier writers, who thus drew some erroneous conclusions and indulged in premature speculations, in their endeavour to present a complete system to the public. Thus the reader, who is already a student of Theosophy, must not be surprised to find in these pages the rectification of certain statements made in various Theosophical works, and also the explanation of certain points which have remained obscure, because they were necessarily left incomplete. Many are the questions upon which even the author of “Esoteric Buddhism” (the best and

 

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152‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

most accurate of all such works) has not touched. On the other hand, even he has introduced several mistaken notions which must now be presented in their true mystic light, as far as the present writer is capable of doing so.

Let us then make a short break between the Slokas just explained and those which follow, for the Cosmic periods which separate them are of immense duration. This will afford us ample time to take a bird’s-eye view of some points pertaining to the Secret Doctrine, which have been presented to the public under a more or less uncertain and sometimes mistaken light.

———

A FEW EARLY THEOSOPHICAL MISCONCEPTIONS CONCERNING PLANETS, ROUNDS, AND MAN.

Among the eleven Stanzas omitted¹⁷⁰ there is one which gives a full description of the formation of the planetary chains one after another, after the first Cosmic and Atomic differentiation had commenced in the primitive Acosmism. It is idle to speak of “laws arising when Deity prepares to create” for (a) laws or rather Law is eternal and uncreated; and (b) that Deity is Law, and vice versâ. Moreover, the one eternal Law unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular chains of worlds, composed of seven globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the world of formation (the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe). Out of these seven only one, the lowest and the most material of those globes, is within our plane or means of perception, the six others lying outside of it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. Every such chain of worlds is the progeny and creation of another, lower, and dead chain—its reincarnation, so to say. To make it clearer: we are told of the planets—of which seven only were held as sacred, as being ruled by the highest regents or gods, and not at all because the ancients knew nothing of the others¹⁷¹—that each of these, whether known or unknown, is a septenary, as is the chain to which the Earth belongs (see “Esoteric

 

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153 DESCENDING AND RE-ASCENDING STATES.

Buddhism”). For instance, all such planets as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., etc., or our Earth, are as visible to us as our globe, probably, is to the inhabitants of the other planets, if any, because they are all on the same plane; while the superior fellow-globes of these planets are on other planes quite outside that of our terrestrial senses. As their relative position is given further on, and also in the diagram appended to the Comments on Verse 7 of Stanza VI., a few words of explanation is all that is needed at present. These invisible companions correspond curiously to that which we call “the principles in Man.” The seven are on three material planes and one spiritual plane, answering to the three Upadhis (material bases) and one spiritual vehicle (Vahan) of our seven principles in the human division. If, for the sake of a clearer mental conception, we imagine the human principles to be arranged as in the following scheme, we shall obtain the annexed diagram of correspondences:

Diagram I.

[Footnotes from Diagram I.: (1) Spirit¹⁷², (7) Physical Body¹⁷³]

 

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154 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The dark horizontal lines of the lower planes are the Upadhis in one case, and the planes in the case of the planetary chain. Of course, as regards the human principles, the diagram does not place them quite in order, yet it shows the correspondence and analogy to which attention is now drawn. As the reader will see, it is a case of descent into matter, the adjustment—in both the mystic and the physical senses—of the two, and their interblending for the great coming “struggle of life” that awaits both the entities. “Entity” may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a globe; but the ancient philosophers, who saw in the earth a huge “animal,” were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs; and Pliny, who called the Earth our kind nurse and mother, the only element which is not inimical to man, spoke more truly than Watts, who fancied that he saw in her the footstool of God. For Earth is only the footstool of man in his ascension to higher regions; the vestibule—

“. . . . . . . to glorious mansions,
Through which a moving crowd for ever press.”

But this only shows how admirably the occult philosophy fits everything in Nature, and how much more logical are its tenets than the lifeless hypothetical speculations of physical science.

Having learned thus much, the mystic will be better prepared to understand the occult teaching, though every formal student of modern science may, and probably will, regard it as preposterous nonsense. The student of occultism, however, holds that the theory at present under discussion is far more philosophical and probable than any other. It is more logical, at any rate, than the theory recently advanced which made of the moon the projection of a portion of our Earth extruded when the latter was but a globe in fusion, a molten plastic mass.¹⁷⁴

It is said that the planetary chains having their “Days” and their

 

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155 EXCHANGE OF LIFE-PRINCIPLES.

“Nights”—i.e., periods of activity or life, and of inertia or death—and behave in heaven as do men on Earth: they generate their likes, get old, and become personally extinct, their spiritual principles only living in their progeny as a survival of themselves.

Without attempting the very difficult task of giving out the whole process in all its cosmic details, enough may be said to give an approximate idea of it. When a planetary chain is in its last Round, its Globe 1 or A, before finally dying out, sends all its energy and “principles” into a neutral centre of latent force, a “laya centre,” and thereby informs a new nucleus of undifferentiated substance or matter, i.e., calls it into activity or gives it life. Suppose such a process to have taken place in the lunar “planetary” chain; suppose again, for argument’s sake (though Mr. Darwin’s theory quoted below has lately been upset, even if the fact has not yet been ascertained by mathematical calculation) that the moon is far older than the Earth. Imagine the six fellow-globes of the moon—æons before the first globe of our seven was evolved—just in the same position in relation to each other as the fellow-globes of our chain occupy in regard to our Earth now. (See in “Esoteric Buddhism,” “The Constitution of Man,” and the “Planetary Chain.”) And now it will be easy to imagine further Globe A of the lunar chain informing Globe A of the terrestrial chain, and—dying; Globe B of the former sending after that its energy into Globe B of the new chain; then Globe C of the lunar, creating its progeny sphere C of the terrene chain; then the Moon (our Satellite¹⁷⁵) pouring forth into

 

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156 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the lowest globe of our planetary ring—Globe D, our Earth—all its life, energy and powers; and, having transferred them to a new centre becoming virtually a dead planet, in which rotation has almost ceased since the birth of our globe. The Moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers and “principles” are transfused. She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny. Constantly vampirised by her child, she revenges herself on it by soaking it through and through with the nefarious, invisible, and poisoned influence which emanates from the occult side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although the body which they had formed is soulless and lifeless. Therefore its emanations are at the same time beneficent and maleficent—this circumstance finding its parallel on earth in the fact that the grass and plants are nowhere more juicy and thriving than on the graves; while at the same time it is the graveyard or corpse-emanations, which kill. And like all ghouls or vampires, the moon is the friend of the sorcerers and the foe of the unwary. From the archaic æons and the later times of the witches of Thessaly, down to some of the present tantrikas of Bengal, her nature and properties were known to every Occultist, but have remained a closed book for physicists.

Such is the moon from the astronomical, geological, and physical standpoints. As to her metaphysical and psychic nature it must remain an occult secret in this work, as it was in the volume on “Esoteric Buddhism,” notwithstanding the rather sanguine statement made therein on p. 113 (5th edition) that “there is not much mystery left now in the riddle of the eighth sphere.” These are topics, indeed, “on which the adepts are very reserved in their communications to uninitiated pupils,” and since they have, moreover, never sanctioned or permitted any published speculations upon them, the less said the better.

Yet without treading upon the forbidden ground of the “eighth sphere,” it may be useful to state some additional facts with regard to ex-monads of the lunar chain—the “lunar ancestors”—as they play a

157 OPINIONS DIFFER AND YET AGREE.

leading part in the coming Anthropogenesis. This brings us directly to the septenary constitution of man; and as some discussion has arisen of late about the best classification to be adopted for the division of the microcosmic entity, two systems are now appended with a view to facilitate comparison. The subjoined short article is from the pen of Mr. T. Subba Row, a learned Vedantin scholar. He prefers the Brahmanical division of the Raja Yoga, and from a metaphysical point of view he is quite right. But, as it is a question of simple choice and expediency, we hold in this work to the “time-honoured” classification of the trans-Himalayan “Arhat Esoteric School.” The following table and its explanatory text are reprinted from the “Theosophist” of Madras, and they are also contained in “Five Years of Theosophy”:

SEPTENARY DIVISION IN DIFFERENT INDIAN SYSTEMS.

“We give below in a tabular form the classifications adopted by the Buddhist and Vedantic teachers of the principles of man:

 

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158 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

From the foregoing table it will be seen that the third principle in the Buddhist classification is not separately mentioned in the Vedantic division, as it is merely the vehicle of Prana. It will also be seen that the Fourth principle is included in the third Kosa (Sheath), as the same principle is but the vehicle of will-power, which is but an energy of the mind. It must also be noticed that the Vignanamaya Kosa is considered to be distinct from the Manomaya Kosa, as a division is made after death between the lower part of the mind, as it were, which has a closer affinity with the fourth principle than with the sixth; and its higher part, which attaches itself to the latter, and which is, in fact, the basis for the higher spiritual individuality of man.

We may also here point out to our readers that the classification mentioned in the last column is, for all practical purposes, connected with Raja Yoga, the best and simplest. Though there are seven principles in man, there are but three distinct Upadhis (bases), in each of which his Atma may work independently of the rest. These three Upadhis can be separated by an Adept without killing himself. He cannot separate the seven principles from each other without destroying his constitution.”

The student will now be better prepared to see that between the three Upadhis of the Raja Yoga and its Atma, and our three Upadhis, Atma, and the additional three divisions, there is in reality but very little difference. Moreover, as every adept in cis-Himalayan or trans-Himalayan India, of the Patanjali, the Aryasanga or the Mahayana schools, has to become a Raja Yogi, he must, therefore, accept the Taraka Raja classification in principle and theory whatever classification he resorts to for practical and occult purposes. Thus, it matters very little whether one speaks of the three Upadhis with their three aspects and Atma, the eternal and immortal synthesis, or calls them the “seven principles.”

For the benefit of those who may not have read, or, if they have, may not have clearly understood, in Theosophical writings, the doctrine of the septenary chains of worlds in the Solar Kosmos, the teaching is briefly thus:

1. Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible

159 THE TRANSMIGRATIONS OF THE EGO.

or invisible, is credited with six companion globes. (See Diagram No. 3, after verse 6 of this commentary.) The evolution of life proceeds on these seven globes or bodies from the 1st to the 7th in Seven Rounds or Seven Cycles.

2. These globes are formed by a process which the Occultists call the “rebirth of planetary chains (or rings).” When the seventh and last Round of one of such rings has been entered upon, the highest or first globe “A,” followed by all the others down to the last, instead of entering upon a certain time of rest—or “obscuration,” as in their previous Rounds—begins to die out. The “planetary” dissolution (pralaya) is at hand, and its hour has struck; each globe has to transfer its life and energy to another planet. (See diagram No. 2 infra, “The Moon and the Earth.”)

3. Our Earth, as the visible representative of its invisible superior fellow globes, its “lords” or “principles” (see diagram No. 1), has to live, as have the others, through seven Rounds. During the first three, it forms and consolidates; during the fourth it settles and hardens; during the last three it gradually returns to its first ethereal form: it is spiritualised, so to say.

4. Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth—our present Round. Up to this fourth Life-Cycle, it is referred to as “humanity” only for lack of a more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes chrysalis and butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes man, passes through all the forms and kingdoms during the first Round and through all the human shapes during the two following Rounds. Arrived on our Earth at the commencement of the Fourth in the present series of life-cycles and races, man is the first form that appears thereon, being preceded only by the mineral and vegetable kingdoms—even the latter having to develop and continue its further evolution through man. This will be explained in Book II. During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the globe on which it lives, will be ever tending to reassume its primeval form, that of a Dhyan Chohanic Host. Man tends to become a God and then—God, like every other atom in the Universe.

“Beginning so early as with the 2nd round, Evolution proceeds already on quite a different plan. It is only during the 1st round that (heavenly) man becomes a human being on globe A (rebecomes) a mineral, a plant, an animal, on globe B and C, etc. The process changes

160 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

entirely from the second round; but you have learned prudence . . . and I advise you to say nothing before the time for saying it has come. . .” (Extract from the Teacher’s letters on various topics.)

5. Every life-cycle on Globe D (our Earth)¹⁸¹ is composed of seven root-races. They commence with the Ethereal and end with the spiritual on the double line of physical and moral evolution—from the beginning of the terrestrial round to its close. (One is a “planetary round” from Globe A to Globe G, the seventh; the other, the “globe round,” or the terrestrial).

This is very well described in “Esoteric Buddhism” and needs no further elucidation for the time being.

6. The first root-race, i.e., the first “men” on earth (irrespective of form) were the progeny of the “celestial men,” called rightly in Indian philosophy the “Lunar Ancestors” or the Pitris, of which there are seven classes or Hierarchies. As all this will be sufficiently explained in the following sections and in Book II., no more need be said of it here.

But the two works already mentioned, both of which treat of subjects from the occult doctrine, need particular notice. “Esoteric Buddhism” is too well known in Theosophical circles, and even to the outside world, for it to be necessary to enter at length upon its merits here. It is an excellent book, and has done still more excellent work. But this does not alter the fact that it contains some mistaken notions, and that it has led many Theosophists and lay-readers to form an erroneous conception of the Secret Eastern Doctrines. Moreover it seems, perhaps, a little too materialistic.

Man: Fragments of Forgotten History, which came later, was an attempt to present the archaic doctrine from a more ideal standpoint, to translate some visions in and from the Astral Light, to render some teachings partly gathered from a Master’s thoughts, but unfortunately misunderstood. This work also speaks of the evolution of the early Races of men on Earth, and contains some excellent pages of a philosophical character. But so far it is only an interesting little mystical romance. It has failed in its mission, because the conditions required for a correct translation of these visions were not present. Hence the reader must not wonder if our Volumes contradict these earlier descriptions in several particulars.

 

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161 A RE-ADJUSTMENT OF FACTS.

Esoteric “Cosmogony” in general, and the evolution of the human Monad especially, differ so essentially in these two books and in other Theosophical works written independently by beginners, that it becomes impossible to proceed with the present work without special mention of these two earlier volumes, for both have a number of admirers—“Esoteric Buddhism” especially. The time has arrived for the explanation of some matters in this direction. Mistakes have now to be checked by the original teachings and corrected. If one of the said works has too pronounced a bias toward materialistic science, the other is decidedly too idealistic, and is, at times, fantastic.

From the doctrine—rather incomprehensible to western minds—which deals with the periodical “obscurations” and successive “Rounds” of the Globes along their circular chains, were born the first perplexities and misconceptions. One of such has reference to the “Fifth-” and even “Sixth-Rounders.” Those who knew that a Round was preceded and followed by a long Pralaya, a pause of rest which created an impassable gulf between two Rounds until the time came for a renewed cycle of life, could not understand the “fallacy” of talking about “fifth and sixth Rounders” in our Fourth Round. Gautama Buddha, it was held, was a Sixth-Rounder, Plato and some other great philosophers and minds, “Fifth-Rounders.” How could it be? One Master taught and affirmed that there were such “Fifth-Rounders” even now on Earth; and though understood to say that mankind was yet “in the Fourth Round,” in another place he seemed to say that we were in the Fifth. To this an “apocalyptic answer” was returned by another Teacher: “A few drops of rain do not make a Monsoon, though they presage it.” . . . “No, we are not in the Fifth Round, but Fifth Round men have been coming in for the last few thousand years.” This was worse than the riddle of the Sphinx.! Students of Occultism subjected their brains to the wildest work of speculation. For a considerable time they tried to outvie Œdipus and reconcile the two statements. And as the Masters kept as silent as the stony Sphinx herself, they were accused of inconsistency, “contradiction,” and “discrepancies.” But they were simply allowing the speculations to go on, in order to teach a lesson which the Western mind sorely needs. In their conceit and arrogance, as in their habit of materializing every metaphysical conception and term without allowing any margin for Eastern

162 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

metaphor and allegory, the Orientalists have made a jumble of the Hindu exoteric philosophy, and the Theosophists were now doing the same with regard to esoteric teachings. To this day it is evident that the latter have utterly failed to understand the meaning of the term “Fifth and Sixth Rounders.” But it is simply this: every “Round” brings about a new development and even an entire change in the mental, psychic, spiritual and physical constitution of man, all these principles evoluting on an ever ascending scale. Thence it follows that those persons who, like Confucius and Plato, belonged psychically, mentally and spiritually to the higher planes of evolution, were in our Fourth Round as the average man will be in the Fifth Round, whose mankind is destined to find itself, on this scale of Evolution, immensely higher than is our present humanity. Similarly Gautama Buddha—Wisdom incarnate—was still higher and greater than all the men we have mentioned, who are called Fifth Rounders, while Buddha and Sankaracharya are termed Sixth Rounders, allegorically. Thence again the concealed wisdom of the remark, pronounced at the time “evasive”—that “a few drops of rain do not make the Monsoon, though they presage it.”

And now the truth of the remark made in “Esoteric Buddhism” by its author will be fully apparent:

“It is impossible, when the complicated facts of an entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained minds for the first time, to put them forward with all their appropriate qualifications . . . and abnormal developments. . . . We must be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with study, in connection with which the traditional methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impressing every fresh idea on the memory by provoking the perplexity it at last relieves.”

As the author of the remark was himself, as he says, “an untrained mind” in Occultism, his own inferences, and his better knowledge of modern astronomical speculations than of archaic doctrines led him quite naturally, and as unconsciously to himself, to commit a few mistakes of detail rather than of any “broad rule.” One such will now be noticed. It is a trifling one, still it is calculated to lead many a beginner into erroneous conceptions. But as the mistaken notions of the earlier editions were corrected in the annotations of the fifth edition, so the sixth may be revised and perfected. There were several reasons

163 LIKE QUESTIONS, LIKE ANSWERS.

for such mistakes. (1) They were due to the necessity under which the teachers laboured of giving what were considered as “evasive answers”: the questions being too persistently pressed to be left unnoticed, while, on the other hand, they could only be partially answered. (2) This position notwithstanding, the confession that “half a loaf is better than no bread” was but too often misunderstood and hardly appreciated as it ought to have been. As a result thereof gratuitous speculations were sometimes indulged in by the European lay-chelas. Among such were the “Mystery of the Eighth Sphere” in its relation to the Moon; and (b) the erroneous statement that two of the superior Globes of the terrestrial chain were two of our well-known planets: “besides the Earth . . . there are only two other worlds of our chain which are visible. . . . Mars and Mercury. . . .” (Esoteric Buddhism; p. 136.)

This was a great mistake. But the blame for it is to be attached as much to the vagueness and incompleteness of the Master’s answer as to the question of the learner itself, which was equally vague and indefinite. It was asked: “What planets, of those known to ordinary science, besides Mercury, belong to our system of worlds?” Now if by “System of Worlds” our terrestrial chain or “string” was intended in the mind of the querist, instead of the “Solar System of Worlds,” as it should have been, then of course the answer was likely to be misunderstood. For the reply was: “Mars, etc., and four other planets of which astronomy knows nothing. Neither A, B, nor YZ are known nor can they be seen through physical means however perfected.” This is plain: (a) Astronomy as yet knows nothing in reality of the planets, neither the ancient ones, nor those discovered in modern times. (b) No companion planets from A to Z, i.e., no upper globes of any chain in the Solar System, can be seen.¹⁸² As to Mars, Mercury, and “the four other planets,” they bear

 

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164 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

a relation to Earth of which no master or high Occultist will ever speak, much less explain the nature.¹⁸³

Let it now be distinctly stated, then, that the theory broached is impossible, with or without the additional evidence furnished by modern Astronomy. Physical Science can supply corroborative, though still very uncertain, evidence, but only as regards heavenly bodies on the same plane of materiality as our objective Universe. Mars and Mercury, Venus and Jupiter, like every hitherto discovered planet (or those still to be discovered), are all, per se, the representatives on our plane of such chains. As distinctly stated in one of the numerous letters of Mr. Sinnett’s “Teacher,” “there are other and innumerable Manvantaric chains of globes which bear intelligent Beings both in and outside our solar system.” But neither Mars nor Mercury belong to our chain. They are, along with the other planets, septenary Units in the great host of “chains” of our system, and all are as visible as their upper globes are invisible.

If it is still argued that certain expressions in the Teacher’s letters were liable to mislead, the answer comes:Amen; so it was. The author of “Esoteric Buddhism” understood it well when he wrote that such are “the traditional modes of teaching . . . by provoking the perplexity” . . . they do, or do not relieve—as the case may be. At all events, if it is urged that this might have been explained earlier, and the true nature of the planets given out as they now are, the answer comes that: “it was not found expedient to do so at the time, as it would have opened the way to a series of additional questions which could never be answered on account of their esoteric nature, and thus would only become embarrassing.” It had been declared from the first and has been repeatedly asserted since that (1st) no Theosophist, not even as an accepted chela—let alone lay students—could expect to have the secret teachings explained to him thoroughly and completely, before he had irretrievably pledged himself to the Brotherhood and passed through at least one initiation, because no figures and numbers could be given to the public, for figures and numbers are the key to the esoteric system. (2.) That

 

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165 AN AUTHORITATIVE LETTER.

what was revealed was merely the esoteric lining of that which is contained in almost all the exoteric Scriptures of the world-religions—pre-eminently in the Brahmânas, and the Upanishads of the Vedas and even in the Purânas. It was a small portion of what is divulged far more fully now in the present volumes; and even this is very incomplete and fragmentary.

When the present work was commenced, the writer, feeling sure that the speculation about Mars and Mercury was a mistake, applied to the Teachers by letter for explanation and an authoritative version. Both came in due time, and verbatim extracts from these are now given.

“. . . . . It is quite correct that Mars is in a state of obscuration at present, and Mercury just beginning to get out of it. You might add that Venus is in her last Round. . . . . . . . . . . If neither Mercury nor Venus have satellites, it is because of the reasons . . . (vide footnote supra, where those reasons are given), and also because Mars has two satellites to which he has no right. . . . . Phöbos, the supposed inner satellite, is no satellite at all. As remarked long ago by Laplace and now by Faye (see comptes rendus, Tome XC., p. 569), Phöbos keeps a too short periodic time, and therefore there ‘must exist some defect in the mother idea of the theory’ as Faye justly observes. . . . . Again, both (Mars and Mercury) are septenary chains, as independent of the Earth’s sidereal lords and superiors as you are independent of the ‘principles’ of Daumling (Tom Thumb)—which were perhaps his six brothers, with or without night-caps. . . . . . . . . . ‘Gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge for some men,’ was said by Bacon, who was as right in postulating this truism, as those who were familiar with it before him were right in hedging off WISDOM from Knowledge, and tracing limits to that which is to be given out at one time. . . . Remember:—

‘. . . . . . . . . . . knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own. . . .’

You can never impress it too profoundly on the minds of those to whom you impart some of the esoteric teachings. . .”

Again, here are more extracts from another letter written by the same authority. This time it is in answer to some objections laid before the Teachers. They are based upon extremely scientific, and as

166 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

futile, reasonings about the advisability of trying to reconcile the Esoteric theories with the speculations of Modern Science, and were written by a young Theosophist as a warning against the “Secret Doctrine” and in reference to the same subject. He had declared that if there were such companion Earths “they must be only a wee bit less material than our globe.” How then was it that they could not be seen? The answer was:

“. . . . Were psychic and spiritual teachings more fully understood, it would become next to impossible to even imagine such an incongruity. Unless less trouble is taken to reconcile the irreconcileable—that is to say, the metaphysical and spiritual sciences with physical or natural philosophy, ‘natural’ being a synonym to them (men of science) of that matter which falls under the perception of their corporeal senses—no progress can be really achieved. Our Globe, as taught from the first, is at the bottom of the arc of descent, where the matter of our perceptions exhibits itself in its grossest form. . . . . . . Hence it only stands to reason that the globes which overshadow our Earth must be on different and superior planes. In short, as Globes, they are in co-adunition but not in consubstantiality with our earth and thus pertain to quite another state of consciousness. Our planet (like all those we see) is adapted to the peculiar state of its human stock, that state which enables us to see with our naked eye the sidereal bodies which are co-essential with our terrene plane and substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Jovians, Martians and others can perceive our little world: because our planes of consciousness, differing as they do in degree but being the same in kind, are on the same layer of differentiated matter. . . . . What I wrote was ‘The minor Pralaya concerns only our little strings of globes.’ (We called chains ‘Strings’ in those days of lip-confusion.) . . . ‘To such a string our Earth belongs.’ This ought to have shown plainly that the other planets were also ‘strings’ or CHAINS. . . If he (meaning the objector) would perceive even the dim silhouette of one of such ‘planets’ on the higher planes, he has to first throw off even the thin clouds of the astral matter that stands between him and the next plane. . . . .”

It becomes patent why we could not perceive, even with the help of the best earthly telescopes, that which is outside our world of matter. Those alone, whom we call adepts, who know how to direct their mental vision and to transfer their consciousness—physical and psychic both—

167 PRICELESS ADVICE, NEGLECTED.

to other planes of being, are able to speak with authority on such subjects. And they tell us plainly:

“Lead the life necessary for the acquisition of such knowledge and powers, and Wisdom will come to you naturally. Whenever you are able to attune your consciousness to any of the seven chords of ‘Universal Consciousness,’ those chords that run along the sounding-board of Kosmos, vibrating from one Eternity to another; when you have studied thoroughly ‘the music of the Spheres,’ then only will you become quite free to share your knowledge with those with whom it is safe to do so. Meanwhile, be prudent. Do not give out the great Truths that are the inheritance of the future Races, to our present generation. Do not attempt to unveil the secret of being and non-being to those unable to see the hidden meaning of Apollo’s heptachord—the lyre of the radiant god, in each of the seven strings of which dwelleth the Spirit, Soul and Astral body of the Kosmos, whose shell only has now fallen into the hands of Modern Science. . . . . . Be prudent, we say, prudent and wise, and above all take care what those who learn from you believe in; lest by deceiving themselves they deceive others . . . . for such is the fate of every truth with which men are, as yet, unfamiliar. . . . . Let rather the planetary chains and other super- and sub-cosmic mysteries remain a dreamland for those who can neither see, nor yet believe that others can. . . .”

It is to be regretted that few of us have followed the wise advice; and that many a priceless pearl, many a jewel of wisdom, has been cast to an enemy unable to understand its value and who has turned round and rent us.

“‘Let us imagine,’ wrote the same Master to his two ‘lay chelas,’ as he called the author of ‘Esoteric Buddhism’ and another gentleman, his co-student for some time—‘let us imagine that our earth is one of a group of seven planets or man-bearing worlds. . . . . . (The seven planets are the sacred planets of antiquity, and are all septenary.) Now the life-impulse reaches A, or rather that which is destined to become A, and which so far is but cosmic dust (a “laya centre”) . . etc.’”

In these early letters, in which the terms had to be invented and words coined, the “Rings” very often became “Rounds,” and the “Rounds” life-cycles, and vice versâ. To a correspondent who called a “Round” a “World-Ring,” the Teacher wrote: “I believe this will lead to a further confusion. A Round we are agreed to call the passage

168 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of a monad from Globe A to Globe G or Z. . . The ‘World-Ring’ is correct. . . Advise Mr. . . . strongly, to agree upon a nomenclature before going any further. . .”

Notwithstanding this agreement, many mistakes, owing to this confusion, crept into the earliest teachings. The Races even were occasionally mixed up with the “Rounds” and “Rings,” and led to similar mistakes in “Man.” From the first the Master had written: “Not being permitted to give you the whole truth, or divulge the number of isolated fractions . . . I am unable to satisfy you.”

This in answer to the questions, “If we are right, then the total existence prior to the man-period is 637,” etc., etc. To all the queries relating to figures, the reply was, “Try to solve the problem of 777 incarnations. . . . Though I am obliged to withhold information . . . yet if you should work out the problem by yourself, it will be my duty to tell you so.”

But they never were so worked out, and the results were—never-ceasing perplexity and mistakes.

Even the teaching about the Septenary constitution of the sidereal bodies and of the macrocosm—from which the septenary division of the microcosm, or Man—has until now been among the most esoteric. In olden times it used to be divulged only at the Initiation and along with the most sacred figures of the cycles. Now, as stated in one of the Theosophical journals,¹⁸⁴ the revelation of the whole system of Cosmogony had not been contemplated, nor even thought for one moment possible, at a time when a few bits of information were sparingly given out in answer to letters written by the author of “Esoteric Buddhism,” in which he put forward a multiplicity of questions. Among these were questions on such problems as no MASTER, however high and independent he might be, would have the right to answer, thus divulging to the world the most time-honoured and archaic of the mysteries of the ancient college-temples. Hence only a few of the doctrines were revealed in their broad outlines, while details were constantly withheld, and all the efforts made to elicit more information about them were systematically eluded from the beginning. This is perfectly natural. Of the four Vidyas—out of the seven branches of Knowledge mentioned in the Purânas—namely, “Yajna-Vidya” (the performance of religious rites in order to

 

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169 THE SEVEN BRANCHES OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

produce certain results); “Maha-Vidya,” the great (Magic) knowledge, now degenerated into Tantrika worship; “Guhya-Vidya,” the science of Mantras and their true rhythm or chanting, of mystical incantations, etc.—it is only the last one, “Atma-Vidya,” or the true Spiritual and Divine wisdom, which can throw absolute and final light upon the teachings of the three first named. Without the help of Atma-Vidya, the other three remain no better than surface sciences, geometrical magnitudes having length and breadth, but no thickness. They are like the soul, limbs, and mind of a sleeping man: capable of mechanical motions, of chaotic dreams and even sleep-walking, of producing visible effects, but stimulated by instinctual not intellectual causes, least of all by fully conscious spiritual impulses. A good deal can be given out and explained from the three first-named sciences. But unless the key to their teachings is furnished by Atma-Vidya, they will remain for ever like the fragments of a mangled text-book, like the adumbrations of great truths, dimly perceived by the most spiritual, but distorted out of all proportion by those who would nail every shadow to the wall.

Then, again, another great perplexity was created in the minds of students by the incomplete exposition of the doctrine of the evolution of the Monads. To be fully realised, both this process and that of the birth of the Globes must be examined far more from their metaphysical aspect than from what one might call a statistical standpoint, involving figures and numbers which are rarely permitted to be broadly used. Unfortunately, there are few who are inclined to handle these doctrines only metaphysically. Even the best of the Western writers upon our doctrine declares in his work that “on pure metaphysics of that sort we are not now engaged,” when speaking of the evolution of the Monads (“Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 46). And in such case, as the Teacher remarks in a letter to him, “Why this preaching of our doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming in adversum fl? Why should the West . . . learn . . . from the East . . . that which can never meet the requirements of the special tastes of the æsthetics?” And he draws his correspondent’s attention “to the formidable difficulties encountered by us (the Adepts) in every attempt we make to explain our metaphysics to the Western mind.”

And well he may; for outside of metaphysics no occult philosophy, no esotericism is possible. It is like trying to explain the aspirations and affections, the love and hatred, the most private and sacred workings in

170‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the soul and mind of the living man, by an anatomical description of the chest and brain of his dead body.

Let us now examine two tenets mentioned above and hardly alluded to in “Esoteric Buddhism,” and supplement them as far as lies in our power.

—————

ADDITIONAL FACTS AND EXPLANATIONS CONCERNING THE GLOBES AND THE MONADS.

Two statements made in “Esoteric Buddhism” must be noticed and the author’s opinions quoted. On p. 47 (fifth edition) it is said:

“. . . the spiritual monads . . . do not fully complete their mineral existence on Globe A, then complete it on Globe B, and so on. They pass several times round the whole circle as minerals, and then again several times round as vegetables, and several times as animals. We purposely refrain for the present from going into figures,” etc., etc. This was a wise course to adopt in view of the great secrecy maintained with regard to figures and numbers. This reticence is now partially relinquished; but it would perhaps have been better had the real numbers concerning Rounds and evolutional gyrations been either entirely divulged at the time, or as entirely withheld. Mr. Sinnett understood this difficulty well when saying (p. 140) that: “For reasons which are not easy for the outsider to divine, the possessors of occult knowledge are especially reluctant to give out facts relating to Cosmogony, though it is hard for the uninitiated to understand why they should be withheld.”

That there were such reasons is evident. Nevertheless, it is to this reticence that most of the confused ideas of some Eastern as well as Western pupils are due. The difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the two particular tenets under consideration seemed great, just because of the absence of any data to go upon. But there it was. For the figures belonging to the Occult calculations cannot be given—as the Masters have many times declared—outside the circle of pledged chelas, and not even these can break the rules.

To make things plainer, without touching upon the mathematical aspects of the doctrine, the teaching given may be expanded and some obscure

171 THE MYSTERY OF THE MOON, UNVEILED.

points solved. As the evolution of the Globes and that of the Monads are so closely interblended, we will make of the two teachings one. In reference to the Monads, the reader is asked to bear in mind that Eastern philosophy rejects the Western theological dogma of a newly-created soul for every baby born, as being as unphilosophical as it is impossible in the economy of Nature. There must be a limited number of Monads evolving and growing more and more perfect through their assimilation of many successive personalities, in every new Manvantara. This is absolutely necessary in view of the doctrines of Rebirth, Karma, and the gradual return of the human Monad to its source—absolute Deity. Thus, although the hosts of more or less progressed Monads are almost incalculable, they are still finite, as is everything in this Universe of differentiation and finiteness.

As shown in the double diagram of the human “principles” and the ascending Globes of the world-chains, there is an eternal concatenation of causes and effects, and a perfect analogy which runs through, and links together, all the lines of evolution. One begets the other—globes as personalities. But, let us begin at the beginning.

The general outline of the process by which the successive planetary chains are formed has just been given. To prevent future misconceptions, some further details may be offered which will also throw light on the history of humanity on our own chain, the progeny of that of the Moon.

In the diagrams on p. 172, Fig. 1 represents the “lunar-chain” of seven planets at the outset of its seventh or last Round; while Fig. 2 represents the “earth-chain” which will be, but is not yet in existence. The seven Globes of each chain are distinguished in their cyclic order by the letters A to G, the Globes of the Earth-chain being further marked by a cross—  —the symbol of the Earth.

Now, it must be remembered that the Monads cycling round any septenary chain are divided into seven classes or hierarchies according to their respective stages of evolution, consciousness, and merit. Let us follow, then, the order of their appearance on planet A, in the first Round. The time-spaces between the appearances of these hierarchies on any one Globe are so adjusted that when Class 7, the last, appears on Globe A, Class 1, the first, has just passed on to Globe B, and so on, step by step, all round the chain.

Again, in the Seventh Round on the Lunar chain, when Class 7, the

172 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

last, quits Globe A, that Globe, instead of falling asleep, as it had done in previous Rounds, begins to die (to go into its planetary pralaya);¹⁸⁵ and in dying it transfers successively, as just said, its “principles,” or life-elements and energy, etc., one after the other to a new “laya-centre,” which commences the formation of Globe A of the Earth Chain. A similar process takes place for each of the Globes of the “lunar chain” one after the other, each forming a fresh Globe of the “earth-chain.” Our Moon was the fourth Globe of the series, and was

Diagram II.

on the same plane of perception as our Earth. But Globe A of the lunar chain is not fully “dead” till the first Monads of the first class have passed from Globe G or Z, the last of the “lunar chain,” into the Nirvana

 

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173 THE EARTH, THE CHILD OF THE MOON.

which awaits them between the two chains; and similarly for all the other Globes as stated, each giving birth to the corresponding globe of the “earth-chain.”

Further, when Globe A of the new chain is ready, the first class or Hierarchy of Monads from the Lunar chain incarnate upon it in the lowest kingdom, and so on successively. The result of this is, that it is only the first class of Monads which attains the human state of development during the first Round, since the second class, on each planet, arriving later, has not time to reach that stage. Thus the Monads of Class 2 reach the incipient human stage only in the Second Round, and so on up to the middle of the Fourth Round. But at this point—and on this Fourth Round in which the human stage will be fully developed—the “Door” into the human kingdom closes; and henceforward the number of “human” Monads, i.e., Monads in the human stage of development, is complete. For the Monads which had not reached the human stage by this point will, owing to the evolution of humanity itself, find themselves so far behind that they will reach the human stage only at the close of the seventh and last Round. They will, therefore, not be men on this chain, but will form the humanity of a future Manvantara and be rewarded by becoming “Men” on a higher chain altogether, thus receiving their Karmic compensation. To this there is but one solitary exception, for very good reasons, of which we shall speak farther on. But this accounts for the difference in the races.

It thus becomes apparent how perfect is the analogy between the processes of Nature in the Kosmos and in the individual man. The latter lives through his life-cycle, and dies. His “higher principles,” corresponding in the development of a planetary chain to the cycling Monads, pass into Devachan, which corresponds to the “Nirvana” and states of rest intervening between two chains. The Man’s lower “principles” are disintegrated in time and are used by Nature again for the formation of new human principles, and the same process takes place in the disintegration and formation of Worlds. Analogy is thus the surest guide to the comprehension of the Occult teachings.

This is one of the “seven mysteries of the Moon,” and it is now revealed. The seven “mysteries” are called by the Japanese Yama-boosis, the mystics of the Lao-Tze sect and the ascetic monks of Kioto, the Dzenodoo—the “seven jewels.” Only the Japanese and the Chinese

174 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Buddhist ascetics and Initiates are, if possible, even more reticent in giving out their “Knowledge” than are the Hindus.

But the reader must not be allowed to lose sight of the Monads, and must be enlightened as to their nature, as far as permitted, without trespassing upon the highest mysteries, of which the writer does not in any way pretend to know the last or final word.

The Monadic Host may be roughly divided into three great classes:

1. The most developed Monads (the Lunar Gods or “Spirits,” called, in India, the Pitris), whose function it is to pass in the first Round through the whole triple cycle of the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms in their most ethereal, filmy, and rudimentary forms, in order to clothe themselves in, and assimilate, the nature of the newly formed chain. They are those who first reach the human form (if there can be any form in the realm of the almost subjective) on Globe A in the first Round. It is they, therefore, who lead and represent the human element during the second and third Rounds, and finally evolve their shadows at the beginning of the Fourth Round for the second class, or those who come behind them.

2. Those Monads that are the first to reach the human stage during the three and a half Rounds, and to become men.¹⁸⁶

 

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175 THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE MONADS.

3. The laggards; the Monads which are retarded, and which will not reach, by reason of Karmic impediments, the human stage at all during this cycle or Round, save one exception which will be spoken of elsewhere as already promised.

Now the evolution of the external form or body round the astral is produced by the terrestrial forces, just as in the case of the lower kingdoms; but the evolution of the internal or real man is purely spiritual. It is now no more a passage of the impersonal Monad through many and various forms of matter—endowed at best with instinct and consciousness on quite a different plane—as in the case of external evolution, but a journey of the “pilgrim-soul” through various states of not only matter but Self-consciousness and self-perception, or of perception from apperception. (See “Gods, Monads and Atoms.”)

The Monad emerges from its state of spiritual and intellectual unconsciousness; and, skipping the first two planes—too near the absolute to permit of any correlation with anything on a lower plane—it gets direct into the plane of Mentality. But there is no plane in the whole universe with a wider margin, or a wider field of action in its almost endless gradations of perceptive and apperceptive qualities, than this plane, which has in its turn an appropriate smaller plane for every “form,” from the “mineral” monad up to the time when that monad blossoms forth by evolution into the divine monad. But all the time it is still one and the same Monad, differing only in its incarnations, throughout its ever succeeding cycles of partial or total obscuration of spirit, or the partial or total obscuration of matter—two polar antitheses—as it ascends into the realms of mental spirituality, or descends into the depths of materiality.

To return to “Esoteric Buddhism.” It is there stated with regard to the enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch on Globe A, and the man-epoch,¹⁸⁷ that: “The full development of the

 

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176 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

mineral epoch on Globe A, prepares the way for the vegetable development, and, as soon as this begins, the mineral life-impulse overflows into Globe B. Then, when the vegetable development on Globe A is complete and the animal development begins, the vegetable life-impulse overflows to Globe B, and the mineral impulse passes on to Globe C. Then finally comes the human life-impulse on Globe A.” (Page 49.)

And so it goes on for three Rounds, when it slackens, and finally stops at the threshold of our Globe, at the Fourth Round; because the human period (of the true physical men to be), the seventh, is now reached. This is evident, for as said, “. . . there are processes of evolution which precede the mineral kingdom, and thus a wave of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution, precede the mineral wave in its progress round the spheres” (ibid).

And now we have to quote from another article, “The Mineral Monad” in “Five Years of Theosophy,” p. 273 et seq.

“There are seven kingdoms. The first group comprises three degrees of elementals, or nascent centres of forces—from the first stage of differentiation of (from) Mulaprakriti (or rather Pradhâna, primordial homogeneous matter) to its third degree—i.e., from full unconsciousness to semi-perception; the second or higher group embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral kingdom thus forming the central or turning point in the degrees of the “Monadic Essence,” considered as an evoluting energy. Three stages (sub-physical) on the elemental side; the mineral kingdom; three stages on the objective physical¹⁸⁸ side—these are the (first or preliminary) seven links of the evolutionary chain.”

“Preliminary” because they are preparatory, and though belonging in fact to the natural, they yet would be more correctly described as sub-natural evolution. This process makes a halt in its stages at the Third, at the threshold of the Fourth stage, when it becomes, on the plane of the natural evolution, the first really manward stage, thus forming with the three elemental kingdoms, the ten, the Sephirothal number. It is at this point that begins:

“A descent of spirit into matter equivalent to an ascent in physical

 

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177 AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, IS THE LAW.

evolution; a re-ascent from the deepest depths of materiality (the mineral) towards its status quo ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete organism—up to Nirvana, the vanishing point of differentiated matter.” (“Five Years of Theosophy,” p. 276.)

Therefore it becomes evident why that which is pertinently called in Esoteric Buddhism “Wave of Evolution,” and mineral-, vegetable-, animal- and man-“impulse,” stops at the door of our Globe, at its Fourth cycle or Round. It is at this point that the Cosmic Monad (Buddhi) will be wedded to and become the vehicle of the Atmic Ray, i.e., it (Buddhi) will awaken to an apperception of it (Atman); and thus enter on the first step of a new septenary ladder of evolution, which will lead it eventually to the tenth (counting from the lowest upwards) of the Sephirothal tree, the Crown.

Everything in the Universe follows analogy. “As above, so below”; Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual. Thus, corresponding to the Sephirothal Crown (or upper triad) there are the three elemental Kingdoms, which precede the Mineral (see diagram on p. 277 in Five Years of Theosophy), and which, using the language of the Kabalists, answer in the Cosmic differentiation to the worlds of Form and Matter from the Super-Spiritual to the Archetypal.

Now what is a “Monad?” And what relation does it bear to an Atom? The following reply is based upon the explanations given in answer to these questions in the above-cited article: “The Mineral Monad,” written by the author.

“None whatever,” is answered to the second question, “to the atom or molecule as existing in the scientific conception at present. It can neither be compared with the microscopic organism, once classed among polygastric infusoria, and now regarded as vegetable, and classed among Algæ; nor is it quite the Monas of the Peripatetics. Physically or constitutionally the mineral monad differs, of course, from the human monad, which is neither physical nor can its constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements.” In short, as the spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and Impartite, whose rays, nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance, call the “Individual Monads” of men,

178 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

so the Mineral Monad—being at the opposite point of the circle—is also One—and from it proceed the countless physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as individualized.

Otherwise how could one account for and explain mathematically the evolutionary and spiral progress of the Four Kingdoms? The “Monad” is the combination of the last two “principles” in man, the 6th and the 7th, and, properly speaking, the term “human monad” applies only to the dual soul (Atma-Buddhi), not to its highest spiritual vivifying Principle, Atma, alone. But since the Spiritual Soul, if divorced from the latter (Atma) could have no existence, no being, it has thus been called . . . . Now the Monadic, or rather Cosmic, Essence (if such a term be permitted) in the mineral, vegetable, and animal, though the same throughout the series of cycles from the lowest elemental up to the Deva Kingdom, yet differs in the scale of progression. It would be very misleading to imagine a Monad as a separate Entity trailing its slow way in a distinct path through the lower Kingdoms, and after an incalculable series of transformations flowering into a human being; in short, that the Monad of a Humboldt dates back to the Monad of an atom of horneblende. Instead of saying a “Mineral Monad,” the more correct phraseology in physical Science, which differentiates every atom, would of course have been to call it “the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called the Mineral Kingdom.” The atom, as represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined after æons to blossom as a man. But it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy which itself has not yet become individualized; a sequential manifestation of the one Universal Monas. The ocean (of matter) does not divide into its potential and constituent drops until the sweep of the life-impulse reaches the evolutionary stage of man-birth. The tendency towards segregation into individual Monads is gradual, and in the higher animals comes almost to the point. The Peripatetics applied the word Monas to the whole Kosmos, in the pantheistic sense; and the Occultists, while accepting this thought for convenience sake, distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the concrete from the abstract by terms of which the “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, (etc.), Monad” are examples. The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit. The “Monadic

179 THE LUNAR MONADS.

Essence” begins to imperceptibly differentiate towards individual consciousness in the Vegetable Kingdom. As the Monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad—not the atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and the higher degrees of intelligence.

Leibnitz conceived of the Monads as elementary and indestructible units endowed with the power of giving and receiving with respect to other units, and thus of determining all spiritual and physical phenomena. It is he who invented the term apperception, which together with nerve- (not perception, but rather)—sensation, expresses the state of the Monadic consciousness through all the Kingdoms up to Man.

Thus it may be wrong on strictly metaphysical lines to call Atma-Buddhi a monad, since in the materialistic view it is dual and therefore compound. But as Matter is Spirit, and vice versâ; and since the Universe and the Deity which informs it are unthinkable apart from each other; so in the case of Atma-Buddhi. The latter being the vehicle of the former, Buddhi stands in the same relation to Atma, as Adam-Kadmon, the Kabalistic Logos, does to En-Soph, or Mulaprakriti to Parabrahm.

A few words more of the Moon.

What, it may be asked, are the “Lunar Monads,” just spoken of? The description of the seven classes of Pitris will come later, but now some general explanations may be given. It must be plain to everyone that they are Monads, who, having ended their life-cycle on the lunar chain, which is inferior to the terrestrial chain, have incarnated on this one. But there are some further details which may be added, though they border too closely on forbidden ground to be treated of fully. The last word of the mystery is divulged only to the adepts, but it may be stated that our satellite is only the gross body of its invisible principles. Seeing then that there are 7 Earths, so there are 7 Moons, the last one alone being visible; the same for the Sun, whose visible body is called a Maya, a reflection, just as man’s body is. “The real Sun and the real Moon are as invisible as the real man,” says an occult maxim. And it may be remarked en passant that those ancients were not so foolish after all who first started the idea of “the seven moons.” For though

180 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

this conception is now taken solely as an astronomical measure of time, in a very materialised form, yet underlying the husk there can still be recognised the traces of a profoundly philosophical idea.

In reality the Moon is only the satellite of the Earth in one respect, viz., that physically the Moon revolves round the Earth. But in every other respect it is the Earth which is the satellite of the Moon, and not vice versâ. Startling as the statement may seem it is not without confirmation from scientific knowledge. It is evidenced by the tides, by the cyclic changes in many forms of disease which coincide with the lunar phases; it can be traced in the growth of plants, and is very marked in the phenomena of human gestation and conception. The importance of the Moon and its influence on the Earth were recognized in every ancient religion, notably the Jewish, and have been remarked by many observers of psychical and physical phenomena. But, so far as Science knows, the Earth’s action on the Moon is confined to the physical attraction, which causes her to circle in her orbit. And should an objector insist that this fact alone is sufficient evidence that the Moon is truly the Earth’s satellite on other planes of action, one may reply by asking whether a mother, who walks round and round her child’s cradle keeping watch over the infant, is the subordinate of her child or dependent upon it; though in one sense she is its satellite, yet she is certainly older and more fully developed than the child she watches.

It is, then, the Moon that plays the largest and most important part, as well in the formation of the Earth itself, as in the peopling thereof with human beings. The “Lunar Monads” or Pitris, the ancestors of man, become in reality man himself. They are the “Monads” who enter on the cycle of evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the chain of planets, evolve the human form as has just been shown. At the beginning of the human stage of the Fourth Round on this Globe, they “ooze out” their astral doubles from the “ape-like” forms which they had evolved in Round III. And it is this subtle, finer form, which serves as the model round which Nature builds physical man. These “Monads” or “divine sparks” are thus the “Lunar” ancestors, the Pitris themselves. For these “Lunar Spirits” have to become “Men” in order that their “Monads” may reach a higher plane of activity and self-consciousness, i.e., the plane of the Manasa-Putras, those who

181 A TRIPLE EVOLUTION IN NATURE.

endow the “senseless” shells, created and informed by the Pitris, with “mind” in the latter part of the Third Root-Race.

In the same way the “Monads” or Egos of the men of the seventh Round of our Earth, after our own Globes A, B, C, D, et seq., parting with their life-energy, will have informed and thereby called to life other laya-centres destined to live and act on a still higher plane of being—in the same way will the Terrene “Ancestors” create those who will become their superiors.

It now becomes plain that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme, for the formation of the three periodical Upadhis; or rather three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point. These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. These three are the finite aspects or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion of atma, the seventh, the one reality.

1. The Monadic is, as the name implies, concerned with the growth and development into still higher phases of activity of the Monad in conjunction with:

2. The Intellectual, represented by the Manasa-Dhyanis (the Solar Devas, or the Agnishwatta Pitris) the “givers of intelligence and consciousness”¹⁸⁹ to man and:

3. The Physical, represented by the Chhayas of the lunar Pitris, round which Nature has concreted the present physical body. This body serves as the vehicle for the “growth” (to use a misleading word) and the transformations through Manas and—owing to the accumulation of experiences—of the finite into the infinite, of the transient into the Eternal and Absolute.

Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by different sets of the highest Dhyanis or “Logoi.” Each is represented in the constitution of man, the Microcosm of the great Macrocosm; and it is the union of these three streams in him which makes him the complex being he now is.

“Nature,” the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve intelligence unaided—she can only create “senseless forms,” as will be seen in our “Anthropogenesis.” The “Lunar Monads” cannot progress, for they have not yet had sufficient touch with the forms

 

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182 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

created by “Nature” to allow of their accumulating experiences through its means. It is the Manasa-Dhyanis who fill up the gap, and they represent the evolutionary power of Intelligence and Mind, the link between “Spirit” and “Matter”—in this Round.

Also it must be borne in mind that the Monads which enter upon the evolutionary cycle upon Globe A, in the first Round, are in very different stages of development. Hence the matter becomes somewhat complicated. . . . Let us recapitulate.

The most developed Monads (the lunar) reach the human germ-stage in the first Round; become terrestrial, though very ethereal human beings towards the end of the Third Round, remaining on it (the globe) through the “obscuration” period as the seed for future mankind in the Fourth Round, and thus become the pioneers of Humanity at the beginning of this, the Fourth Round. Others reach the Human stage only during later Rounds, i.e., in the second, third, or first half of the Fourth Round. And finally the most retarded of all, i.e., those still occupying animal forms after the middle turning-point of the Fourth Round—will not become men at all during this Manwantara. They will reach to the verge of humanity only at the close of the seventh Round to be, in their turn, ushered into a new chain after pralaya—by older pioneers, the progenitors of humanity, or the Seed-Humanity (Sishta), viz., the men who will be at the head of all at the end of these Rounds.

The student hardly needs any further explanation on the part played by the fourth Globe and the fourth Round in the scheme of evolution.

From the preceding diagrams, which are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to Rounds, Globes or Races, it will be seen that the fourth member of a series occupies a unique position. Unlike the others, the Fourth has no “sister” Globe on the same plane as itself, and it thus forms the fulcrum of the “balance” represented by the whole chain. It is the sphere of final evolutionary adjustments, the world of Karmic scales, the Hall of Justice, where the balance is struck which determines the future course of the Monad during the remainder of its incarnations in the cycle. And therefore it is, that, after this central turning-point has been passed in the Great Cycle,—i.e., after the middle point of the Fourth Race in the Fourth Round on our Globe—no more Monads can enter the human kingdom. The door is closed for this Cycle and the balance struck. For were it otherwise—had there been a new soul

183 MAN, THE OLDEST SON OF THE EARTH.

created for each of the countless milliards of human beings that have passed away, and had there been no reincarnation—it would become difficult indeed to provide room for the disembodied “Spirits”; nor could the origin and cause of suffering ever be accounted for. It is the ignorance of the occult tenets and the enforcement of false conceptions under the guise of religious education, which have created materialism and atheism as a protest against the asserted divine order of things.

The only exceptions to the rule just stated are the “dumb races,” whose Monads are already within the human stage, in virtue of the fact that these “animals” are later than, and even half descended from man, their last descendants being the anthropoid and other apes. These “human presentments” are in truth only the distorted copies of the early humanity. But this will receive full attention in the next Book.

As the Commentary, broadly rendered, says:

1. “Every form on earth, and every speck (atom) in Space strives in its eff towards self-formation to follow the model placed for it in the ‘heavenly man.’ . . . Its (the atom’s) involution and evolution, its external and internal growth and development, have all one and the same object—man; man, as the highest physical and ultimate form on this earth; the monad, in its absolute totality and awakened condition—as the culmination of the divine incarnations on Earth.”

2. “The Dhyanis (Pitris) are those who have evolved their bhuta (doubles) from themselves, which rupa (form) has become the vehicle of monads (seventh and sixth principles) that had completed their cycle of transmigration in the three preceding Kalpas (Rounds). Then, they (the astral doubles) became the men of the first Human Race of the Round. But they were not complete, and were senseless.”

This will be explained in the Books that follow. Meanwhile man—or rather his Monad—has existed on the earth from the very beginning of this Round. But, up to our own Fifth Race, the external shapes which covered those divine astral doubles changed and consolidated with every sub-race; the form and physical structure of the fauna changing at the same time, as they had to be adapted to the ever-changing conditions of life on this globe during the geological periods of its formative cycle. And thus shall they go on changing with every

184 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Root Race and every chief sub-race down to the last one of the Seventh in this Round.

3. “The inner, now concealed, man, was then (in the beginnings) the external man. The progeny of the Dhyanis (Pitris), he was ‘the son like unto his father.’ Like the lotus, whose external shape assumes gradually the form of the model within itself, so did the form of man in the beginning evolve from within without. After the cycle in which man began to procreate his species after the fashion of the present animal kingdom, it became the reverse. The human fœtus follows now in its transformations all the forms that the physical frame of man had assumed throughout the three Kalpas (Rounds) during the tentative eff at plastic formation around the monad by senseless, because imperfect, matter, in her blind wanderings. In the present age, the physical embryo is a plant, a reptile, an animal, before it finally becomes man, evolving within himself his own ethereal counterpart, in his turn. In the beginning it was that counterpart (astral man) which, being senseless, got entangled in the meshes of matter.”

But this “man” belongs to the fourth Round. As shown, the monad had passed through, journeyed and been imprisoned in, every transitional form throughout every kingdom of nature during the three preceding Rounds. But the monad which becomes human is not the Man. In this Round—with the exception of the highest mammals after man, the anthropoids destined to die out in this our race, when their monads will be liberated and pass into the astral human forms (or the highest elementals) of the Sixth¹⁹⁰ and the Seventh Races, and then into lowest human forms in the fifth Round—no units of either of the kingdoms are animated any longer by monads destined to become human in their next stage, but only by the lower Elementals of their respective realms.¹⁹¹

The last human Monad incarnated before the beginning of the 5th

 

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185 THE MAN, OR THE APE; WHICH THE FIRST?

Root-Race.¹⁹² The cycle of metempsychosis for the human monad is closed, for we are in the Fourth Round and the Fifth Root-Race. The reader will have to bear in mind—at any rate one who has made himself acquainted with “Esoteric Buddhism”—that the Stanzas which follow in this Book and Book II. speak of the evolution in our Fourth Round only. The latter is the cycle of the turning-point, after which, matter,

 

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186 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

having reached its lowest depths, begins to strive onward and to get spiritualized with every new Race and with every fresh cycle. Therefore the student must take care not to see contradiction where there is none, as in “Esoteric Buddhism” Rounds are spoken of in general, while here only the Fourth, or our present Round, is meant. Then it was the work of formation; now it is that of reformation and evolutionary perfection.

Finally, to close this chapter anent various, but unavoidable misconceptions, we must refer to a statement in “Esoteric Buddhism” which has produced a very fatal impression upon the minds of many Theosophists. One unfortunate sentence from the work just referred to is constantly brought forward to prove the materialism of the doctrine. On p. 48, 5th Edition, the Author, referring to the progress of organisms on the Globes, says that “the mineral kingdom will no more develop the vegetable . . . than the Earth was able to develop man from the ape, till it received an impulse.”

Whether this sentence renders literally the thought of the author, or is simply (as we believe it is) a lapsus calami, may remain an open question. It is really with surprise that we have ascertained the fact that “Esoteric Buddhism” was so little understood by some Theosophists, as to have led them into the belief that it thoroughly supported Darwinian evolution, and especially the theory of the descent of man from a pithecoid ancestor. As one member writes: “I suppose you realise that three-fourths of Theosophists and even outsiders imagine that, as far as the evolution of man is concerned, Darwinism and Theosophy kiss one another.” Nothing of the kind was ever realised, nor is there any great warrant for it, so far as we know, in “Esoteric Buddhism.” It has been repeatedly stated that evolution as taught by Manu and Kapila was the groundwork of the modern teachings, but neither Occultism nor Theosophy has ever supported the wild theories of the present Darwinists—least of all the descent of man from an ape. Of this, more hereafter. But one has only to turn to p. 47 of “Esoteric Buddhism,” 5th edition, to find there the statement that “Man belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from that of the animals.” With such a plain and unequivocal statement before him, it is very strange that any careful student should have been so misled unless he is prepared to charge the author with a gross contradiction.

187 AN ERRONEOUS OPINION.

Every Round repeats on a higher scale the evolutionary work of the preceding Round. With the exception of some higher anthropoids, as just mentioned, the Monadic inflow, or inner evolution, is at an end till the next Manvantara. It can never be too often repeated, that the full-blown human Monads have to be first disposed of, before the new crop of candidates appears on this Globe at the beginning of the next cycle. Thus there is a lull; and this is why, during the Fourth Round, man appears on Earth earlier than any animal creation, as will be described.

But it is still urged that the author of “Esoteric Buddhism” has “preached Darwinism” all along. Certain passages would undoubtedly seem to lend countenance to this inference. Besides which the Occultists themselves are ready to concede partial correctness to the Darwinian hypothesis, in later details, bye-laws of Evolution, and after the midway point of the Fourth Race. Of that which has taken place, physical science can really know nothing, for such matters lie entirely outside of its sphere of investigation. But what the Occultists have never admitted, nor will they ever admit, is that man was an ape in this or in any other Round; or that he ever could be one, however much he may have been “ape-like.” This is vouched for by the very authority from whom the author of “Esoteric Buddhism” got his information.

Thus to those who confront the Occultists with these lines from the above-named volume: “It is enough to show that we may as reasonably—and that we must, if we would talk about these matters at all—conceive a life-impulse giving birth to mineral form, as of the same sort of impulse concerned to raise a race of apes into a race of rudimentary men.” To those who bring this passage forward as showing “decided Darwinism,” the Occultists answer by pointing to the explanation of the Master (Mr. Sinnett’s “teacher”) which would contradict these lines, were they written in the spirit attributed to them. A copy of this letter was sent to the writer, together with others, two years ago (1886), with additional marginal remarks, to quote from, in the “Secret Doctrine.” It begins by considering the difficulty experienced by the Western student, in reconciling some facts, previously given, with the evolution of man from the animal, i.e., from the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, and advises the student to hold to the doctrine of analogy and correspondences. Then it touches upon the mystery of the Devas,

188 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and even Gods, having to pass through states which it was agreed to refer to as “Inmetallization, Inherbation, Inzoonization and finally Incarnation,” and explains this by hinting at the necessity of failures even in the ethereal races of Dhyan Chohans. Concerning this it says:

“Still, as these ‘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. . . . .” After which only a hint is given about the mystery contained in the allegory of the fallen Asuras, which will be expanded and explained in Book II. When Karma has reached them at the stage of human evolution, “they will have to drink it to the last drop in the bitter cup of retribution. Then they become an active force and commingle with the Elementals, the progressed entities of the pure animal kingdom, to develop little by little the full type of humanity.”

These Dhyan Chohans, as we see, do not pass through the three kingdoms as do the lower Pitris; nor do they incarnate in man until the Third Root Race. Thus, as the teaching stands:

“Man in the First Round and First Race on Globe D, our Earth, was an ethereal being (a Lunar Dhyani, as man), non-intelligent but super-spiritual; and correspondingly, on the law of analogy, in the First Race of the Fourth Round. In each of the subsequent races and sub-races . . . he grows more and more into an encased or incarnate being, but still preponderatingly ethereal. . . . He is sexless, and, like the animal and vegetable, he develops monstrous bodies correspondential with his coarser surroundings.

“II. Round. He (Man) is still gigantic and ethereal but growing firmer and more condensed in body, a more physical man. Yet still less intelligent than spiritual (1 ), for mind is a slower and more difficult evolution than is the physical frame . . .

“III. Round. He has now a perfectly concrete or compacted body, at first the form of a giant-ape, and now more intelligent, or rather cunning, than spiritual. For, on the downward arc, he has now reached a point where his primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent mentality (2). In the last half of the Third Round his gigantic stature decreases, and his body improves in texture, and he becomes a more rational being, though still more an ape than a

189 A MASTER’S LETTER.

Deva. . . . (All this is almost exactly repeated in the third Root-Race of the Fourth Round.)

“IV. Round. Intellect has an enormous development in this Round. The (hitherto) dumb races acquire our (present) human speech on this globe, on which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge increases. At this half-way point of the Fourth Round (as of the Fourth Root, or Atlantean, race) humanity passes the axial point of the minor Manvantara cycle . . . . the world teeming with the results of intellectual activity and spiritual decrease . . . .”

This is from the authentic letter; what follows are the later remarks and additional explanations traced by the same hand in the form of footnotes.

(1.) “. . . The original letter contained general teaching—a ‘bird’s-eye view’—and particularized nothing. . . . To speak of ‘physical man’ while limiting the statement to the early Rounds would be drifting back to the miraculous and instantaneous ‘coats of skin.’ . . . The first ‘Nature,’ the first ‘body,’ the first ‘mind’ on the first plane of perception, on the first Globe in the first Round, is what was meant. For Karma and evolution have—

‘. . . centred in our make such strange extremes!
From different Natures¹⁹³ marvellously mixed . . .’

(2.) “Restore: he has now reached the point (by analogy, and as the Third Root Race in the Fourth Round) where his (“the angel”-man’s) primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent human mentality, and you have the true version on your thumb-nail. . . .”

These are the words of the Teacher—text, words and sentences in brackets, and explanatory footnotes. It stands to reason that there must be an enormous difference in such terms as “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” “materiality” and “spirituality,” when the same terms are applied to different planes of being and perception. All this must be taken in its relative sense. And therefore there is little to be wondered at, if, left to his own speculations, an author, however eager to learn, yet quite inexperienced in these abstruse teachings, has fallen

 

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190 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

into an error. Neither was the difference between the “Rounds” and the “Races” sufficiently defined in the letters received, nor was there anything of the kind required before, as the ordinary Eastern disciple would have found out the difference in a moment. Moreover, to quote from a letter of the Master’s (188-), “the teachings were imparted under protest. . . . They were, so to say, smuggled goods . . . and when I remained face to face with only one correspondent, the other, Mr. ————, had so far tossed all the cards into confusion, that little remained to be said without trespassing upon law.” Theosophists, “whom it may concern,” will understand what is meant.

The outcome of all this is that nothing had ever been said in the “letters” to warrant the assurance that the Occult doctrine has ever taught, or any Adept believed in, the preposterous modern theory of the descent of man from a common ancestor with the ape—an anthropoid of the actual animal kind, unless metaphorically. To this day the world is more full of “ape-like men” than the woods are of “men-like apes.” The ape is sacred in India because its origin is well known to the Initiates, though concealed under a thick veil of allegory. Hanuman is the son of Pavana (Vayu, “the god of the wind”) by Anjana, a monster called Kesarî, though his genealogy varies. The reader who bears this in mind will find in Book II. passim, the whole explanation of this ingenious allegory. The “Men” of the Third Race (who separated) were “Gods” by their spirituality and purity, though senseless, and as yet destitute of mind, as men.

These “Men” of the Third Race—the ancestors of the Atlanteans—were just such ape-like, intellectually senseless giants as were those beings, who, during the Third Round, represented Humanity. Morally irresponsible, it was these third Race “men” who, through promiscuous connection with animal species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages later (in the tertiary period only) the remote ancestor of the real ape as we find it now in the pithecoid family.¹⁹⁴

 

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191 THE PRELIMINARY CREATION OF MAN.‌

Thus the earlier teachings, however unsatisfactory, vague and fragmentary, did not teach the evolution of “man” from the “ape.” Nor does the author of “Esoteric Buddhism” assert it anywhere in his work in so many words; but, owing to his inclination towards modern science, he uses language which might perhaps justify such an inference. The man who preceded the Fourth, the Atlantean race, however much he may have looked physically like a “gigantic ape”—“the counterfeit of man who hath not the life of a man”—was still a thinking and already a speaking man. The “Lemuro-Atlantean” was a highly civilized race, and if one accepts tradition, which is better history than the speculative fiction which now passes under that name, he was higher than we are with all our sciences and the degraded civilization of the day: at any rate, the Lemuro-Atlantean of the closing Third Race was so.

And now we may return to the Stanzas.

———

STANZA VI.—Continued.

5. At the fourth (Round, or revolution of life and being around “the seven smaller wheels”) (a), the sons are told to create their images. One third refuses. Two (thirds) obey.

The full meaning of this sloka can be fully comprehended only after reading the detailed additional explanations in the “Anthropogenesis” and its commentaries, in Book II. Between this Sloka and the last, Sloka 4 in this same Stanza, extend long ages; and there now gleams the dawn and sunrise of another æon. The drama enacted on our planet is at the beginning of its fourth act, but for a clearer comprehension of the whole play the reader will have to turn back before he can proceed onward. For this verse belongs to the general Cosmogony given in the archaic volumes, whereas Book II. will give a detailed account of the “Creation” or rather the formation, of the first human beings, followed by the second humanity, and then by the third; or, as they are called, “the first, second, and the third Root-Races.” As the solid Earth began by being a ball of liquid fire, of fiery dust and its protoplasmic phantom, so did man.

192 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(a) That which is meant by the qualification the “Fourth” is explained as the “fourth Round” only on the authority of the Commentaries. It can equally mean fourth “Eternity” as “Fourth Round,” or even the fourth (our) Globe. For, as will repeatedly be shown, it is the fourth Sphere on the fourth or lowest plane of material life. And it so happens that we are in the Fourth Round, at the middle point of which the perfect equilibrium between Spirit and Matter had to take place.¹⁹⁵ Says the Commentary explaining the verse:

“The holy youths (the gods) refused to multiply and create species after their likeness, after their kind. They are not fit forms (rupas) for us. They have to grow. They refuse to enter the chhayas (shadows or images) of their inferiors. Thus had selfish feeling prevailed from the beginning, even among the gods, and they fell under the eye of the Karmic Lipikas.”

They had to suffer for it in later births. How the punishment reached the gods will be seen in the second volume.

———

STANZA VI.—Continued.

5. (cont.) The curse is pronounced (a): they will be born in the fourth (Race), suffer and cause suffering (b). This is the first war (c).

(a) It is a universal tradition that, before the physiological “Fall,” propagation of one’s kind, whether human or animal, took place through the will of the Creators, or of their progeny. It was the Fall of Spirit into generation, not the Fall of mortal man. It has already been stated that, to become a Self-Conscious Spirit, the latter must pass through every cycle of being, culminating in its highest point on earth in Man.

 

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193 THE FIRST CAUSE OF SIN.

Spirit per se is an unconscious negative abstraction. Its purity is inherent, not acquired by merit; hence, as already shown, to become the highest Dhyan Chohan it is necessary for each Ego to attain to full self-consciousness as a human, i.e., conscious Being, which is synthesized for us in Man. The Jewish Kabalists arguing that no Spirit could belong to the divine hierarchy unless Ruach (Spirit) was united to Nephesh (living Soul), only repeat the Eastern Esoteric teaching. “A Dhyani has to be an Atma-Buddhi; once the Buddhi-Manas breaks loose from its immortal Atma of which it (Buddhi) is the vehicle, Atman passes into non-being, which is absolute Being.” This means that the purely Nirvanic state is a passage of Spirit back to the ideal abstraction of Be-ness which has no relation to the plane on which our Universe is accomplishing its cycle.

(b) “The curse is pronounced” does not mean, in this instance, that any personal Being, god, or superior Spirit, pronounced it, but simply that the cause which could but create bad results had been generated, and that the effects of a Karmic cause could lead the “Beings” that counteracted the laws of Nature, and thus impeded her legitimate progress, only to bad incarnations, hence to suffering.

(c) “There were many wars” refers to several struggles of adjustment, spiritual, cosmical, and astronomical, but chiefly to the mystery of the evolution of man as he is now. Powers—pure Essences—“that were told to create” is a sentence that relates to a mystery explained, as already said, elsewhere. It is not only one of the most hidden secrets of Nature—that of generation, over whose solution the Embryologists have vainly put their heads together—but likewise a divine function that involves that other religious, or rather dogmatic, mystery, the “Fall” of the Angels, as it is called. Satan and his rebellious host would thus prove, when the meaning of the allegory is explained, to have refused to create physical man, only to become the direct Saviours and the Creators of “divine Man.” The symbolical teaching is more than mystical and religious, it is purely scientific, as will be seen later on. For, instead of remaining a mere blind, functioning medium, impelled and guided by fathomless Law, the “rebellious” Angel claimed and enforced his right of independent judgment and will, his

194 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

right of free-agency and responsibility, since man and angel are alike under Karmic Law.¹⁹⁶

“And there was war in Heaven. . . . Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the Dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.”

The Kabalistic version of the same story is given in the Codex Nazareus, the scripture of the Nazarenes, the real mystic Christians of John the Baptist and the Initiates of Christos. Bahak-Zivo, the “Father of the Genii,” is ordered to construct creatures (to create). But, as he is “ignorant of Orcus,” he fails to do so, and calls in Fetahil, a still purer spirit, to his aid, who fails still worse. This is a repetition of the failure of the “Fathers,” the lords of light who fail one after the other. (Book II, Sloka 17.)

We will now quote from our earlier Volumes:

“Then steps on the stage of creation the spirit¹⁹⁷ (of the Earth so-called, or the Soul, Psyche, which St. James calls ‘devilish’) the lower portion the Anima Mundi or Astral Light. (See the close of this Sloka). With the Nazarenes and the Gnostics this Spirit was

 

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195 THE CODEX REPEATS THE ALLEGORY.

feminine. Thus the spirit of the Earth perceiving that for Fetahil,¹⁹⁸ the newest man (the latest), the splendour was ‘changed,’ and that for splendour existed ‘decrease and damage,’ she awakes Karabtanos,¹⁹⁹ ‘who was frantic and without sense and judgment,’ and says to him: ‘Arise, see, the splendour (light) of the newest man (Fetahil) has failed (to produce or create men), the decrease of this splendour is visible. Rise up, come with thy mother (the Spiritus) and free thee from limits by which thou art held, and those more ample than the whole world.’ After which follows the union of the frantic and blind matter, guided by the insinuations of the spirit (not the Divine breath but the Astral spirit, which by its double essence is already tainted with matter); and the offer of the mother being accepted, the Spiritus conceives “Seven Figures,” and the seven stellars (planets) which represent also the seven capital sins, the progeny of an astral soul separated from its divine source (spirit) and matter, the blind demon of concupiscence. Seeing this, Fetahil extends his hand towards the abyss of matter, and says: ‘Let the Earth exist, just as the abode of the powers has existed.’ Dipping his hand in the chaos, which he condenses, he creates our planet.²⁰⁰”

“Then the Codex proceeds to tell how Bahak-Zivo was separated from the Spiritus, and the Genii or angels from the rebels.²⁰¹ Then Mano²⁰² (the greatest), who dwells with the greatest ferho, call Kebar-Zivo (known also by the name of Nebat-Iavar bar Iufin Ifafin), Helm and Vine of the food of life,²⁰³ he being the third life, and commiserating the rebellious and foolish Genii, on account of the magnitude of their ambition, says: ‘Lord of the Genii²⁰⁴ (Æons), see what the Genii, the

 

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196 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

rebellious angels do, and about what they are consulting.²⁰⁵ They say, ‘Let us call for the world, and let us call the ‘powers’ into existence,” The Genii are the Principes, the “Sons of Light,” but thou art the “Messenger of Life.” ²⁰⁶

And in order to counteract the influence of the seven “badly disposed” principles, the progeny of Spiritus, cabar-zio, the mighty Lord of Splendor, produces seven other lives (the cardinal virtues) who shine in their own form and light “from on high”²⁰⁷ and thus re-establish the balance between good and evil, light and darkness.

Here one finds a repetition of the early allegorical, dual systems, as the Zoroastrian, and detects a germ of the dogmatic and dualistic religions of the future, a germ which has grown into such a luxuriant tree in ecclesiastical Christianity. It is already the outline of the two “Supremes”—God and Satan. But in the Stanzas no such idea exists.

Most of the Western Christian Kabalists—pre-eminently Eliphas Lévi—in their desire to reconcile the Occult Sciences with Church dogmas, did their best to make of the “Astral Light” only and pre-eminently the Pleroma of early Church Fathers, the abode of the Hosts of the Fallen Angels, of the “Archons” and “Powers.” But the Astral Light, while only the lower aspect of the Absolute, is yet dual. It is the Anima Mundi, and ought never to be viewed otherwise, except for Kabalistic purposes. The difference which exists between its “light” and its “Living Fire” ought to be ever present in the mind of the Seer and the “Psychic.” The higher aspect, without which only creatures of matter from that Astral Light can be produced, is this Living Fire, and it is the Seventh Principle. It is said in “Isis Unveiled,” in a complete description of it:

“The Astral Light or Anima Mundi is dual and bisexual. The (ideal) male part of it is purely divine and spiritual, it is the Wisdom, it is Spirit or Purusha; while the female portion (the Spiritus of the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, is indeed matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life-principle of every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit, to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything living. Animals have only the latent germ of the highest immortal soul in them. . . . . This latter will develop

 

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197 ILDA-BAOTH-JEHOVAH.

only after a series of countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolution is contained in the Kabalistic axiom: ‘A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.’” (Vol. I., p. 301, note.)

The seven principles of the Eastern Initiates had not been explained when “Isis” was written, but only the three Kabalistic Faces of the semi-exoteric Kabala.²⁰⁸ But these contain the description of the mystic natures of the first group of Dhyan Chohans in the regimen ignis, the region and “rule (or government) of fire,” which group is divided into three classes, synthesized by the first, which makes four or the “Tetraktis.” (See Comments on Stanza VII. Book I.) If one studies the Comments attentively he will find the same progression in the angelic natures, viz., from the passive down to the active, the last of these Beings being as near to the Ahamkara element (the region or plane wherein Ego-ship or the feeling of I-am-ness is beginning to be defined) as the first ones are near to the undifferentiated essence. The former are Arupa, incorporeal; the latter, Rupa, corporeal.

In Volume II. of Isis (p. 183 et seq.) the philosophical systems of the Gnostics and the primitive Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, are fully considered. They show the views held in those days—outside the circle of Mosaic Jews—about Jehovah. He was identified by all the Gnostics with the evil, rather than with the good principle. For them, he was Ilda-Baoth, “the son of Darkness,” whose mother, Sophia Achamoth, was the daughter of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (the female Holy Ghost of the early Christians)—Akâsa;²⁰⁹ while Sophia Achamoth personified the lower Astral Light or Ether. Ilda-Baoth,²¹⁰ or Jehovah, is simply one of the Elohim, the seven

 

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198 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

creative Spirits, and one of the lower Sephiroth. He produces from himself seven other Gods, “Stellar Spirits” (or the lunar ancestors²¹¹), for they are all the same.²¹² They are all in his own image (the “Spirits of the Face”), and the reflections one of the other, and have become darker and more material as they successively receded from their originator. They also inhabit seven regions disposed like a ladder, as its rungs slope up and down the scale of spirit and matter.²¹³ With Pagans and Christians, with Hindus and Chaldeans, with the Greek as with the Roman Catholics—with a slight variation of the texts in their interpretations—they all were the Genii of the seven planets, as of the seven planetary spheres of our septenary chain, of which Earth is the lowest. (See Isis, Vol. II. p. 186.) This connects the “Stellar” and “Lunar” Spirits with the higher planetary Angels and the Saptarishis (the seven Rishis of the Stars) of the Hindus—as subordinate Angels (Messengers) to these “Rishis,” the emanations, on the descending scale, of the former. Such, in the opinion of the philosophical Gnostics, were the God and the Archangels now worshipped by the Christians! The “Fallen Angels” and the legend of the “War in Heaven” is thus purely pagan in its origin and comes from India viâ Persia and Chaldea. The only reference to it in the Christian canon is found in Revelations xii., as quoted a few pages back.

Thus “Satan,” once he ceases to be viewed in the superstitious, dogmatic, unphilosophical spirit of the Churches, grows into the grandiose image of one who made of terrestrial a divine man; who gave him, throughout the long cycle of Mahâ-kalpa the law of the Spirit of Life, and made him free from the Sin of Ignorance, hence of death. (See the Section On Satan in Part II. Vol. II.)

 

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199 THE SEVEN PLANES.

STANZA VI.—Continued.

6. The older wheels rotated downward and upward (a). . . . The Mother’s spawn filled the whole (Kosmos).²¹⁴ There were battles fought between the Creators and the Destroyers, and battles fought for Space; the seed appearing and reappearing continuously (b).²¹⁵

(a) Here, having finished for the time being with our side-issues—which, however they may break the flow of the narrative, are necessary for the elucidation of the whole scheme—the reader must return once more to Cosmogony. The phrase “Older wheels” refers to the worlds or Globes of our chain as they were during the “previous Rounds.” The present Stanza, when explained esoterically, is found embodied entirely in the Kabalistic works. Therein will be found the very history of the evolution of those countless Globes which evolve after a periodical Pralaya, rebuilt from old material into new forms. The previous Globes disintegrate and reappear transformed and perfected for a new phase of life. In the Kabala, worlds are compared to sparks which fly from under the hammer of the great Architect—law, the law which rules all the smaller Creators.

The following comparative diagram shows the identity between the two systems, the Kabalistic and the Eastern. The three upper are the three higher planes of consciousness, revealed and explained in both schools only to the Initiates, the lower ones represent the four lower planes—the lowest being our plane, or the visible Universe.

These seven planes correspond to the seven states of consciousness in man. It remains with him to attune the three higher states in himself to the three higher planes in Kosmos. But before he can attempt to attune, he must awaken the three “seats” to life and activity. And how many are capable of bringing themselves to even a superficial comprehension of Atma-Vidya (Spirit-Knowledge), or what is called by the Sufis, Rohanee! In Section the VIIth of this Book, in Sub-section 3,

 

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200 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the reader will find a still clearer explanation of the above in the Commentary upon Saptaparna—the man-plant. See also the Section of that name in Part II.

[Diagram III.]

[Footnotes from Diagram: … World of Spirit²¹⁶, The Archetypal World²¹⁷, The Physical Material World²¹⁸]

(b) “The Seed appears and disappears continuously.” Here “Seed” stands for “the World-germ,” viewed by Science as material particles in a highly attenuated condition, but in Occult physics as “Spiritual particles,” i.e., supersensuous matter existing in a state of primeval

 

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201 NO SHADOW, NO LIGHT.

differentiation.²¹⁹ In theogony, every Seed is an ethereal organism, from which evolves later on a celestial being, a God.

In the “beginning,” that which is called in mystic phraseology “Cosmic Desire” evolves into absolute Light. Now light without any shadow would be absolute light—in other words, absolute darkness—as physical science seeks to prove. That shadow appears under the form of primordial matter, allegorized—if one likes—in the shape of the Spirit of Creative Fire or Heat. If, rejecting the poetical form and allegory, science chooses to see in this the primordial Fire-Mist, it is welcome to do so. Whether one way or the other, whether Fohat or the famous force of Science, nameless, and as difficult of definition as our Fohat himself, that Something “caused the Universe to move with circular motion,” as Plato has it; or, as the Occult teaching expresses it:

“The Central Sun causes Fohat to collect primordial dust in the form of balls, to impel them to move in converging lines and finally to approach each other and aggregate.” (Book of Dzyan) . . . . . “Being scattered in Space, without order or system, the world-germs come into frequent collision until their final aggregation, after which they become wanderers (Comets). Then the battles and struggles begin. The older (bodies) attract the younger, while others repel them. Many perish, devoured by their stronger companions. Those that escape become worlds.”²²⁰

 

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202 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

We have been assured that there exist several modern works of speculative fancy upon such struggles for life in sidereal heaven, especially in the German language. We rejoice to hear it, for ours is an Occult teaching lost in the darkness of archaic ages. We have treated of it fully in “Isis Unveiled,” and the idea of Darwinian-like evolution, of struggle for life and supremacy, and of the “survival of the fittest” among the Hosts above as the Hosts below, runs throughout both the volumes of our earlier work, written in 1876 (See Index in “Isis Unveiled” at the words “Evolution” —“Darwin” —“Kapila” —“Battle of Life,” etc. etc.) But the idea was not ours, it is that of antiquity. Even the Purânic writers have ingeniously interwoven allegory with Cosmic facts and human events. Any symbologist may discern the astro-cosmical allusion even though he be unable to grasp the whole meaning. The great “Wars in Heaven,” in the Purânas; the wars of the Titans, in Hesiod and other classical writers; the “struggles,” also in the Egyptian legend between Osiris and Typhon, and even those in the Scandinavian legends, all refer to the same subject. Northern Mythology refers to it as the battle of the Flames, the sons of Muspel who fought on the field of Wigred. All these relate to Heaven and Earth, and have a double and often even a triple meaning, and esoteric application to things above as to things below. They relate severally to astronomical, theogonical and human struggles; to the adjustment of orbs, and the supremacy among nations and tribes. The “Struggle for Existence” and the “Survival of the Fittest” reigned supreme from the moment that Kosmos manifested into being, and could hardly escape the observant eye of the ancient Sages. Hence the incessant fights of Indra, the god of the Firmament, with the Asuras—degraded from high gods into Cosmic demons; and with Vritri or Ah-hi; the battles fought between stars and constellations, between Moon and planets—later on incarnated as kings and mortals. Hence also the War in Heaven of Michael and his Host against the Dragon (Jupiter and Lucifer-Venus), when a third of the stars of the rebellious host was hurled down into Space, and “its place was found no more in Heaven.” As said long ago—“This is the basic and fundamental stone of the secret cycles. It shows that the Brahmins and Tanäim . . . speculated on the creation and development of the world quite in a Darwinian way, both anticipating him and his school in the natural selection of species, the survival of the fittest,

203 THE BIRTH OF THE WORLDS.

and transformation. . . . There were old worlds that perished conquered by the new,” etc., etc. (“Isis Unveiled,” Vol. II., p. 260.) The assertion that all the worlds (Stars, planets, etc.)—as soon as a nucleus of primordial substance in the laya (undifferentiated) state is informed by the freed principles, of a just deceased sidereal body—become first comets, and then Suns to cool down to inhabitable worlds, is a teaching as old as the Rishis.

Thus the Secret Books distinctly teach, as we see, an astronomy that would not be rejected even by modern speculation could the latter thoroughly understand its teachings.

For, archaic astronomy, and the ancient, physical and mathematical sciences, expressed views identical with those of modern science, and many of far more momentous import. A “struggle for life” as a “survival of the fittest” in the worlds above, as on our planet here below, are distinctly taught. This teaching, however, although it would not be “entirely rejected” by Science, is sure to be repudiated as an integral whole. For it avers that there are only seven Self-born primordial “gods” emanated from the trinitarian one. In other words, it means that all the worlds or sidereal bodies (always on strict analogy) are formed one from the other, after the primordial manifestation at the beginning of the “Great Age” is accomplished. The birth of the celestial bodies in Space is compared to a crowd or multitude of “pilgrims” at the festival of the “Fires.” Seven ascetics appear on the threshold of the temple with seven lighted sticks of incense. At the light of these the first row of pilgrims light their incense sticks. After which every ascetic begins whirling his stick around his head in space, and furnishes the rest with fire. Thus with the heavenly bodies. A laya-centre is lighted and awakened into life by the fires of another “pilgrim,” after which the new “centre” rushes into space and becomes a comet. It is only after losing its velocity, and hence its fiery tail, that the “Fiery Dragon” settles down into quiet and steady life as a regular respectable citizen of the sidereal family. Therefore it is said:

Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element called the World-Soul, every nucleus of Cosmic matter, suddenly launched into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances. Through a series of countless ages, it has to conquer

204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

for itself a place in the infinitudes. It circles round and round between denser and already fixed bodies, moving by jerks, and pulling towards some given point or centre that attracts it, trying to avoid, like a ship drawn into a channel dotted with reefs and sunken rocks, other bodies that draw and repel it in turn; many perish, their mass disintegrating through stronger masses, and, when born within a system, chiefly within the insatiable stomachs of various Suns. (See Comm. to Stanza IV). Those which move slower and are propelled into an elliptic course are doomed to annihilation sooner or later. Others moving in parabolic curves generally escape destruction, owing to their velocity.

Some very critical readers will perhaps imagine that this teaching, as to the cometary stage passed through by all heavenly bodies, is in contradiction with the statements just made as to the moon being the mother of the earth. They will perhaps fancy that intuition is needed to harmonize the two. But no intuition is in truth required. What does Science know of Comets, their genesis, growth, and ultimate behaviour? Nothing—absolutely nothing! And what is there so impossible that a laya centre—a lump of cosmic protoplasm, homogeneous and latent, when suddenly animated or fired up—should rush from its bed in Space and whirl throughout the abysmal depths in order to strengthen its homogeneous organism by an accumulation and addition of differentiated elements? And why should not such a comet settle in life, live, and become an inhabited globe!

“The abodes of Fohat are many,” it is said. “He places his four fiery (electro-positive) Sons in the “Four circles”; these Circles are the Equator, the Ecliptic, and the two parallels of declination, or the tropics—to preside over the climates of which are placed the Four mystical Entities. Then again: “Other seven (sons) are commissioned to preside over the seven hot, and seven cold lokas (the hells of the orthodox Brahmins) at the two ends of the Egg of Matter (our Earth and its poles). The seven lokas are also called the “Rings,” elsewhere, and the “Circles.” The ancients made the polar circles seven instead of two, as Europeans do; for Mount Meru, which is the North Pole, is said to have seven gold and seven silver steps leading to it.

The strange statement made in one of the Stanzas: “The Songs of Fohat and his Sons were radiant as the noon-tide Sun and the Moon combined”; and that the four Sons on the middle four-fold

205 SEEING SOUND, HEARING COLOURS.

Circle “saw their father’s songs and heard his Solar-selenic radiance”; is explained in the Commentary in these words: “The agitation of the Fohatic Forces at the two cold ends (North and South Poles) of the Earth which resulted in a multicoloured radiance at night, have in them several of the properties of Akâsa (Ether) colour and sound as well.”

. . . . . . “Sound is the characteristic of Akâsa (Ether): it generates air, the property of which is Touch; which (by friction) becomes productive of Colour and Light.” . . . . . . (Vishnu Purâna.)

Perhaps the above will be regarded as archaic nonsense, but it will be better comprehended, if the reader remembers the Aurora Borealis and Australis, both of which take place at the very centres of terrestrial electric and magnetic forces. The two poles are said to be the store-houses, the receptacles and liberators, at the same time, of Cosmic and terrestrial Vitality (Electricity); from the surplus of which the Earth, had it not been for these two natural “safety-valves,” would have been rent to pieces long ago. At the same time it is now a theory that has lately become an axiom, that the phenomenon of polar lights is accompanied by, and productive of, strong sounds, like whistling, hissing, and cracking. (But see Professor Humboldt’s works on the Aurora Borealis, and his correspondence regarding this moot question.)

———

STANZA VI.—Continued.

7. Make thy calculations, O Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy small wheel (chain). Its fourth spoke is our mother (Earth) (a). Reach the fourth “fruit” of the fourth path of knowledge that leads to Nirvana, and thou shalt comprehend, for thou shalt see (b).

(a) The “small wheel” is our chain of spheres, and the fourth spoke is our Earth, the fourth in the chain. It is one of those on which the “hot (positive) breath of the Sun” has a direct effect.²²¹

 

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206 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

To calculate its age, however, as the pupil is asked to do in the Stanza, is rather difficult, since we are not given the figures of the Great Kalpa, and are not allowed to publish those of our small Yugas, except as to the approximate duration of these. “The older wheels rotated for one Eternity and one half of an Eternity,” it says. We know that by “Eternity” the seventh part of 311,040,000,000,000 years, or an age of Brahmâ is meant. But what of that? We also know that, to begin with, if we take for our basis the above figures, we have first of all to eliminate from the 100 years of Brahmâ (or 311,040,000,000,000 years) two years taken up by the Sandhyas (twilights), which leaves 98, as we have to bring it to the mystical combination 14 × 7. But we have no knowledge at what time precisely the evolution and formation of our little earth began. Therefore it is impossible to calculate its age, unless the time of its birth is given—which the teachers refuse to do, so far. At the close of this Book and in Book II., however, some chronological hints will be given. We must remember, moreover, that the law of Analogy holds good for the worlds, as it does for man; and that as “The one (Deity) becomes Two (Deva or Angel) and Two becomes Three (or man),” etc., etc., so we are taught that the Curds (world-stuff) become wanderers, (Comets), these become stars, and the stars (the centres of vortices) our sun and planets—to put it briefly.²²²

(b) There are four grades of initiation mentioned in exoteric works, which are known respectively in Sanskrit as “Sçrôtâpanna,” “Sagardagan,” “Anagamin,” and “Arhan”—the four paths to Nirvana, in this, our fourth Round, bearing the same appellations. The Arhan, though he can see the Past, the Present, and the Future, is not yet the highest Initiate; for the Adept himself, the initiated candidate, becomes chela (pupil) to a higher Initiate. Three further higher grades have to be conquered by the Arhan who would reach the apex of the ladder of Arhatship. There are those who have reached it even in this fifth race of ours, but the faculties necessary for the attainment of these higher

 

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207 THE TREE FROM WHICH THE ADEPTS GROW.

grades will be fully developed in the average ascetic only at the end of this Root-Race, and in the Sixth and Seventh. Thus there will always be Initiates and the Profane till the end of this minor Manvantara, the present life-cycle. The Arhats of the “fire-mist” of the 7th rung are but one remove from the Root-Base of their Hierarchy—the highest on Earth, and our Terrestrial chain. This “Root-Base” has a name which can only be translated by several compound words into English—“the ever-living-human-Banyan.” This “Wondrous Being” descended from a “high region,” they say, in the early part of the Third Age, before the separation of the sexes of the Third Race.

This Third Race is sometimes called collectively “the Sons of Passive Yoga,” i.e., it was produced unconsciously by the second Race, which, as it was intellectually inactive, is supposed to have been constantly plunged in a kind of blank or abstract contemplation, as required by the conditions of the Yoga state. In the first or earlier portion of the existence of this third race, while it was yet in its state of purity, the “Sons of Wisdom,” who, as will be seen, incarnated in this Third Race, produced by Kriyasakti a progeny called the “Sons of Ad” or “of the Fire-Mist,” the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” etc. They were a conscious production, as a portion of the race was already animated with the divine spark of spiritual, superior intelligence. It was not a Race, this progeny. It was at first a wondrous Being, called the “Initiator,” and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human beings. “Set apart” in Archaic genesis for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyanis, “Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras”—to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during the present cycle. These “Sons of Will and Yoga” born, so to speak, in an immaculate way, remained, it is explained, entirely apart from the rest of mankind.

The “Being” just referred to, which has to remain nameless, is the Tree from which, in subsequent ages, all the great historically known Sages and Hierophants, such as the Rishi Kapila, Hermes, Enoch, Orpheus, etc., etc., have branched off. As objective man, he is the mysterious (to the profane—the ever invisible) yet ever present Personage about whom legends are rife in the East, especially among the Occultists and the students of the Sacred Science. It is he who changes form, yet remains ever the same. And it is he again who holds spiritual sway over the

208 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

initiated Adepts throughout the whole world. He is, as said, the “Nameless One” who has so many names, and yet whose names and whose very nature are unknown. He is the “Initiator,” called the “great sacrifice.” For, sitting at the threshold of light, he looks into it from within the circle of Darkness, which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last day of this life-cycle. Why does the solitary Watcher remain at his self-chosen post? Why does he sit by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, of which he drinks no longer, as he has naught to learn which he does not know—aye, neither on this Earth, nor in its heaven? Because the lonely, sore-footed pilgrims on their way back to their home are never sure to the last moment of not losing their way in this limitless desert of illusion and matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, though but a few Elect may profit by the great sacrifice.

It is under the direct, silent guidance of this Maha—(great)—Guru that all the other less divine Teachers and instructors of mankind became, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It is through these “Sons of God” that infant humanity got its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge; and it is they who have laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient civilizations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students and scholars.²²³

 

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209 THE SACRED ISLAND.

Although these matters were barely hinted at in “Isis Unveiled,” it will be well to remind the reader of what was said in Vol. I., pp. 589 to 593, concerning a certain Sacred Island in Central Asia, and to refer him for further details to the chapter in Book II. on “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island.” A few more explanations, however, though thrown out in a fragmentary form, may help the student to obtain a glimpse into the present mystery.

To state at least one detail concerning these mysterious “Sons of God” in plain words. It is from them, these Brahmaputras, that the high Dwijas, the initiated Brahmins of old justly claimed descent, while the modern Brahmin would have the lowest castes believe literally that they issued direct from the mouth of Brahmâ. This is the esoteric teaching, which adds moreover that, although these descendants (spiritually of course) from the “sons of Will and Yoga,” became in time divided into opposite sexes, as their “Kriyasakti” progenitors did themselves, later on; yet even their degenerate descendants have down to the present day retained a veneration and respect for the creative

210 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

function, and still regard it in the light of a religious ceremony, whereas the more civilized nations consider it as a mere animal function. Compare the western views and practice in these matters with the Institutions of Manu in regard to the laws of Grihasta and married life. The true Brahmin is thus indeed “he whose seven forefathers have drunk the juice of the moon-plant (Soma),” and who is a “Trisuparna,” for he has understood the secret of the Vedas.

And, to this day, such Brahmins know that, during its early beginnings, psychic and physical intellect being dormant and consciousness still undeveloped, the spiritual conceptions of that race were quite unconnected with its physical surroundings. That divine man dwelt in his animal—though externally human—form; and, if there was instinct in him, no self-consciousness came to enlighten the darkness of the latent fifth principle. When, moved by the law of Evolution, the Lords of Wisdom infused into him the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators. As the child’s first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet were outside, and independent of him. Devotion arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal. This feeling of irrepressible, instinctive aspiration in primitive man is beautifully, and one may say intuitionally, described by Carlyle. “The great antique heart,” he exclaims, “how like a child’s in its simplicity, like a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth! heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making all the earth a mystic temple to him, the earth’s business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover, doing God’s messages among men . . . . . Wonder, miracle, encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle²²⁴ . . . . A great law of duty, high as these two infinitudes (heaven and hell), dwarfing all else, annihilating all else—it was a reality, and it is one: the garment

 

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211 THE SONS OF WISDOM.

only of it is dead; the essence of it lives through all times and all eternity!”

It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Aryan heart from the Third Race direct through its first “mind-born” sons,—the fruits of Kriyasakti. As time rolled on the holy caste of Initiates produced but rarely, and from age to age, such perfect creatures: beings apart, inwardly, though the same as those who produced them, outwardly.

While in the infancy of the third primitive race:

“A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and therefore was designed;
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast
For empire formed and fit to rule the rest. . . . .”

It was called into being, a ready and perfect vehicle for the incarnating denizens of higher spheres, who took forthwith their abodes in these forms born of Spiritual will and the natural divine power in man. It was a child of pure Spirit, mentally unalloyed with any tincture of earthly element. Its physical frame alone was of time and of life, as it drew its intelligence direct from above. It was the living tree of divine wisdom; and may therefore be likened to the Mundane Tree of the Norse Legend, which cannot wither and die until the last battle of life shall be fought, while its roots are gnawed all the time by the dragon Nidhogg; for even so, the first and holy Son of Kriyasakti had his body gnawed by the tooth of time, but the roots of his inner being remained for ever undecaying and strong, because they grew and expanded in heaven not on earth. He was the first of the First, and he was the seed of all the others. There were other “Sons of Kriyasakti” produced by a second Spiritual effort, but the first one has remained to this day the Seed of divine Knowledge, the One and the Supreme among the terrestrial “Sons of Wisdom.” Of this subject we can say no more, except to add that in every age—aye, even in our own—there have been great intellects who have understood the problem correctly.

How comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is found in now? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by materialism. For, as Carlyle says: “. . . The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself ‘I,’—what words have we for such things?—it is a breath of Heaven,

212 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for the unnamed?”

The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life, called in the Bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck as in every mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that highest Being,²²⁵ as none has that divine harmony in its form which man possesses. It is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:

“There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form . . . . We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!” “This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric,” adds Carlyle, “but it is not so. If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression . . . of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles,—the great inscrutable Mystery.”

 

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213 THE CREATIVE POWERS.‌

STANZA VII.

1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless life (a).

First, the divine (vehicle) (b), the one from the mother-spirit (Atman); then the Spiritual—(Atma-Buddhi, Spirit-soul)²²⁶ (c); (again) the three from the one (d), the four from the one (e), and the five (f), from which the three, the five and the seven (g)—these are the three-fold and the four-fold downward; the “mind-born” sons of the first Lord (Avalôkitêswara) the Shining Seven (the “Builders”).²²⁷ It is they who are thou, me, him, O Lanoo; they who watch over thee and thy mother, Bhumi (the Earth).

(a) The hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided into seven (or 4 and 3) esoteric, within the twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the seven of the manifesting scale being connected, moreover, with the Seven Planets. All this is subdivided into numberless groups of divine Spiritual, semi-Spiritual, and ethereal Beings.

The Chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the “four bodies and the three faculties” of Brahmâ exoterically, and the Panchâsyam, the five Brahmâs, or the five Dhyani-Buddhas in the Buddhist system.

The highest group is composed of the divine Flames, so-called, also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior divine World (see Commentary in first pages of Addendum). They are the formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the “Archetypal World.”

The same hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese system, in the “Beginnings” as taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes Cosmogenesis, as the Divine merges into the human, and creates—

 

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214 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

midway in its descent into matter—the visible Universe. The legendary personages—remarks reverentially Omoie—“having to be understood as the stereotyped embodiment of the higher (secret) doctrine, and its sublime truths.” To state it at full length, however, would occupy too much of our space, but a few words on this old system cannot be out of place. The following is a short synopsis of this Anthropo-Cosmogenesis, and it shows how closely the most separated notions echoed one and the same Archaic teaching.

When all was as yet Chaos (Kon-ton) three spiritual Beings appeared on the stage of future creation: (1) Ame no ani naka nushi no Kami, “Divine Monarch of the Central Heaven”; (2) Taka mi onosubi no Kami, “Exalted, imperial Divine offspring of Heaven and the Earth”; and (3) Kamu mi musubi no Kami, “Offspring of the Gods,” simply.

These were without form or substance (our arupa triad), as neither the celestial nor the terrestrial substance had yet differentiated, “nor had the essence of things been formed.”

In the Zohar—which, as now arranged and re-edited by Moses de Leon, with the help of Syrian and Chaldean Christian Gnostics in the XIIIth century, and corrected and revised still later by many Christian hands, is only a little less exoteric than the Bible itself—this divine “Vehicle” no longer appears as it does in the “Chaldean Book of Numbers.” True enough, Ain-Soph, the Absolute Endless No-thing, uses also the form of the One, the manifested “Heavenly man” (the first cause) as its chariot (Mercabah, in Hebrew; Vahan, in Sanskrit) or vehicle to descend into, and manifest through, in the phenomenal world. But the Kabalists neither make it plain how the Absolute can use anything, or exercise any attribute whatever, since, as the Absolute, it is devoid of attributes; nor do they explain that in reality it is the First Cause (Plato’s Logos) the original and eternal idea, that manifests through Adam Kadmon, the Second Logos, so to speak. In the “Book of Numbers” it is explained that En (or Ain, Aiôr) is the only self-existent, whereas its “Depth” (Bythos or Buthon of the Gnostics, called Propator) is only periodical. The latter is Brahmâ as differentiated from Brahma or Parabrahm. It is the Depth, the Source of Light, or Propator, which is the unmanifested Logos or the abstract Idea, and not Ain-Soph, whose ray uses Adam-Kadmon or the manifested Logos (the objective Universe) “male and female”—as a chariot through which to manifest. But in the Zohar we read the following incongruity: “Senior

215 ONE PARENT FLAME, COUNTLESS FLAMES.

occultatus est et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus” (Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, 1677-1684, Vol. 2, Part 2, p. 374; Liber Mysterii, Chapter 4, verse 1 [Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā, Zōhar 2:178a.6]). This is a fallacy, since Microprosopus or the microcosm, can only exist during its manifestations, and is destroyed during the Maha-Pralayas. Rosenroth’s Kabala is no guide, but very often a puzzle.

(b) As in the Japanese system, in the Egyptian, and every old cosmogony—at this divine flame, The “One,” are lit the three descending groups. Having their potential being in the higher group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called the “Virgins of Life,” the “Great Illusion,” etc., etc., and collectively the “Six-pointed Star.” The latter is the symbol, in almost every religion, of the Logos as the first emanation. It is that of Vishnu in India (the Chakra, or wheel), and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, the “He of the four letters” or—metaphorically—“the limbs of Microprosopos” in the Kabala, which are ten and six respectively. The later Kabalists however, especially the Christian mystics, have played sad havoc with this magnificent symbol.²²⁸ For the “ten limbs” of the Heavenly Man are the ten Sephiroth; but the first Heavenly Man is the unmanifested Spirit of the Universe, and ought never to be degraded into Microprosopus—the lesser Face or Countenance, the prototype of man on the terrestrial plane.²²⁹ Of this, however, later on. The six-pointed Star refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the Star. All these, the upper and lower hierarchies included, emanate from the “Heavenly or Celestial Virgin,”²³⁰ the great mother in all religions, the Androgyne, the

 

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216 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Sephira-Adam-Kadmon. In its Unity, primordial light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daivi-prakriti, the light of the unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation it becomes Fohat, or the “Seven Sons.” The former is symbolised by the Central point in the double-Triangle; the latter by the hexagon itself, or the “six limbs” of the Microprosopus the Seventh being Malkuth, the “Bride” of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth. Hence the expressions:

“The first after the ‘One’ is divine Fire; the second, Fire and Æther; the third is composed of Fire, Æther and Water; the fourth of Fire, Æther, Water, and Air.” ²³¹ The One is not concerned with Man-bearing globes, but with the inner invisible Spheres. “The ‘First-Born’ are the Life, the heart and pulse of the Universe; the Second are its Mind or Consciousness,”²³²

as said in the Commentary.

(c) The second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Æther (corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or the Atma-Buddhi) whose names are legion, are still formless, but more definitely “substantial.” They are the first differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or “Creation”—a misleading word. As the name shows, they are the prototypes of the incarnating Jivas or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit of Life. It is through these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the ray which is furnished by them with its future vehicle, the Divine Soul, Buddhi. These are directly concerned with the Hosts of the higher world of our system. From these twofold Units emanate the threefold.

In the cosmogony of Japan, when, out of the chaotic mass, an egg-like nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all the universal as well as of all terrestrial life, it is the “three-fold” just named, which differentiates. “The male æthereal” (Yo) principle

 

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217 TEACHINGS CONTRASTED.

ascends and the female grosser or more material principle (In) is precipitated into the Universe of substance, when a separation occurs between the celestial and the terrestrial. From this the female, the mother, the first rudimentary objective being is born. It is ethereal, without form or sex, and yet it is from this and the mother that the Seven Divine Spirits are born, from whom will emanate the seven creations, just as in the Codex Nazaræus from Karabtanos and the Mother Spiritus the seven evilly disposed (material) spirits are born. It would be too long to give here the Japanese names, but once translated they stand in this order:

(1.) The “Invisible Celibate,” which is the creative logos of the non-creating “father,” or the creative potentiality of the latter made manifest.

(2.) “The Spirit (or the God) of the rayless depths” (of Chaos); which becomes differentiated matter, or the world-stuff; also the mineral realm.

(3.) “The Spirit of the Vegetable Kingdom,” of the “Abundant Vegetation.”

(4.) This one is of dual nature, being at the same time “The Spirit of the Earth” and “the Spirit of the Sands,” the former containing the potentiality of the male element, the latter that of the female element, the two forming a combined nature.

These two were one; yet unconscious of being two.

In this duality were contained (a) the male, dark and muscular Being, Isu no gai no Kami; and (b) Eku gai no Kami, the female, fair and weaker or more delicate Being. Then, the:

(5th and 6th.) Spirits who were androgynous or dual-sexed, and, finally:

(7.) The Seventh Spirit, the last emanated from the “mother,” appears as the first divine human form distinctly male and female. It was the seventh creation, as in the Purânas, wherein man is the seventh creation of Brahmâ.

These, Tsanagi-Tsanami, descended into the Universe by the celestial Bridge (the milky way), and “Tsanagi, perceiving far below a chaotic mass of cloud and water, thrust his jewelled spear into the depths, and dry land appeared.” Then the two separated to explore Onokoro, the newly-created island-world; etc., etc. (Omoie).

218 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Such are the Japanese exoteric fables, the rind that conceals the kernel of the same one truth of the Secret Doctrine. Turning back to the esoteric explanations in every cosmogony:

(d) The Third order corresponds to the Atma-Buddhi-Manas: Spirit, Soul and Intellect, and is called the “Triads.”

(e) The Fourth are substantial Entities. This is the highest group among the Rupas (Atomic Forms²³³). It is the nursery of the human, conscious, spiritual Souls. They are called the “Imperishable Jivas,” and constitute, through the order below their own, the first group of the first septenary²³⁴ host—the great mystery of human conscious and

 

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219 THE HIERARCHIES OF SPIRITS.

intellectual Being. For the latter are the field wherein lies concealed in its privation the germ that will fall into generation. That germ will become the spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the development of the embryo, and which is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties and all the inherent qualities in man. The Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties, is neither taught nor accepted in Occultism. Evolution, in it, proceeds on quite other lines; the physical, according to esoteric teaching, evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This inner soul of the physical cell—this “spiritual plasm” that dominates the germinal plasm—is the key that must open one day the gates of the terra incognita of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of Embryology. (See text and note infra.)

(f) The Fifth group is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with the Microcosmic Pentagon, the five-pointed star representing man. In India and Egypt these Dhyanis were connected with the Crocodile, and their abode is in Capricornus. These are convertible terms in Indian astrology, as this (tenth) sign of the Zodiac is called Makara, loosely translated “crocodile.” The word itself is occultly interpreted in various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt the defunct man—whose symbol is the pentagram or the five-pointed star, the points of which represent the limbs of a man—was shown emblematically transformed into a crocodile: Sebakh or Sevekh “or seventh,” as Mr. Gerald Massey says, showing it as having been the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a crocodile. He is the “Dragon of Wisdom” or Manas, the “Human Soul,” Mind, the Intelligent principle, called in our esoteric philosophy the “Fifth” principle.

Says the defunct “Osirified” in ch. lxxxviii., “Book of the Dead,” or the Ritual, under the glyph of a mummiform god with a crocodile’s head:

(1) “I am the god (crocodile) presiding at the fear . . . at the arrival of his Soul among men. I am the god-crocodile brought for destruction” (an allusion to the destruction of divine spiritual purity

220 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil; also to the “fallen” gods, or angels of every theogony).

(2) “I am the fish of the great Horus (as Makara is the “crocodile,” the vehicle of Varuna). I am merged in Sekten.”

This last sentence gives the corroboration of, and repeats the doctrine of, esoteric Buddhism, for it alludes directly to the fifth principle (Manas), or the most spiritual part of its essence rather, which merges into, is absorbed by, and made one with Atma-Buddhi after the death of man. For Se-khen is the residence or loka of the god Khem (Horus-Osiris, or Father and Son), hence the “Devachan” of Atma-Buddhi. In the Ritual of the Dead the defunct is shown entering into Sekhem with Horus-Thot and “emerging from it as pure spirit” (lxiv., 29). Thus the defunct says (v. 130): “I see the forms of (myself, as various) men transforming eternally . . . I know this (chapter). He who knows it . . . takes all kinds of living forms.” . . . And in verse 35, addressing in magic formula that which is called, in Egyptian esotericism, the “ancestral heart,” or the re-incarnating principle, the permanent Ego, the defunct says:

“Oh my heart, my ancestral heart necessary for my transformations, . . . . . . do not separate thyself from me before the guardian of the Scales. Thou art my personality within my breast, divine companion watching over my fleshes (bodies). . . . . . .”

It is in Sekhem that lies concealed “the Mysterious Face,” or the real man concealed under the false personality, the triple-crocodile of Egypt, the symbol of the higher Trinity or human Triad, Atma, Buddhi and Manas.²³⁵ In all the ancient papyri the crocodile is called Sebek (Seventh), while the water is the fifth principle esoterically; and, as already stated, Mr. Gerald Massey shows that the crocodile was “the Seventh Soul, the supreme one of seven—the Seer unseen.” Even exoterically Sekhem is the residence of the god Khem, and Khem is Horus avenging the death of his father Osiris, hence punishing the Sins of man when he becomes a disembodied Soul. Thus the defunct

 

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221 CORRELATION OF BEINGS.

“Osirified” became the god Khem, who “gleans the field of Aanroo,” i.e., he gleans either his reward or punishment, as that field is the celestial locality (Devachan) where the defunct is given wheat, the food of divine justice. The fifth group of the celestial Beings is supposed to contain in itself the dual attributes of both the spiritual and physical aspects of the Universe; the two poles, so to say, of Mahat the Universal Intelligence, and the dual nature of man, the spiritual and the physical. Hence its number Five, multiplied and made into ten, connecting it with Makara, the 10th sign of Zodiac.

(g) The sixth and seventh groups partake of the lower qualities of the Quaternary. They are conscious, ethereal Entities, as invisible as Ether, which are shot out like the boughs of a tree from the first central group of the four, and shoot out in their turn numberless side groups, the lower of which are the Nature-Spirits, or Elementals of countless kinds and varieties; from the formless and unsubstantial—the ideal thoughts of their creators—down to the Atomic, though, to human perception, invisible organisms. The latter are considered as the “Spirits of Atoms” for they are the first remove (backwards) from the physical Atom—sentient, if not intelligent creatures. They are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle. For, as the doctrine teaches, there are no such privileged beings in the universe, whether in our or in other systems, in the outer or the inner worlds,²³⁶ as the angels of the Western Religion and the Judean. A Dhyan Chohan has to become one; he cannot be born or appear suddenly on the plane of life as a full-blown angel. The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred in the next cycle of life into higher, superior worlds, and will make room for a new hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind. Being is an endless cycle within the one absolute eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned. Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being gods. Such a class of beings, perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in them, in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of the lower creation, would be the

 

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222 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

symbol of an eternal injustice quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an impossibility in Nature. Therefore the “Four” and the “Three” have to incarnate as all other beings have. This sixth group, moreover, remains almost inseparable from man, who draws from it all but his highest and lowest principles, or his spirit and body, the five middle human principles being the very essence of those Dhyanis.²³⁷ Alone, the Divine Ray (the Atman) proceeds directly from the One. When asked how that can be? How is it possible to conceive that those “gods,” or angels, can be at the same time their own emanations and their personal selves? Is it in the same sense in the material world, where the son is (in one way) his father, being his blood, the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh? To this the teachers answer “Verily it is so.” But one has to go deep into the mystery of being before one can fully comprehend this truth.

———

STANZA VII.—Continued.

2. The one ray multiplies the smaller rays. Life precedes form, and life survives the last atom (of Form, Sthula-sarira, external body). Through the countless rays the life-ray, the one, like a thread through many beads (pearls) (a).

(a) This sloka expresses the conception—a purely Vedantic one, as already explained elsewhere—of a life-thread, Sutratma, running through successive generations. How, then, can this be explained? By resorting to a simile, to a familiar illustration, though necessarily imperfect, as all our available analogies must be. Before resorting to it, however, I would ask whether it seems unnatural, least of all “supernatural,” to any one of us, when we consider that process known as the growth and development of a fœtus into a healthy baby weighing several pounds—evolves from what? From the segmentation of an infinitesimally small ovum and a spermatozoon; and afterwards we see that baby develop into a six-foot man! This refers to the atomic and physical

 

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223 THE MYSTERY OF BEING.

expansion from the microscopically small into something very large, from the—to the naked eye—unseen, into the visible and objective. Science has provided for all this; and, I dare say, her theories, embryological, biological, and physiological, are correct enough so far as exact observation of the material goes. Nevertheless, the two chief difficulties of the science of embryology—namely, what are the forces at work in the formation of the fœtus, and the cause of “hereditary transmission” of likeness, physical, moral or mental—have never been properly answered; nor will they ever be solved till the day when scientists condescend to accept the Occult theories.²³⁸ But if this physical pheno-

 

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224 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

menon astonishes no one, except in so far as it puzzles the Embryologists, why should our intellectual and inner growth, the evolution of the human-spiritual to the Divine-Spiritual, be regarded as, or seem, more impossible than the other? Now to the simile.

Complete the physical plasm, mentioned in the last foot-note, the “Germinal Cell” of man with all its material potentialities, with the “spiritual plasm,” so to say, or the fluid that contains the five lower principles of the six-principled Dhyan—and you have the secret, if you are spiritual enough to understand it.

“When the seed of the animal man is cast into the soil of the animal woman, that seed cannot germinate unless it has been fructified by the five virtues (the fluid of, or the emanation from the principles) of the six-fold Heavenly man. Wherefore the Microcosm is represented as a Pentagon, within the Hexagon Star, the “Macrocosm.” (“Ἄνθρωπος,” a work on Occult Embryology, Book I.). Then: “The functions of Jiva on this Earth are of a five-fold character. In the mineral atom it is connected with the lowest principles of the Spirits of the Earth (the six-fold Dhyanis); in the vegetable particle, with their second—the Prana (life); in the animal, with all these plus the third and the fourth; in man, the germ must receive the fruition of all the five. Otherwise he will be born no higher than an animal”; namely, a congenital idiot. Thus in man alone the Jiva is complete. As to his seventh principle, it is but one of the Beams of the Universal Sun. Each rational creature receives only the temporary loan of that which has to return to its source; while his physical body is shaped by the lowest terrestrial lives, through physical, chemical, and physiological evolution. “The Blessed Ones have nought to do with the purgations of matter.” (Kabala, Chaldean Book of Numbers).

It comes to this: Mankind in its first prototypal, shadowy form, is the offspring of the Elohim of Life (or Pitris); in its qualitative and physical aspect it is the direct progeny of the “Ancestors,” the lowest Dhyanis, or Spirits of the Earth; for its moral, psychic, and spiritual nature, it is indebted to a group of divine Beings, the name and characteristics of which will be given in Book II. Collectively, men are the handiwork of hosts of various spirits; distributively, the tabernacles of those hosts; and occasionally and singly, the vehicles of some of them. In our present all-material Fifth Race, the earthly Spirit of the

225 SPIRIT FALLING INTO MATTER.

Fourth is still strong in us; but we are approaching the time when the pendulum of evolution will direct its swing decidedly upwards, bringing Humanity back on a parallel line with the primitive third Root-Race in Spirituality. During its childhood, mankind was composed wholly of that Angelic Host, who were the indwelling Spirits that animated the monstrous and gigantic tabernacles of clay of the Fourth Race—built by (as they are now also) and composed of countless myriads of lives.²³⁹ This sentence will be explained later on in the present Commentary. The “tabernacles” have improved in texture and symmetry of form, growing and developing with the globe that bore them; but the physical improvement took place at the expense of the spiritual inner man and nature. The three middle principles in earth and man became with every race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the physical intellect; the essence of elements becoming the material and composite elements now known.

Man is not, nor could he ever be, the complete product of the “Lord God”; but he is the child of the Elohim, so arbitrarily changed into the singular masculine gender. The first Dhyanis, commissioned to “create” man in their image, could only throw off their shadows, like a delicate model for the Nature Spirits of matter to work upon. (See Book II.) Man is, beyond any doubt, formed physically out of the dust of the Earth, but his creators and fashioners were many. Nor can it be said that the “Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” unless that God is identified with the “One Life,” Omnipresent though invisible, and unless the same operation is attributed to “God” on behalf of every living Soul—or Nephesch, which is the vital Soul, not the divine Spirit or Ruach, which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation. It is the inadequate distinctions made by the Jews, and now by our Western metaphysicians, who, not knowing of, and being unable to understand, hence to accept, more than a triune man—Spirit, Soul,

 

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226 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Body—thus confuse the “breath of life” with immortal Spirit.²⁴⁰ This applies also directly to the Protestant theologians, who, in translating verse 8 of Ch. III. in the Fourth Gospel, have entirely perverted the meaning. Indeed the verse is made to say “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” instead of “the Spirit goeth where it willeth,” as in the original and also in the translation of the Greek Eastern Church.

Thus the philosophy of psychic, spiritual, and mental relations with man’s physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Aryan, nor the Egyptian psychology are now properly understood. Nor can they be assimilated without accepting the esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedantic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic and even physiological relations between the Dhyan-Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and humanity on the other. No Eastern (Aryan) esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri which speak clearly

 

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227 THE EGYPTIAN SYSTEM.

of the seven principles or the “Seven Souls of Man.”²⁴¹ The Book of the Dead gives a complete list of the “transformations” that every defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all those principles—materialised for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to prove that the ancient Egyptians knew nothing of and did not teach Reincarnation, that the “Soul” (the Ego or Self) of the defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal, “co-eval with, and disappearing with the Solar boat,” i.e., for the cycle of necessity. This “Soul” emerges from the Tiaou (the realm of the cause of life) and joins the living on Earth by day, to return to Tiaou every night. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego. (Book of the Dead, cvxliii.)

The shadow, the astral form, is annihilated, “devoured by the Uræus” (cxlix., 51), the Manes will be annihilated; the two twins (the 4th and 5th principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-bird, “the divine Swallow—and the Uræus of Flame” (Manas and Atma-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother’s husbands.²⁴²

Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the gods (Dhyanis) his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which those gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Atman) is one—and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.

For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the “Book of the Dead” contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the concealed side of the moon. The human being, in their

 

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228 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

esotericism, came out from the moon (a triple mystery—astronomical, physiological, and psychical at once); he crossed the whole cycle of existence and then returned to his birth-place before issuing from it again. Thus the defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the god Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot (the celestial abyss), returning once more to Tiaou: an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life and reproduction, inhabits the moon. Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, ch. xliii.) shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called “The Ingress of Osiris into the moon.” In chapter xli. life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reincarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reappearance every month. In the Dankmoe, (iv. 5) it is said: “Oh, Osiris-Lunus! That renews to thee thy renewal.” And Safekh says to Seti I. (Mariette’s Abydos, plate 51), “Thou renewest thyself as the god Lunus when a babe.” It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus (P. Pierret, “Etudes Egyptologiques”): “Couplings and conceptions abound when he (Osiris-Lunus) is seen in heaven on that day.” Says Osiris: “Oh, sole radiant beam of the moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes (of stars) . . . . . . Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living” (“Book of the Dead,” ch. ii.),—i.e., to produce conceptions.

Osiris was “God manifest in generation,” because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception.²⁴³ Later on, when the moon became connected with female goddesses²⁴⁴—with Diana, Isis, Artemis,

 

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229 MANY STREAMS, BUT ONE SOURCE.

Juno, etc., that connection was due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic. But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, so to say, tangible [by their effects] psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son, while Space and air in general, or that expanse of Heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. These “Father and Son” were interchangeable in their functions and worked harmoniously together in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded as one, though two in personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct and also collaborative work in the causative generation of Humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints viewed and expressed in symbolical language—which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of Cosmic and Astrological symbols, there were the Occult mysteries of Anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols—or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews—will, or can help, save only with reference to that which was laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was only the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, often relating, moreover,—as in the Hebrew Scriptures—merely to the terrestrial human, not divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to mystery and initiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but, as in Central Asia, on rocks and in subterranean crypts.

Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was “of one lip and of one knowledge,” and Man knew more of his origin than he does now, and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they do play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth;

230 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

these agents being, in truth, the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyan Chohans.

As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that “the Kabala says expressly that Elohim is a ‘general abstraction’; what we call in mathematics ‘a constant co-efficient’ or a ‘general function’ entering into all construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, (the astro-Dhyanic and) Elohistic figures.” To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so, it is an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim or Dhyanis are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other—since that which is the surviving Entity in us is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entities themselves. One thing is sure; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces; but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel (Enoch belonging to a far distant race and not to any nation but to all, as a generic character), they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism, their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal, and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the “stiff-necked race.” But even the Kabala plainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.

Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephiroth, has still another, a sub-occult meaning in it, then and then only the Occultist will be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah is in the abstract sense of a “one living God,” a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephiroth—we have a right to maintain that the Zohar (as witnessed by the Book of Numbers, at any rate), gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out the same doctrine that we do; i.e., it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary group of Celestial men or Angels, just as in “Pymander, the Thought Divine.”

231 THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE “ONE.”

STANZA VII.—Continued.

3. When the one becomes two—the “three-fold” appears (a). The three are (linked into) one; and it is our thread, O Lanoo, the heart of the man-plant, called Saptaparṇa (b).

“When the one becomes two, the three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation, that reflection, “the Ray,” differentiates the “Water of Space”; or, in the words of the “Book of the Dead”; “Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial light dissipating total darkness by the help of the great magic power of the word of the (Central) Sun.” Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated through Light, and the “three-fold being issues as its First-born.” “Osiris-Ptah (or ra) creates his own limbs (like Brahmâ) by creating the gods destined to personify his phases” during the Cycle (xvii., 4). The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Narâyana, the Purusha, “concealed in Akâsa and present in Ether.” This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we should rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming two, and then being transformed into the “three-fold,” the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call “Rounds.” If he refers to “Esoteric Buddhism”—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic Cosmogony—he will find that by a “Round” is meant the serial evolution of nascent material nature, of the seven globes of our chain²⁴⁵ with their mineral,

 

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232 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

vegetable, and animal kingdoms (man being there included in the latter and standing at the head of it) during the whole period of a life-cycle. The latter would be called by the Brahmins “a Day of Brahmâ.” It is, in short, one revolution of the “Wheel” (our planetary chain), which is composed of seven globes (or seven separate “Wheels,” in another sense this time). When evolution has run downward into matter, from planet A to planet G, or Z, as the Western students call it, it is one Round. In the middle of the Fourth revolution, which is our present “Round”: “Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.” All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained in “Esoteric Buddhism.” That which was hardly touched upon, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Book II.

Now every “Round” (on the descending scale) is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, as every globe—down to our fourth sphere (the actual earth)—is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy sphere which precedes it in their successive order, on the three higher planes. (See diagram in Stanza VI. Comm. 6). On its way upwards on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualises and etherealises, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin globe on the opposite side is placed; the result being, that when the seventh globe is reached (in whatever Round) the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the “origin of man,” so-called, on this our present

233 WHAT INCARNATES IN ANIMAL MAN.

Round, or life-cycle on this planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different group of so-called “Creators” or “Architects,” so is that of every globe; i.e., it is under the supervision and guidance of special “Builders” and “Watchers”—the various Dhyan-Chohans.

The group of the hierarchy which is commissioned to “create”²⁴⁶ men is a special group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this cycle just as a higher and still more spiritual group evolved him in the Third Round. But as it is the Sixth—on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and seventh being the terrestrial Spirits (elementals) which gradually form, build, and condense his physical body—this Sixth group evolves no more than the future man’s shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or “Crocodile” in India as in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a mystery, truly but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious spiritual Beings in the Universe, limiting full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a “function of the Brain.” Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since the beginning of his appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space. . . . To put it more clearly: the invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without abandoning, however, its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in Spiritualism, though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating,²⁴⁷

 

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234 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

or taking temporary possession of a medium. Just as certain persons—men and women, reverting to parallel cases among living persons—whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their “double” in one place, while the body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.

Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the third round. He is a living body, not a living being, since the realisation of existence, the “Ego-Sum,” necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the Ancients that the Kabalist even made of soul and body two lives, independent of each other.²⁴⁸ The soul, whose body vehicle is the Astral, ethero-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth—i.e., the soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons—such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc.²⁴⁹ Therefore, that which living men (Initiates)

 

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235 DII SUNT DEMONES INVERSI.

can do, the Dhyanis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the Antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society, in Spiritualism, besides the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean oracles, we have a triple evidence of the universality of this doctrine, for he says: “In these oracles the seven Cosmocratores of the world, (‘The World-Pillars,’) mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double—one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.” Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the archangels and the “Archontes.” (See “De Mysteriis,” sec. ii., ch. 3.) The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of spiritual beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, their doubles are denounced by her as devils.²⁵⁰ But the word “ferouer” is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the “Demon is the lining of God” (evil, the reverse of the medal), he does not mean two separate

 

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236 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

actualities, but the two aspects or facets of the same Unity. Now the best man living would appear, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—a fiend. Hence a certain reason to depreciate a lower “double,” immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But there is still as little cause to regard them as devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.

(b) The concluding sentence of this sloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The thread of being which animates man and passes through all his personalities, or rebirths on this Earth (an allusion to Sutratma), the thread on which moreover all his “Spirits” are strung—is spun from the essence of the “threefold,” the “fourfold” and the “fivefold”; which contain all the preceding. Panchâsikha, agreeably to Bhâgavata Purâna (V. XX. 25-28), is one of the seven Kumâras who go to Sveta-Dvipa to worship Vishnu. We shall see further on, what connection there is between the “celibate” and chaste sons of Brahmâ, who refuse “to multiply,” and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile it is evident that “the Man-Plant,” Saptaparna, thus refers to the seven principles, and man is compared to the seven-leaved plant of this name²⁵¹ so sacred among Buddhists.

For further details as to Saptaparna and the importance of the number seven in occultism, as well as in symbology, the reader is referred to Part II., Book II., on Symbolism: Sections on “Saptaparna,” [p. 590] “The Septenary Element in the Vedas,” [p. 605] etc., etc.

 

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237 THE IMMORTAL ROOT.

STANZA VII.—Continued.

4. It is the root that never dies, the three-tongued flame of the four wicks²⁵² (a) . . . The wicks are the sparks, that draw from the three-tongued flame (their upper triad) shot out by the seven, their flame; the beams and sparks of one moon reflected in the running waves of all the rivers of the earth (“Bhumi,” or “Prithivi”)²⁵³ (b).

(a) The “Three-tongued flame” that never dies is the immortal spiritual triad—the Atma-Buddhi and Manas—the fruition of the latter assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The “four wicks” that go out and are extinguished, are the four lower principles, including the body.

“I am the three-wicked Flame and my wicks are immortal,” says the defunct. “I enter into the domain of Sekhem (the God whose arm sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul) and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries,” i.e., got rid of the sin-creating “four wicks.” (See chap. i., vii., “Book of the Dead,” and the “Mysteries of Ro-stan.”)

(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal monad-ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Maya. They last and appear, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the running waters of life: the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the beams—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, re-merged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.

 

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238 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA VII.—Continued.

5. The spark hangs from the flame by the finest thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Maya (a). It stops in the first (Kingdom), and is a metal and a stone; it passes into the second (Kingdom), and behold—a plant; the plant whirls through seven forms and becomes a sacred animal; (the first shadow of the physical man) (b).

From the combined attributes of these, manu (man), the thinker, is formed.

Who forms him? The seven lives; and the one life (c). Who completes him? The fivefold Lha. And who perfects the last body? Fish, sin, and soma (the moon) (d).

(a) The phrase “through the seven Worlds of Maya” refers here to the seven globes of the planetary chain and the seven rounds, or the 49 stations of active existence that are before the “Spark” or Monad, at the beginning of every “Great Life-Cycle” or Manvantara. The “thread of Fohat” is the thread of life before referred to.

This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of life, the independent nature of which is denied by modern science because that science is unable to comprehend it. The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if—

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity”—

yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for life alone can understand life.

What is that “Spark” which “hangs from the flame?” It is Jiva, the monad in conjunction with manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each personality, when worthy, and hangs from Atma-Buddhi, the Flame, by the thread of life. In whatever way interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may easily be shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient

239 CHALDEAN METAPHYSICS.

religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine septenary hanging from the Triad (thus forming the Decade) and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into the one itself: an endless and boundless Circle.

“The Deity (the ever Invisible Presence),” says the Zohar, “manifests itself through the ten Sephiroth which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the Sea from which outflows a stream called wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth. . . . . For ten equal seven: the Decade contains four Unities and three Binaries.” The ten Sephiroth correspond to the limbs of man. “When I framed Adam Kadmon,” the Elohim are made to say, “the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of the Seven millions of skies, and my ten splendours were his limbs.” But neither the Head nor the shoulders of Adam-Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in the Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā (the Book of the Concealed Mystery):

“In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim (the “Sons of Light and Life,” or the “Builders”) had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six, the seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth (see Mantuan Codex [Sēfer haZōhar, 3 Vols, 1558-1560]) on its plane, and the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The Chaldean Book of Numbers contains a detailed explanation of all this. “The first triad of the body of Adam Kadmon (the three upper planes of the seven²⁵⁴) cannot be seen before the soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.” The Sephiroth of this upper triad are: “1, Kether (the Crown) represented by the brow of Macroprosopos; 2, Chochmah (Wisdom, a male Principle) by his right shoulder; and 3, Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle) by the left shoulder.” Then come the seven limbs (or Sephiroth) on the planes of manifestation, the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus (the

 

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240 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

lesser Face) or Tetragrammaton, the “four-lettered” Mystery. “The seven manifested and the three concealed limbs are the Body of the Deity.”

Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both the Seventh and the Fourth world, the former when counting from the first globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth globe or Sephiroth called Yezod, “foundation,” or as said in the Book of Numbers “by Yezod, He (Adam Kadmon) fecundates the primitive Heva” (Eve or our Earth). Rendered in mystic language this is the explanation why Malkuth, called “the inferior Mother,” Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton or Microprosopus (the 2nd Logos) the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity she will become united with the Spiritual Logos, i.e., in the 7th Race of the 7th Round—after the regeneration, on the day of “Sabbath.” For the “seventh day” has again an occult significance undreamt of by our theologians.

“When Maṭrōnīṯā, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body,” says verse 746, in chapter 22 of the Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā [Zōhar 3:296a.10]. “Becomes one body” means that all is reabsorbed once more into the one element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvanees and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—protyle or undifferentiated substance. “Sabbath” means rest or Nirvana. It is not the seventh day after six days but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven “days” or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a pralaya is equal in duration to the manwantara, or a night of Brahmâ is equal to this “day.” If the Christians will follow Jewish customs they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof: i.e., to work one week of seven days and rest seven days. That the word “Sabbath” had a mystic significance is shown in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said in Luke xviii. 12. Sabbath is there taken for the whole week. (See Greek text where the week is called Sabbath. “I fast twice in the Sabbath.”) Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in heaven, as Sabbath; “and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be (one) with the Lord and will enjoy an eternal Sabbath.” (Hebrew iv. 2.)

241 THE TRUE AND THE FALSE KABALA.

The difference between the two systems, taking the Kabala as contained in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, the Kabala of the Christian mystics—the Kabala and the archaic esoteric Vidya, is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern occultism refers to our earth as the fourth world, the lowest of the chain, above which run upward on both its sides the six globes, three on each side. The Zohar, on the other hand, calls the earth the lower, or the Seventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it, “Microprosopus.” The “smaller face,” smaller because manifested and finite, “is formed of six Sephiroth,” says the same work. “Seven kings come and die in the thrice-destroyed world”—(Malkuth our earth, destroyed after each of the three rounds which it has gone through). “And their reign (of the seven kings) will be broken up.” (Book of Numbers, l. viii., 3.) This relates to the Seven Races, five of which have already appeared, and two more have still to appear in this Round.

The Shinto allegorical accounts of Cosmogony and the origin of man in Japan hint at the same belief.

Captain C. Pfoundes studied for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan the religion underlying the various sects of the land. . . . . . “The Shinto idea of creation,” he says, “is as follows: Out of chaos (Konton) the earth (in) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Maa (jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, and five other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five gods of the Earth.” These “gods” are simply our five races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of the “ancestors,” the two preceding races which give birth to animal and to rational man.

It will be shown (Vol. II. Pt. II.) that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was pre-eminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabala as in Eastern Occultism. Eliphas Lévi calls the number seven “the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.” He shows the Kabala following faithfully even the septenary division of man, as the diagram he gives in his “Clef des Grands Mystères” is septenary. This

242 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

may be seen at a glance on page 389, “Une prophetie et diverses pensées de Paracelse,” however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram (Plate VII. in Mr. Mathers’ Kabala) “the formation of the Soul”^255a from the same “Key of the Great Mysteries” by Lévi to find the same, though with a different interpretation.

Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and the Occult names attached:

[Footnotes from Diagram: … and vice versa^255b]

7. Neschemah. Pure Spirit. Atma.

6. Ruach. Spiritual Soul. Buddhi.

5. Nephesch. Plastic Mediator. Manas.

4. Samael. Seat of Passion & Animal Desires. Kama.

3. Mikael. The Sun Principle, whence Life. Prana.

2. Image of man. Astral Body or Linga Sarira.

1. Image of the Creators. Physical Body, Sthula Sarira, Rupa.

N.B.—Please remark that this triad is disconnected with the lower Quaternary, as it disconnects itself always after death.

The lower Quaternary: the Transitory and the mortal.

The Upper Triad. The Immortal. E. Lévi calls Nephesch what we name Manas, and vice versâ.

Nephesch.—The Breath of animal life in man—the breath of life instinctual in the animal: and Manas is the 3rd Soul—the human in its light side,—animal, in its connection with Samaelor Kama.

 

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243 OCCULT AND KABALISTIC DOCTRINES.

We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Eliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics. (See “La Clef des Grands Mystères,” pp. 388, 389.) Says Eliphas Lévi, the Kabalist: Say the Theosophists:

It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not know sufficiently the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his object. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, and we, Occultists, answer the late Kabalist and his admirers:

246 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Such are the distorted copies of the esoteric doctrine in the Kabala. But see also “The Primeval Manus of Humanity” in Book II. To return to Stanza VII.

(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man a spirit; and the spirit a god.” The “spark” animates all the kingdoms in turn before it enters into and informs divine man, between whom and his predecessor, animal man, there is all the difference in the world. Genesis begins its anthropology at the wrong end (evidently for a blind) and lands nowhere.²⁵⁸ Had it begun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the celestial Logos, the “Heavenly Man,” which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of whom after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the cyphers scattered on the Mayavic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first “male and female” or Adam Kadmon, the “Fiat Lux” of the Bible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-matter. On our nascent globe things proceed differently. The Monad or Jiva, as said in “Isis Unveiled,” vol. i., p. 302, is, first of all, shot down by the law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone (or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round), it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point in which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the

 

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247 SPIRIT ALONE IS HELPLESS ON EARTH.

animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad or Jiva per se cannot be even called spirit: it is a ray, a breath of the Absolute, or the Absoluteness rather, and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle principles, which are the sentient life of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul, (Manas) “the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,” to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult doctrine teaches that while the monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim—or Pitris, the lower Dhyan-Chohans—are evolving pari passu with it on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the “Heavenly Man” in space—perfect man. In the Sankhya philosophy, Purusha (spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless he mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the secret philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Though one and the same thing in their origin, Spirit and Matter, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual substance. Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. In polarity, on the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted, so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous substance, the root-principle of the universe.

248 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti’s shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first 2-1/2 Races being only the first, gradually evolving into the most perfect of mammals—the Celestial “Ancestors” (Entities from preceding worlds, called in India the Sishta) step in on this our plane, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the physical or animal-man, and incarnate in the latter. Thus the two processes—for the two creations: the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies, still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call “doubles,” or “astral forms,” in their own likeness.²⁵⁹ This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. But Man is still incomplete. From Swayambhuva Manu (in Manu, Book I.), from whom descended the seven primitive Manus or Prajapati, each of whom gave birth to a primitive race of men, down to the Codex Nazareus, in which Karabtanos or Fetahil (blind concupiscent matter) begets on his Mother, “Spiritus,” seven figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primæval seven races—this doctrine has left its impress on every Archaic Scripture.

(c) “Who forms Manu (the Man) and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin²⁶⁰ and the Moon.” Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the “One Life” or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained and as rightly comprehended, it is only the exact Science of the future that is destined to vindicate the theory fully.

It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science, “inorganic substance,” means simply that the latent life slumbering in the molecules of so-called “inert matter” is incognizable. All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is a Life, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the

 

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249 MATTER, LIFE AND SUBSTANCE.

laws known to those who reject Occultism. “The very Atoms,” says Tyndall, “seem instinct with a desire for life.” Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency “to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?

“The worlds, to the profane,” says a Commentary, “are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves collectively a divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of lives.²⁶¹ Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of the One

 

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250 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, being, its particles are fiery lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other life that they consume. Therefore they are named the “DEVOURERS.” . . . “Every visible thing in this Universe was built by such LIVES, from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.” . . . “From the ONE LIFE formless and Uncreate, proceeds the Universe of lives. First was manifested from the Deep (Chaos) cold luminous fire (gaseous light?) which formed the curds in Space.” (Irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?). . . . . . . “. . . These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifested MATERIAL, Fire, the hot flames, the wanderers in heaven (comets); heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water (?); then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the pilgrims (comets?) and forms solid watery wheels (MATTER globes). Bhumi (the Earth) appears with six sisters.²⁶² These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—WATER; and from the breath of all (atmospheric) AIR is born. These four are the four lives of the first four periods (Rounds) of Manvantara. The three last will follow.”

This means that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science,—which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the “Ever-becoming” on the manifested plane, then those Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the Manvantaric end. Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be called one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be so de facto, “One-dimensional Space.”

 

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251 THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF SPACE.

The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements—Fire and Earth—and its humanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name Humanity to beings living under conditions unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense (the only way in which it can be used correctly)—“a two-dimensional species.” The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes of the two, three, and four or more “dimensional Space”; but in passing, it is worthwhile to point out the real significance of the sound but incomplete intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that²⁶³—the use of the modern expression, “the fourth dimension of Space.” To begin with, of course, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the “Fourth dimension of matter in Space.”²⁶⁴ But it is an unhappy phrase even thus expanded, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The faculties, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste, and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and by the time that it fully develops the next characteristic—let us call it for the moment Permeability—this will correspond to the next sense of man—let us call it “Normal Clairvoyance”; thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, what they were really in want of, was a sixth characteristic of matter. The three dimensions belong really but to one attribute or characteristic of matter—extension; and

 

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252 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that under any condition of things there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth, and thickness. These terms, and the term “dimension” itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of Kosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; and from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not militate in any way against the certainty that in the progress of time—as the faculties of humanity are multiplied—so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar one of the “Sun rising or setting.”

We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here another caveat must be entered. That loose and figurative expression may be regarded—in one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the “Elements” (in the Occult sense)—Fire, Air, Water,²⁶⁵ Earth. We are only in the fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The centres of consciousness (destined to develop into humanity as we know it) of the third Round arrived at a perception of the third Element Water.²⁶⁶ Those of the fourth Round have added

 

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253 THE GREAT ARCHÆUS.

earth as a state of matter to their stock as well as the three other elements in their present transformation. In short, none of the so-called elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know, fire may have been pure akasa, the first Matter of the Magnum Opus of the Creators and “Builders,” that Astral Light which the paradoxical Eliphas Lévi calls in one breath “the body of the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet,” the “Androgyne Goat of Mendes”²⁶⁷; air, simply

 

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254 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Nitrogen, “the breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,” as the Mahometan mystics call it; water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a living soul with. And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found in Genesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far younger Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which things created appear—namely, Fire (light), Air, Water, and man (or the Earth). For the sentence: “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth” is a mistranslation; it is not “Heaven and Earth,” but the duplex or dual Heaven, the upper and the lower Heavens, or the separation of primordial substance that was light in its upper and dark in its lower portions—or the manifested Universe—in its duality of the invisible (to the senses) and the visible to our perceptions. God divided the light from the Darkness (v. 4); and then made the firmament, air (5), “a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,” (6), i.e., “the waters which were under the firmament (our manifested visible Universe) from the waters above the firmament,” or the (to us) invisible planes of being. In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first, light is produced before the Sun. “God made the Earth and the Heavens and every plant of the field before it was in the Earth and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Elohim (‘gods’) had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.” (v. 5)—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plants were created before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now in the fourth Round.

Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the “primordial fire” mentioned above, Eliphas Lévi calls it invariably the “Astral Light.” It is the “grand Agent Magique” with him; undeniably it is so, but—only so far as Black Magic is concerned, and

255 BUT WHY SLANDER THE INDIAN HIEROPHANTS?

on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Akâsa; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The “Astral Light” is simply the older “sidereal Light” of Paracelsus; and to say that “everything which exists has been evolved from it, and it preserves and reproduces all forms,” as he writes, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolved through (or via) it, it is not the astral light. The latter is not the container of all things but only the reflector, at best, of this all. Eliphas Lévi writes:

“The great Magic agent is the fourth emanation of the life principle (we say—it is the first in the inner, and the second in the outer (our) Universe), of which the Sun is the third form . . . for the day-star (the sun) is only the reflection and material shadow of the Central Sun of truth, which illuminates the intellectual (invisible) world of Spirit and which itself is but a gleam borrowed from the Absolute.”

So far he is right enough. But when the great authority of the Western Kabalists adds that nevertheless, “it is not the immortal Spirit as the Indian Hierophants have imagined”—we answer that he slanders the said Hierophants, as they have said nothing of the kind; while even the Purânic exoteric writings flatly contradict the assertion. No Hindu has ever mistaken Prakriti—the Astral Light being only above the lowest plane of Prakriti, the material Kosmos—for the “immortal Spirit.” Prakriti is ever called Maya, illusion, and is doomed to disappear with the rest, the gods included, at the hour of the Pralaya; for it is shown that Akâsa is not even the Ether, least of all then, we imagine, can it be the Astral Light. Those unable to penetrate beyond the dead letter of the Purânas, have occasionally confused Akâsa with Prakriti, with Ether, and even with the visible Sky! It is true also that those who have invariably translated the term Akâsa by “Ether” (Wilson, for instance), finding it called “the material cause of sound” possessing, moreover, this one single property (Vishnu Purâna), have ignorantly imagined it to be “material,” in the physical sense. True, again, that if the characteristics are accepted literally, then, since nothing material or physical, and therefore conditioned and temporary can be immortal—according to metaphysics and philosophy—it would follow that Akâsa is neither infinite nor immortal. But all this is erroneous, since both the words Pradhâna

256 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(primeval matter) and sound, as a property, have been misunderstood; the former term (Pradhâna) being certainly synonymous with Mulaprakriti and Akâsa, and the latter (sound) with the Verbum, the Word or the Logos. This is easy to demonstrate; for it is shown in the following sentences in Vishnu Purâna: “In the beginning there was neither day nor night, nor sky, nor earth, nor darkness, nor light. . . . . Save only One, unapprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahma and Pums (Spirit) and Pradhâna (primordial matter).” . . . . (Book I., ch. ii.).

Now, what is Pradhâna, if it is not Mulaprakriti, the root of all, in another aspect? For Pradhâna, though said further on to merge into the Deity as everything else does, in order to leave the one absolute during the Pralaya, yet is held as infinite and immortal. The Commentator describes the Deity as: “One Pradhánika Brahma Spirit: that, was,” and interprets the compound term as a substantive, not as a derivative word used attributively, i.e., like something conjoined with Pradhâna.²⁶⁸ Hence Pradhâna even in the Purânas is an aspect of Parabrahmam, not an evolution, and must be the same as the Vedantic Mulaprakriti. “Prakriti in its primary state is Akâsa,” says a Vedantin scholar (see “Five Years of Theosophy,” p. 169). It is almost abstract Nature.

Akâsa, then, is Pradhâna in another form, and as such cannot be Ether, the ever-invisible agent, courted even by physical Science. Nor is it Astral Light. It is, as said, the noumenon of the seven-fold differentiated Prakriti²⁶⁹—the ever immaculate “Mother” of the fatherless Son, who becomes “Father” on the lower manifested plane. For Mahat is the first product of Pradhâna, or Akâsa, and Mahat—Universal intelligence “whose characteristic property is Buddhi”—is no other than the Logos, for he is called “Eswara” Brahmâ, Bhâva, etc. (See Linga Purâna, sec. lxx. 12 et seq.; and Vâyu Purâna, but especially the former Purâna—prior, section viii., 67-74). He is, in short, the “Creator” or the divine mind in creative operation, “the cause of all things.” He is

 

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257 AKASA IS NOT ETHER.

the “first-born” of whom the Purânas tell us that “Mahat and matter are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe,” or, in our language, the negative and the positive poles of dual nature (abstract and concrete), for the Purâna adds: “In this manner—as were the seven forms (principles) of Prakriti reckoned from Mahat to Earth—so at the time of pralaya (pratyâhâra) these seven successively re-enter into each other. The egg of Brahmâ (Sarva-mandala) is dissolved with its seven zones (dwipa), seven oceans, seven regions, etc.” (Vishnu Purâna, Book vi., ch. iv.)²⁷⁰

These are the reasons why the Occultists refuse to give the name of Astral Light to Akâsa, or to call it Ether. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” may be contrasted with the occult saying, “In our Mother’s house there are seven mansions,” or planes, the lowest of which is above and around us—the Astral Light.

The elements, whether simple or compound, could not have remained the same since the commencement of the evolution of our chain. Everything in the Universe progresses steadily in the Great Cycle, while incessantly going up and down in the smaller cycles. Nature is never stationary during manvantara, as it is ever becoming,²⁷¹ not simply being; and mineral, vegetable, and human life are always adapting their organisms to the then reigning Elements, and therefore those Elements were then fitted for them, as they are now for the life of present humanity. It will only be in the next, or fifth, Round that the fifth Element, Ether—the gross body of Akâsa, if it can be called even that—

 

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258 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

will, by becoming a familiar fact of Nature to all men, as air is familiar to us now, cease to be as at present hypothetical, and also an “agent” for so many things. And only during that Round will those higher senses, the growth and development of which Akâsa subserves, be susceptible of a complete expansion. As already indicated, a partial familiarity with the characteristic of matter—permeability—which should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the next element added to our resources in the next Round, permeability will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the densest forms of this will seem to man’s perceptions as obstructive to him as a thick fog, and no more.

Let us return to the life-cycle now. Without entering at length upon the description given of the higher lives, we must direct our attention at present simply to the earthly beings and the earth itself. The latter, we are told, is built up for the first Round by the “Devourers” which disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other lives in the Elements; pretty much, it must be supposed, as in the present stage of the world, the ærobes do, when, undermining and loosening the chemical structure in an organism, they transform animal matter and generate substances that vary in their constitutions. Thus Occultism disposes of the so-called Azoic age of Science, for it shows that there never was a time when the Earth was without life upon it. Wherever there is an atom of matter, a particle or a molecule, even in its most gaseous condition, there is life in it, however latent and unconscious. “What-soever quits the Laya State, becomes active life; it is drawn into the vortex of MOTION (the alchemical solvent of Life); Spirit and Matter are the two States of the ONE, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, both being the absolute life, latent.” (Book of Dzyan, Comm. III., par. 18). . . . “Spirit is the first differentiation of (and in) SPACE; and Matter the first differentiation of Spirit. That, which is neither Spirit nor matter—that is IT—the Causeless CAUSE of Spirit and Matter, which are the Cause of Kosmos. And THAT we call the ONE LIFE or the Intra-Cosmic Breath.”

Once more we will say—like must produce like. Absolute Life cannot produce an inorganic atom whether single or complex, and there is life

259 ATOMS ARE INVISIBLE LIVES.

even in laya just as a man in a profound cataleptic state—to all appearance a corpse—is still a living being.

When the “Devourers” (in whom the men of science are invited to see, with some show of reason, atoms of the Fire-Mist, if they will, as the Occultist will offer no objection to this); when the “Devourers,” we say, have differentiated “the fire-atoms” by a peculiar process of segmentation, the latter become life-germs, which aggregate according to the laws of cohesion and affinity. Then the life-germs produce lives of another kind, which work on the structure of our globes. * * * * Thus, in the first Round, the globe, having been built by the primitive fire-lives, i.e., formed into a sphere—had no solidity, nor qualifications, save a cold brightness, nor form nor colour; it is only towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element which from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence became now in our Round the fire we know throughout the system. The Earth was in her first rupa, the essence of which is the Akâsic principle named *** “that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light, which Eliphas Lévi calls “the imagination of Nature,”²⁷² probably to avoid

giving it its correct name, as others do.

“It is through and from the radiations of the seven bodies of the seven orders of Dhyanis, that the seven discrete quantities (Elements), whose motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are born.” (Commentary.)

 

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260 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The Second Round brings into manifestation the second element—air, that element, the purity of which would ensure continuous life to him who would use it. There have been two occultists only in Europe who have discovered and even partially applied it in practice, though its composition has always been known among the highest Eastern Initiates. The ozone of the modern chemists is poison compared with the real universal solvent which could never be thought of unless it existed in nature. “From the second Round, Earth—hitherto a fœtus in the matrix of Space—began its real existence: it had developed individual sentient life, its second principle. The second corresponds to the sixth (principle); the second is life continuous, the other, temporary.”

The Third Round developed the third Principle—Water; while the Fourth transformed the gaseous fluids and plastic form of our globe into the hard, crusted, grossly material sphere we are living on. “Bhumi” has reached her fourth principle. To this it may be objected that the law of analogy, so much insisted upon, is broken. Not at all. Earth will reach her true ultimate form—(inversely in this to man)—her body shell—only toward the end of the manvantara after the Seventh Round. Eugenius Philalethes was right when he assured his readers on his word of honour that no one had yet seen the Earth (i.e., Matter in its essential form). Our globe is, so far, in its Kamarupic state—the astral body of desires of Ahamkara, dark Egotism, the progeny of Mahat, on the lower plane. . . .

It is not molecularly constituted matter—least of all the human body (sthulasarira)—that is the grossest of all our “principles,” but verily the middle principle, the real animal centre; whereas our body is but its shell, the irresponsible factor and medium through which the beast in us acts all its life. Every intellectual theosophist will understand my real meaning. Thus the idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless lives, just in the same way as the rocky crust of our Earth was, has nothing repulsive in it for the true mystic. Nor can Science oppose the occult teaching, for it is not because the microscope will ever fail to detect the ultimate living atom or life, that it can reject the doctrine.

Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various

261 THE OCCULT CHEMISTRY.

kinds; that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and from within by leucomaines, ærobes, anærobes, and what not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the occult doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of such beings; which, except larger species, no microscope can detect. So far, as regards the purely animal and material portion of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and physiology are the two great magicians of the future, who are destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and physical man, between the plant and man, and even between the reptile and its nest, the rock, and man—is more and more clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all being found to be identical, chemical science may well say that there is no difference between the matter which composes the ox and that which forms man. But the Occult doctrine is far more explicit. It says:Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic or inorganic—is a life. Every atom and molecule in the Universe is both life-giving and death-giving to that form, inasmuch as it builds by aggregation universes and the ephemeral vehicles ready to receive the transmigrating soul, and as eternally destroys and changes the forms and expels those souls from their temporary abodes. It creates and kills; it is self-generating and self-destroying; it brings into being, and annihilates, that mystery of mysteries—the living body of man, animal, or plant, every second in time and space; and it generates equally life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, and even the agreeable and disagreeable, the beneficent and maleficent sensations. It is that mysterious Life, represented collectively by countless myriads of lives, that follows in its own sporadic way, the hitherto incomprehensible law of Atavism; that copies family resemblances as well as those it finds impressed in the aura of the generators of every future human being, a mystery, in short, that will receive fuller attention elsewhere. For the present, one instance may be cited in illustration. Modern science begins to find out that ptomaïne (the alkaloid poison generated by decaying matter and corpses—a life also) extracted

262 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

with the help of volatile ether, yields a smell as strong and equal to that of the freshest orange-blossoms; but that free from oxygen, these alkaloids yield either a most sickening, disgusting smell, or the most agreeable aroma which recalls that of the most delicately scented flowers. And it is suspected that such blossoms owe their agreeable smell to the poisonous ptomaïne; the venomous essence of certain mushrooms (fungi) being nearly identical with the venom of the cobra of India, the most deadly of serpents.²⁷³ Thus, having discovered the effects, Science has to find their primary causes; and this it can never do without the help of the old sciences, of alchemy, occult botany and physics. We are taught that every physiological change, in addition to pathological phenomena; diseases—nay, life itself—or rather the objective phenomena of life, produced by certain conditions and changes in the tissues of the body which allow and force life to act in that body; that all this is due to those unseen creators and destroyers that are called in such a loose and general way, microbes.²⁷⁴ Such

 

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263 PARACELSUS DIED TOO EARLY.

experimenters as Pasteur are the best friends and helpers of the Destroyers and the worst enemies of the Creators—if the latter were not at the same time destroyers too. However it may be, one thing is sure in this: The knowledge of these primary causes and of the ultimate essence of every element, of its lives, their functions, properties, and conditions of change—constitutes the basis of magic. Paracelsus was, perhaps, the only Occultist in Europe, during the last centuries since the Christian era, who was versed in this mystery. Had not a criminal hand put an end to his life, years before the time allotted him by Nature, physiological Magic would have fewer secrets for the civilized world than it now has.

(d) But what has the Moon to do in all this? we may be asked. What have “Fish, Sin and Moon” in the apocalyptic saying of the Stanza to do in company with the “Life-microbes”? With the latter nothing, except availing themselves of the tabernacle of clay prepared by them; with divine perfect man everything, since “Fish, Sin and Moon” make conjointly the three symbols of the immortal Being.

This is all that can be given. Nor does the writer pretend to know more of this strange symbol than may be inferred about it from exoteric religions; from the mystery perhaps, which underlies the Matsya (fish)

264 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Avatar of Vishnu, the Chaldean Oannes—the Man-Fish, recorded in the imperishable sign of the Zodiac, Pisces, and running throughout the two Testaments in the personages of Joshua “Son of the Fish (Nun)” and Jesus; the allegorical “Sin” or Fall of Spirit into matter, and the Moon—in so far as it relates to the “Lunar” ancestors, the Pitris.

For the present it may be as well to remind the reader that while the Moon-goddesses were connected in every mythology, especially the Grecian, with child-birth, because of the lunar influence on women and conception, the occult and actual connection of our satellite with fecundation is to this day unknown to physiology, which regards every popular practice in this reference as gross superstition. As it is useless to discuss them in detail, we may only stop at present to discuss the lunar symbology casually, to show that the said superstition belongs to the most ancient beliefs, and even to Judaism—the basis of Christianity. With the Israelites, the chief function of Jehovah was child-giving, and the esotericism of the Bible, interpreted Kabalistically, shows undeniably the Holy of Holies in the temple to be only the symbol of the womb. This is now proven beyond doubt and cavil, by the numerical reading of the Bible in general, and of Genesis especially. This idea must certainly have been borrowed by the Jews from the Egyptians and Indians, whose Holy of Holies was, and with the latter is to this day, symbolised by the King’s chamber in the Great Pyramid (see “Source of Measures”) and the Yoni symbols of exoteric Hinduism. To make the whole clearer and to show at the same time the enormous difference in the spirit of interpretation and the original meaning of the same symbols between the ancient Eastern Occultists and the Jewish Kabalists we refer the reader to Book II., “The Holy of Holies.”²⁷⁵

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STANZA VII.—Continued.

6. From the first-born (primitive, or the first man) the thread between the silent watcher and his shadow becomes more

 

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265 MAN, THE SHADOW OF HIS PROTOTYPE.

strong and radiant with every change (re-incarnation) (a). The morning sun-light has changed into noon-day glory . . . .

(a) This sentence: “The thread between the silent watcher and his shadow (man) becomes stronger”—with every re-incarnation—is another psychological mystery, that will find its explanation in Book II. For the present it will suffice to say that the “Watcher” and his “Shadows”—the latter numbering as many as there are re-incarnations for the monad—are one. The Watcher, or the divine prototype, is at the upper rung of the ladder of being; the shadow, at the lower. Withal, the Monad of every living being, unless his moral turpitude breaks the connection and runs loose and “astray into the lunar path”—to use the Occult expression—is an individual Dhyan Chohan, distinct from others, a kind of spiritual individuality of its own, during one special Manvantara. Its Primary, the Spirit (Atman) is one, of course, with Paramâtma (the one Universal Spirit), but the vehicle (Vahan) it is enshrined in, the Buddhi, is part and parcel of that Dhyan-Chohanic Essence; and it is in this that lies the mystery of that ubiquity, which was discussed a few pages back. “My Father, that is in Heaven, and I—are one,”—says the Christian Scripture; in this, at any rate, it is the faithful echo of the esoteric tenet.

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STANZA VII.—Continued

7. This is thy present wheel—said the Flame to the Spark. Thou art myself, my image and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee, and thou art my vahan (vehicle) to the day, “Be with us,” when thou shalt re-become myself and others, thyself and me (a), then the builders, having donned their first clothing, descend on radiant earth, and reign over men—who are themselves (b).

(a) The day when “the spark will re-become the Flame (man will merge into his Dhyan Chohan) myself and others, thyself and me,” as the Stanza has it—means this: In Paranirvana—when Pralaya will have reduced not only material and psychical bodies, but even the spiritual Ego(s) to their original principle—the Past, Present, and even Future

266 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Humanities, like all things, will be one and the same. Everything will have re-entered the Great Breath. In other words, everything will be “merged in Brahma” or the divine unity.

Is this annihilation, as some think? Or Atheism, as other critics—the worshippers of a personal deity and believers in an unphilosophical paradise—are inclined to suppose? Neither. It is worse than useless to return to the question of implied atheism in that which is spirituality of a most refined character. To see in Nirvana annihilation amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep—one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours—that he, too, is annihilated. The latter simile answers only to one side of the question—the most material; since re-absorption is by no means such a “dreamless sleep,” but, on the contrary, absolute existence, an unconditioned unity, or a state, to describe which human language is absolutely and hopelessly inadequate. The only approach to anything like a comprehensive conception of it can be attempted solely in the panoramic visions of the soul, through spiritual ideations of the divine monad. Nor is the individuality—nor even the essence of the personality, if any be left behind—lost, because re-absorbed. For, however limitless—from a human standpoint—the paranirvanic state, it has yet a limit in Eternity. Once reached, the same monad will re-emerge therefrom, as a still higher being, on a far higher plane, to recommence its cycle of perfected activity. The human mind cannot in its present stage of development transcend, scarcely reach this plane of thought. It totters here, on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity.

(b) The “Watchers” reign over man during the whole period of Satya Yuga and the smaller subsequent yugas, down to the beginning of the Third Root Race; after which it is the Patriarchs, Heroes, and the Manes (see Egyptian Dynasties enumerated by the priests to Solon), the incarnated Dhyanis of a lower order, up to King Menes and the human kings of other nations; all were recorded carefully. In the views of symbologists this Mythopœic Age is of course only regarded as a fairy tale. But since traditions and even Chronicles of such dynasties of divine Kings—of gods reigning over men followed by dynasties of Heroes or Giants—exist in the annals of every nation, it is difficult to understand how all the peoples under the sun, some of whom are separated by vast

267 EARTH, PEOPLED FROM HEAVEN.

oceans and belong to different hemispheres, such as the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, as well as the Chaldeans, could have worked out the same “fairy tales” in the same order of events.²⁷⁶ However, as the Secret Doctrine teaches history—which, for being esoteric and traditional, is none the less more reliable than profane history—we are as entitled to our beliefs as anyone else, whether religionist or sceptic. And that Doctrine says that the Dhyani-Buddhas of the two higher groups, namely, the “Watchers” or the “Architects,” furnished the many and various races with divine kings and leaders. It is the latter who taught humanity their arts and sciences, and the former who revealed to the incarnated Monads that had just shaken off their vehicles of the lower Kingdoms—and who had, therefore, lost every recollection of their divine origin—the great spiritual truths of the transcendental worlds. (See Book II., “Divine Dynasties.”)

Thus, as expressed in the Stanza, the Watchers descended on Earth and reigned over men—“who are themselves.” The reigning kings had finished their cycle on Earth and other worlds, in the preceding Rounds. In the future manvantaras they will have risen to higher systems than our planetary world; and it is the Elect of our Humanity, the Pioneers on the hard and difficult path of Progress, who will take the places of their predecessors. The next great Manvantara will witness the men of our own life-cycle becoming the instructors and guides of a mankind whose Monads may now yet be imprisoned—semi-conscious—in the most intellectual of the animal kingdom, while their lower principles will be animating, perhaps, the highest specimens of the Vegetable world.

Thus proceed the cycles of the septenary evolution, in Septennial nature; the Spiritual or divine; the psychic or semi-divine; the intellectual, the passional, the instinctual, or cognitional; the semi-corporeal and the purely material or physical natures. All these evolve and progress cyclically, passing from one into another, in a double, centrifugal and centripetal way, one in their ultimate essence, seven in their aspects. The lowest, of course, is the one depending upon and subservient to

 

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268 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

our five physical senses.²⁷⁷ Thus far, for individual, human, sentient, animal and vegetable life, each the microcosm of its higher macrocosm. The same for the Universe, which manifests periodically, for purposes of the collective progress of the countless lives, the outbreathings of the One Life; in order that through the Ever-Becoming, every cosmic atom in this infinite Universe, passing from the formless and the intangible, through the mixed natures of the semi-terrestrial, down to matter in full generation, and then back again, reascending at each new period higher and nearer the final goal; that each atom, we say, may reach through individual merits and efforts that plane where it re-becomes the one unconditioned All. But between the Alpha and the Omega there is the weary “Road” hedged in by thorns, that “goes down first, then—

Winds up hill all the way
Yes, to the very end. . . . .”

Starting upon the long journey immaculate; descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested Space—the Pilgrim, having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective Humanity. This, he has made in his own image. In order to progress upwards and homewards, the “God” has now to ascend the weary uphill path of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom of self-conscious existence. Like Visvakarman he has to sacrifice himself to himself in order to redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the many into the One Life. Then he ascends into heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible absolute Being and Bliss of Para-nirvana, he reigns unconditionally, and whence he will re-descend again at the next “coming,” which one portion of humanity expects in its dead-letter sense as the second advent, and the other as the last “Kalki Avatar.”

 

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269 THE FIRST CHAPTER OF CREATION.‌

SUMMING UP.

“The History of Creation and of this world from its beginning up to the present time is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.” (T. Subba Row, Theosophist, 1881.)

The first of these Seven chapters has been attempted and is now finished. However incomplete and feeble as an exposition, it is, at any rate, an approximation—using the word in a mathematical sense—to that which is the oldest basis for all the subsequent Cosmogonies. The attempt to render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically recurring Law—impressed upon the plastic minds of the first races endowed with Consciousness by those who reflected the same from the Universal Mind—is daring, for no human language, save the Sanskrit—which is that of the Gods—can do so with any degree of adequacy. But the failures in this work must be forgiven for the sake of the motive.

As a whole, neither the foregoing nor what follows can be found in full anywhere. It is not taught in any of the six Indian schools of philosophy, for it pertains to their synthesis—the seventh, which is the Occult doctrine. It is not traced on any crumbling papyrus of Egypt, nor is it any longer graven on Assyrian tile or granite wall. The Books of the Vedanta (the last word of human knowledge) give out but the metaphysical aspect of this world-Cosmogony; and their priceless thesaurus, the Upanishads—Upa-ni-shad being a compound word meaning “the conquest of ignorance by the revelation of secret, spiritual knowledge”—require now the additional possession of a Master-key to enable the student to get at their full meaning. The reason for this I venture to state here as I learned it from a Master.

The name, “Upanishads,” is usually translated “esoteric doctrine.’ These treatises form part of the Sruti or “revealed knowledge,” Revelation, in short, and are generally attached to the Brahmana

270 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

portion of the Vedas,²⁷⁸ as their third division. There are over 150 Upanishads enumerated by, and known to, Orientalists, who credit the oldest with being written probably about 600 years b.c.; but of genuine texts there does not exist a fifth of the number. The Upanishads are to the Vedas what the Kabala is to the Jewish Bible. They treat of and expound the secret and mystic meaning of the Vedic texts. They speak of the origin of the Universe, the nature of Deity, and of Spirit and Soul, as also of the metaphysical connection of mind and matter. In a few words: They contain the beginning and the end of all human knowledge, but they have now ceased to reveal it, since the day of Buddha. If it were otherwise, the Upanishads could not be called esoteric, since they are now openly attached to the Sacred Brahmanical books, which have, in our present age, become accessible even to the Mlechchhas (out-castes) and the European Orientalists. One thing in them—and this in all the Upanishads—invariably and constantly points to their ancient origin, and proves (a) that they were written, in some of their portions, before the caste system became the tyrannical institution which it still is; and (b) that half of their contents have been eliminated, while some of them were rewritten and abridged. “The great Teachers of the higher Knowledge and the Brahmans are continually represented as going to Kshatriya (military caste) kings to become their pupils.” As Cowell pertinently remarks, the Upanishads “breathe an entirely different spirit” (from other Brahmanical writings), “a freedom of thought unknown in any earlier work except in the Rig Veda hymns themselves.” The second fact is explained by a tradition recorded in one of the MSS. on Buddha’s life. It says that the Upanishads were originally attached to their Brahmanas after the beginning of a reform, which led to the exclusiveness of the present caste system among the Brahmins, a few centuries after the invasion of India by the “twice-born.” They were complete in those days, and were used for the instruction of the chelas who were preparing for their initiation.

 

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271 OCCULTISM IN THE UPANISHADS.

This lasted so long as the Vedas and the Brahmanas remained in the sole and exclusive keeping of the temple-Brahmins—while no one else had the right to study or even read them outside of the sacred caste. Then came Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu. After learning the whole of the Brahmanical wisdom in the Rahasya or the Upanishads, and finding that the teachings differed little, if at all, from those of the “Teachers of Life” inhabiting the snowy ranges of the Himalaya,²⁷⁹ the Disciple of the Brahmins, feeling indignant because the sacred wisdom was thus withheld from all but the Brahmins, determined to save the whole world by popularizing it. Then it was that the Brahmins, seeing that their sacred knowledge and Occult wisdom was falling into the hands of the “Mlechchhas,” abridged the texts of the Upanishads, originally containing thrice the matter of the Vedas and the Brahmanas together, without altering, however, one word of the texts. They simply detached from the MSS. the most important portions containing the last word of the Mystery of Being. The key to the Brahmanical secret code remained henceforth with the initiates alone, and the Brahmins were thus in a position to publicly deny the correctness of Buddha’s teaching by appealing to their Upanishads, silenced for ever on the chief questions. Such is the esoteric tradition beyond the Himalayas.

Sri Sankaracharya, the greatest Initiate living in the historical ages, wrote many a Bhâshya on the Upanishads. But his original treatises, as there are reasons to suppose, have not yet fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for they are too jealously preserved in his maths (monasteries, mathams). And there are still weightier reasons to believe that the priceless Bhâshyas (Commentaries) on the esoteric doctrine of the Brahmins, by their greatest expounder, will remain for ages yet a dead letter to most of the Hindus, except the Smârtava Brahmins. This sect, founded by Sankaracharya, (which is still very powerful in Southern India) is now almost the only one to produce students who have preserved sufficient knowledge to comprehend the

 

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272 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dead letter of the Bhashyas. The reason of this is that they alone, I am informed, have occasionally real Initiates at their head in their mathams, as for instance, in the “Sringa-giri,” in the Western Ghauts of Mysore. On the other hand, there is no sect in that desperately exclusive caste of the Brahmins, more exclusive than is the Smârtava; and the reticence of its followers to say what they may know of the Occult sciences and the esoteric doctrine, is only equalled by their pride and learning.

Therefore the writer of the present statement must be prepared beforehand to meet with great opposition and even the denial of such statements as are brought forward in this work. Not that any claim to infallibility, or to perfect correctness in every detail of all that which is herein said, was ever put forward. Facts are there, and they can hardly be denied. But, owing to the intrinsic difficulties of the subjects treated, and the almost insurmountable limitations of the English tongue (as of all other European languages) to express certain ideas, it is more than probable that the writer has failed to present the explanations in the best and in the clearest form; yet all that could be done was done under every adverse circumstance, and this is the utmost that can be expected of any writer.

Let us recapitulate and show, by the vastness of the subjects expounded, how difficult, if not impossible, it is to do them full justice.

(1.) The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate system: e.g., even in the exotericism of the Purânas. But such is the mysterious power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane, however learned, would have perceived but the external work of form. But modern science believes not in the “soul of things,” and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony. It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals. That it is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the

273 THE PITH AND MARROW OF OCCULTISM.

traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity. That for long ages, the “Wise Men” of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last cataclysm and shifting of continents, had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree. No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions—so obtained as to stand as independent evidence—of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.

(2.) The fundamental Law in that system, the central point from which all emerged, around and toward which all gravitates, and upon which is hung the philosophy of the rest, is the One homogeneous divine Substance-Principle, the one radical cause.

. . . “Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been led
From cause to cause to nature’s secret head,
And found that one first Principle must be. . . .”

It is called “Substance-Principle,” for it becomes “substance” on the plane of the manifested Universe, an illusion, while it remains a “principle” in the beginningless and endless abstract, visible and invisible Space. It is the omnipresent Reality: impersonal, because it contains all and everything. Its impersonality is the fundamental conception of the System. It is latent in every atom in the Universe, and is the Universe itself. (See in chapters on Symbolism, “Primordial Substance, and Divine Thought.”)

(3.) The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence. To call it “essence,” however, is to sin against the very spirit of the philosophy. For though the noun may be derived in this case from the verb esse, “to be,” yet It cannot be identified with a being of any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. It is best described as neither Spirit nor matter, but both. “Parabrahmam and Mulaprakriti” are One, in reality, yet two in the Universal conception of the manifested, even in the conception of the One Logos, its first manifestation, to which, as the able lecturer in the “Notes on the Bhagavadgita” shows, It appears from the objective standpoint of

274 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the One Logos as Mulaprakriti and not as Parabrahmam; as its veil and not the one Reality hidden behind, which is unconditioned and absolute.

(4.) The Universe is called, with everything in it, Maya, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire-fly to that of the Sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the One, and the changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever-changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no better than a will-o’-the-wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

(5.) Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs—which we can recognise—of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as there is no “Blind” or “Unconscious” Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts; it resembles therein the mediæval Noumenalists, for whom it was the Universals that were the realities and the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy.

(6.) The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man—the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm—is the living witness to this Universal Law and to the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man’s external body can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who—whether we give to them one name or another, and call them Dhyan-Chohans or Angels—are “messengers” in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their

275 THE NATURE OF THE CELESTIAL MEN.

respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence; and to call them all pure Spirits without any of the earthly alloy “which time is wont to prey upon” is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either was, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming cycle (Manvantara). They are perfected, when not incipient, men; and differ morally from the terrestrial human beings on their higher (less material) spheres, only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality and of the human emotional nature—two purely earthly characteristics. The former, or the “perfected,” have become free from those feelings, because (a) they have no longer fleshly bodies—an ever-numbing weight on the Soul; and (b) the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by maya than man can ever be, unless he is an adept who keeps his two personalities—the spiritual and the physical—entirely separated. The incipient monads, having never had terrestrial bodies yet, can have no sense of personality or ego-ism. That which is meant by “personality,” being a limitation and a relation, or, as defined by Coleridge, “individuality existing in itself but with a nature as a ground,” the term cannot of course be applied to non-human entities; but, as a fact insisted upon by generations of Seers, none of these Beings, high or low, have either individuality or personality as separate Entities, i.e., they have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, “I am myself and no one else”; in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the characteristic of their respective hierarchies, not of their units; and these characteristics vary only with the degree of the plane to which those hierarchies belong: the nearer to the region of Homogeneity and the One Divine, the purer and the less accentuated that individuality in the Hierarchy. They are finite, in all respects, with the exception of their higher principles—the immortal sparks reflecting the universal divine flame—individualized and separated only on the spheres of Illusion by a differentiation as illusive as the rest. They are “Living Ones,” because they are the streams projected on the Kosmic screen of illusion from the absolute life; beings in whom life cannot become extinct, before the fire of ignorance is extinct in those who sense these “Lives.” Having sprung into being under the quickening influence of the uncreated beam, the reflection of the great Central Sun that

276 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

radiates on the shores of the river of Life, it is the inner principle in them which belongs to the waters of immortality, while its differentiated clothing is as perishable as man’s body. Therefore Young was right in saying that

“Angels are men of a superior kind”

and no more. They are neither “ministering” nor “protecting” angels; nor are they “Harbingers of the Most High” still less the “Messengers of wrath” of any God such as man’s fancy has created. To appeal to their protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as much as man himself is, the slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Kosmic law. The reason for it is evident. Having no elements of personality in their essence they can have no personal qualities, such as attributed by men, in their exoteric religions, to their anthropomorphic God—a jealous and exclusive God who rejoices and feels wrathful, is pleased with sacrifice, and is more despotic in his vanity than any finite foolish man. Man, as shown in Book II., being a compound of the essences of all those celestial Hierarchies may succeed in making himself, as such, superior, in one sense, to any hierarchy or class, or even combination of them. “Man can neither propitiate nor command the Devas,” it is said. But, by paralyzing his lower personality, and arriving thereby at the full knowledge of the non-separateness of his higher Self from the One absolute Self, man can, even during his terrestrial life, become as “One of Us.” Thus it is, by eating of the fruit of knowledge which dispels ignorance, that man becomes like one of the Elohim or the Dhyanis; and once on their plane the Spirit of Solidarity and perfect Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him and protect him in every particular.

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. The main impediment before the Spiritualist which hinders him from believing in the same, while preserving a blind belief in the “Spirits” of the Departed, is the general ignorance of all, except some Occultists and Kabalists, about the true essence and nature of matter. It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead.

277 MANY BODIES BUT ONE SOUL.

It is on the right comprehension of the primeval Evolution of Spirit-Matter and its real essence that the student has to depend for the further elucidation in his mind of the Occult Cosmogony, and for the only sure clue which can guide his subsequent studies.

In sober truth, as just shown, every “Spirit” so-called is either a disembodied or a future man. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyan Chohan) down to the last conscious “Builder” (the inferior class of Spiritual Entities), all such are men, having lived æons ago, in other Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres; so the inferior, semi-intelligent and non-intelligent Elementals—are all future men. That fact alone—that a Spirit is endowed with intelligence—is a proof to the Occultist that that Being must have been a man, and acquired his knowledge and intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole finite Kosmos which hath no bounds, and which people call Space, considered independently of anything contained in it. But the first differentiation of its refl in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or Intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually. This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact, in Esoteric philosophy, and a very apparent one too.

The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the “survival of the fittest,” though so cruel in their immediate action—all are working toward the grand end. The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called “unconscious Nature”²⁸⁰ is in reality an aggregate of forces mani-

 

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278 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

pulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) guided by High Planetary Spirits, (Dhyan Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested logos, and constitutes at one and the same time the mind of the Universe and its immutable law.

Three distinct representations of the Universe in its three distinct aspects are impressed upon our thought by the esoteric philosophy: the pre-existing (evolved from) the ever-existing; and the phenomenal—the world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great mystery and drama of life known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like the object placed behind the white screen upon which are thrown the Chinese shadows, called forth by the magic lantern. The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of evolution are pulled by the unseen hands; and men and things are thus but the reflections, on the white field, of the realities behind the snares of Mahamaya, or the great Illusion. This was taught in every philosophy, in every religion, ante as well as post diluvian, in India and Chaldea, by the Chinese as by the Grecian Sages. In the former countries these three Universes were allegorized, in exoteric teachings, by the three trinities emanating from the Central eternal germ and forming with it a Supreme Unity: the initial, the manifested, and the Creative Triad, or the three in One. The last is but the symbol, in its concrete expression, of the first ideal two. Hence Esoteric philosophy passes over the necessarianism of this purely metaphysical conception, and calls the first one, only, the Ever Existing. This is the view of every one of the six great schools of Indian philosophy—the six principles of that unit body of Wisdom of which the “gnosis,” the hidden knowledge, is the seventh.

The writer hopes that, superficially handled as may be the comments on the Seven Stanzas, enough has been given in this cosmogonic portion of the work to show Archaic teachings to be more scientific (in the modern sense of the word) on their very face, than any other ancient Scriptures left to be regarded and judged on their exoteric aspect. Since, however, as confessed before, this work withholds far more than it gives out, the student is invited to use his own intuitions. Our chief care is to elucidate that which has already been given out, and, to our regret, very incorrectly at times; to supplement the knowledge hinted at—whenever and wherever possible—by addi-

279 HERMES, OR ARISTOTLE?

tional matter; and to bulwark our doctrines against the too strong attacks of modern Sectarianism, and more especially against those of our latter-day Materialism, very often miscalled Science, whereas, in reality, the words “Scientists” and “Sciolists” ought alone to bear the responsibility for the many illogical theories offered to the world. In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting everything that emanates from “authorities,” and feeling it to be its duty to regard every dictum coming from a man of Science as a proven fact—the public, we say, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from “heathen” sources. Therefore, as materialistic Scientists can be fought solely with their own weapons—those of controversy and argument—an Addendum is added to every Book contrasting our respective views and showing how even great authorities may often err. We believe that this can be done effectually by showing the weak points of our opponents, and by proving their too frequent sophisms—made to pass for scientific dicta—to be incorrect. We hold to Hermes and his “Wisdom”—in its universal character; they—to Aristotle as against intuition and the experience of the ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As Hermes says, “Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge (gyi) is the end of sense”—i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect; thus emphasizing the contrast between the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses and mind (manas), and the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul—Buddhi.

Whatever may be the destiny of these actual writings in a remote future, we hope to have proven so far the following facts:

(1.) The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism, except in the Hindu sense of the word nastika, or the rejection of idols, including every anthropomorphic god. In this sense every Occultist is a Nastika.

(2.) It admits a Logos or a collective “Creator” of the Universe; a Demi-urgos—in the sense implied when one speaks of an “Architect” as the “Creator” of an edifice, whereas that Architect has never touched one stone of it, but, while furnishing the plan, left all the manual labour to the masons; in our case the plan was furnished by the Ideation of the Universe, and the constructive labour was left to the Hosts of intelligent Powers and Forces. But that Demiurgos is no

280 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

personal deity,—i.e., an imperfect extra-cosmic god,—but only the aggregate of the Dhyan-Chohans and the other forces.

As to the latter—

(3.) They are dual in their character; being composed of (a) the irrational brute energy, inherent in matter, and (b) the intelligent soul or cosmic consciousness which directs and guides that energy, and which is the Dhyan-Chohanic thought reflecting the Ideation of the Universal mind. This results in a perpetual series of physical manifestations and moral effects on Earth, during manvantaric periods, the whole being subservient to Karma. As that process is not always perfect; and since, however many proofs it may exhibit of a guiding intelligence behind the veil, it still shows gaps and flaws, and even results very often in evident failures—therefore, neither the collective Host (Demiurgos), nor any of the working powers individually, are proper subjects for divine honours or worship. All are entitled to the grateful reverence of Humanity, however, and man ought to be ever striving to help the divine evolution of Ideas, by becoming to the best of his ability a co-worker with nature in the cyclic task. The ever unknowable and incognizable Karana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have its shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our heart—invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through “the still small voice” of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before it, ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls²⁸¹; making their spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial victims to the Presence. (See Part II., “On the Hidden Deity.”)

(4.) Matter is Eternal. It is the Upadhi (the physical basis) for the One infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations. Therefore, the Esotericists maintain that there is no inorganic or dead matter in nature, the distinction between the two made by Science being as unfounded as it is arbitrary and devoid of reason.

 

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281 MATTER IS THE SHADOW OF SPIRIT.

Whatever Science may think, however—and exact Science is a fickle dame, as we all know by experience—Occultism knows and teaches differently, from time immemorial—from Manu and Hermes down to Paracelsus and his successors.

Thus Hermes, the thrice great Trismegistus, says: “Oh, my son, matter becomes; formerly it was; for matter is the vehicle of becoming.²⁸² Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity. Having been endowed with the germs of becoming, matter (objective) is brought into birth, for the creative force fashions it according to the ideal forms. Matter not yet engendered had no form; it becomes when it is put into operation.” (The Definitions of Asclepios, p. 134, “Virgin of the World.”)

“Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. . . . There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.” (Paracelsus, “Philosophia ad Athenienses,” F. Hartmann’s translations, p. 44.)

(5.) The Universe was evolved out of its ideal plan, upheld through Eternity in the unconsciousness of that which the Vedantins call Parabrahm. This is practically identical with the conclusions of the highest Western Philosophy—“the innate, eternal, and self-existing Ideas” of Plato, now reflected by Von Hartmann. The “unknowable” of Herbert Spencer bears only a faint resemblance to that transcendental Reality believed in by Occultists, often appearing merely a personification of a “force behind phenomena”—an infinite and eternal Energy

 

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282 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

from which all things proceed, while the author of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” has come (in this respect only) as near to a solution of the great Mystery as mortal man can. Few were those, whether in ancient or mediæval philosophy, who have dared to approach the subject or even hint at it. Paracelsus mentions it inferentially. His ideas are admirably synthesized by Dr. F. Hartmann, F.T.S., in his “Life of Paracelsus.”

All the Christian Kabalists understood well the Eastern root idea: The active Power, the “Perpetual motion of the great Breath” only awakens Kosmos at the dawn of every new Period, setting it into motion by means of the two contrary Forces,²⁸³ and thus causing it to become objective on the plane of Illusion. In other words, that dual motion transfers Kosmos from the plane of the Eternal Ideal into that of finite manifestation, or from the Noumenal to the phenomenal plane. Everything that is, was, and will be, eternally is, even the countless forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective, not in their ideal Form. They existed as Ideas, in the Eternity,²⁸⁴ and, when they pass away, will exist as reflections. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone has ever been created, and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced “becoming,” i.e., objectivising into its present materiality, or expanding from within outwards, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance. Therefore our human forms have existed in the Eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes; according to which models, the Spiritual Beings (or Gods) whose duty it was to bring them into objective being and terrestrial Life, evolved the protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from their own essence. After which, when this human Upadhi, or basic mould was ready, the natural terrestrial Forces began to work on those supersensuous moulds which contained, besides their own, the elements of all the past vegetable and future animal forms of this globe in them. Therefore, man’s outward shell passed through every vegetable and animal body before it assumed the human shape. As this will be fully

 

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283 PARACELSUS ANTICIPATED TYNDALL.

described in Book II., with the Commentaries thereupon, there is no need to say more of it here.

According to the Hermetico-Kabalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster—the ancestor of the just-born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes in chemistry—or primordial protomateria that evolved out of itself the Kosmos.

“When Evolution took place the Yliaster divided itself. . . . melted and dissolved, developing from within itself the Ideos or Chaos, called respectively Mysterium magnum, Iliados, Limbus Major, or Primordial Matter. This Primordial essence is of a monistic nature, and manifests itself not only as vital activity, a spiritual force, an invisible, incomprehensible, and indescribable power, but also as vital matter of which the substance of living beings consists.” In this Ideos of primordial matter, or the proto-ilos—which is the matrix of all created things—is contained the substance from which everything is formed. It is the Chaos . . . out of which the Macrocosm, and, later on, by evolution and division in Mysteria Specialia,²⁸⁵ each separate being, came into existence. “All things and all elementary substances were contained in it in potentiâ but not in actu” —which makes the translator, Dr. F. Hartmann, justly observe that “it seems that Paracelsus anticipated the modern discovery of the ‘potency of matter’ three hundred years ago” (p. 42).

This Magnus Limbus, then, or Yliaster of Paracelsus, is simply our old friend “Father-Mother,” within, before it appeared in Space, of the second and other Stanzas. It is the universal matrix of Kosmos, personified in the dual character of Macro- and Microcosm (or the Universe and our Globe)²⁸⁶ by Aditi-Prakriti, the Spiritual and the physical nature. For we find it explained in Paracelsus that “the Magnus Limbus is the nursery out of which all creatures have grown, in the same sense as a tree grows out of a small seed; with the difference, however, that the great Limbus takes its origin from the Word, while the Limbus minor (the terrestrial seed or sperm) takes it from the earth.

 

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284 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The great Limbus is the seed out of which all beings have come, and the little Limbus is each ultimate being that reproduces its form, and that has itself been produced by the ‘great.’ The latter possesses all the qualifications of the great one, in the same sense as a son has an organization similar to that of his father.” (See Comment. Book II. para. iii.) . . . “As Yliaster dissolved, Ares, the dividing, differentiating, and individualising power (Fohat, another old friend,) . . . began to act. All production took place in consequence of separation. There were produced out of the Ideos, the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take place in a material mode, or by simple separation,” but by spiritual and dynamical, not even complex, combinations—e.g., mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination—just as fire may come out of a pebble, or a tree out of a seed, although there is originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed. Spirit is living, and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit (Prakriti Purusha) (?) produce all things, but they are essentially one and not two. . . . The elements too, have each one its own Yliaster, because all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fount. But as from the seed grow the roots with their fibres, and after that the stalk with its branches and leaves, and lastly the flowers and seeds; likewise all beings were born from the elements, and consist of elementary substances out of which other forms may come into existence, bearing the characteristics of their parents.” (“This doctrine, preached 300 years ago,” remarks the translator, “is identical with the one that has revolutionized modern thought, after having been put into new shape and elaborated by Darwin. It was still more elaborated by Kapila in the Sankhya philosophy”). . . . The elements as the mothers of all creatures are of an invisible, spiritual nature, and have souls.²⁸⁷ They all spring from the “Mysterium Magnum.” (Philosophia ad Athenienses.)

Compare this with Vishnu Purâna.

“From Pradhâna (primordial substance) presided over by Kshetrajna (embodied Spirit?) proceeds the evolution of those qualities. . . . From the great Principle Mahat (Universal Intellect, or mind) . . . proceeds

 

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285 HERMES CHRISTIANIZED.

the origin of the subtle elements and from these the organs of sense . . .” (Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 1:2:33, 34, 36.).

Thus it may be shown that all the fundamental truths of nature were universal in antiquity, and that the basic ideas upon spirit, matter, and the universe, or upon God, Substance, and man, were identical. Taking the two most ancient religious philosophies on the globe, Hinduism and Hermetism, from the scriptures of India and Egypt, the identity of the two is easily recognisable.

This becomes apparent to one who reads the latest translation and rendering of the “Hermetic Fragments” just mentioned, by our late lamented friend, Dr. Anna Kingsford. Disfigured and tortured as these have been in their passage through Sectarian Greek and Christian hands, the translator has most ably and intuitionally seized the weak points and tried to remedy them by means of explanations and footnotes. And she says: . . . . “The creation of the visible world by the ‘working gods’ or Titans, as agents of the Supreme God,²⁸⁸ is a thoroughly Hermetic idea, recognisable in all religious systems, and in accordance with modern scientific research (?), which shows us everywhere the Divine power operating through natural Forces.”

“That Universal Being, that contains all, and which is all, put into motion the Soul and the World, all that nature comprises, says Hermes. In the manifold unity of universal life, the innumerable individualities distinguished by their variations, are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everything proceeds from Unity.” (Asclepios, Part I.)

“God is not a mind, but the cause that the mind is; not a spirit, but the cause that the Spirit is; not light, but the cause that the Light is.” (Divine Pymander, Book IX., v. 64. )

The above shows plainly that “Divine Pymander,” however much distorted in some passages by Christian “smoothing,” was nevertheless written by a philosopher, while most of the so-called “hermetic Fragments” are the production of sectarian pagans with a tendency towards an anthropomorphic Supreme Being. Yet both are the echo of the Esoteric philosophy and the Hindu Purânas.

Compare two invocations, one to the Hermetic “Supreme All,” the

 

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286 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

other to the “Supreme All” of the later Aryans. Says a Hermetic Fragment cited by Suidas (see Mrs. Kingsford’s “The Virgin of the World”):—

“I adjure thee, Heaven, holy work of the great God; I adjure thee, Voice of the Father, uttered in the beginning when the universal world was framed; I adjure thee by the word, only Son of the Father who upholds all things; be favourable, be favourable.”

This just preceded by the following: “Thus the Ideal Light was before the Ideal Light, and the luminous Intelligence of Intelligence was always, and its unity was nothing else than the Spirit enveloping the Universe. Out of whom is neither God nor Angels, nor any other essentials, for He (It?) is the Lord of all things and the power and the Light; and all depends on Him (It) and is in Him (It), etc.” (Fragments of the writings of Hermes to Ammon.)

This is contradicted by the very same Trismegistos, who is made to say: “To speak of God is impossible. For corporeal cannot express the incorporeal. . . . . That which has not any body nor appearance, nor form, nor matter, cannot be apprehended by sense. I understand, Tatios, I understand, that which it is impossible to define—that is God.” (Physical Eclogues, Florilegium of Stobæus.)

The contradiction between the two passages is evident; and this shows (a) that Hermes was a generic nom-de-plume used by a series of generations of mystics of every shade, and (b) that a great discernment has to be used before accepting a Fragment as esoteric teaching only because it is undeniably ancient. Let us now compare the above with a like invocation in the Hindu Scriptures—undoubtedly as old, if not far older. Here it is Parâsara, the Aryan “Hermes” who instructs Maitreya, the Indian Asclepios, and calls upon Vishnu in his triple hypostasis.

“Glory to the unchangeable, holy, eternal Supreme Vishnu, of one universal nature, the mighty over all; to him who is Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Sankara (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva), the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer of the world; to Vasudeva, the liberator (of his worshippers); to him whose essence is both single and manifold; who is both subtle and corporeal, indiscrete and discrete; to Vishnu the cause of final emancipation, the cause of the creation, existence, the

287 ALONE THE ETERNAL IS REST.

end of the world; who is the root of the world, and who consists of the world.” (Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 1:2:1-3.)

This is a grand invocation, full of philosophical meaning underlying it; but, for the profane masses, as suggestive as is the first of an anthropomorphic Being. We must respect the feeling that dictated both; but we cannot help finding it in full disharmony with its inner meaning, even with that which is found in the same Hermetic treatise where it is said:

“Reality is not upon the earth, my son, and it cannot be thereon. . . . Nothing on earth is real, there are only appearances. . . He (man) is not real, my son, as man. The real consists solely in itself and remains what it is. . . Man is transient, therefore he is not real, he is but appearance, and appearance is the supreme illusion.

Tatios: Then the celestial bodies themselves are not real, my father, since they also vary?

Trismegistos: That which is subject to birth and to change is not real. . . . . There is in them a certain falsity, seeing that they too are variable. . . . .

Tatios: And what then is the primordial Reality?

Trismeg.: That which is one and alone, O Tatios; That which is not made of matter, nor in any body. Which has neither colour nor form, which changes not nor is transmitted but which always is.”

This is quite consistent with the Vedantic teaching. The leading thought is Occult; and many are the passages in the Hermetic Fragments that belong bodily to the Secret Doctrine.

The latter teaches that the whole universe is ruled by intelligent and semi-intelligent Forces and Powers, as stated from the very beginning. Christian Theology admits and even enforces belief in such, but makes an arbitrary division and refers to them as “Angels” and “Devils.” Science denies the existence of such, and ridicules the very idea. Spiritualists believe in the Spirits of the Dead, and, outside these, deny entirely any other kind or class of invisible beings. The Occultists and Kabalists are thus the only rational expounders of the ancient traditions, which have now culminated in dogmatic faith on the one hand, and dogmatic denials on the other. For, both belief and unbelief embrace but one small corner each of the infinite horizons of spiritual and physical manifestations; and thus both are right from

288 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

their respective standpoints, and both are wrong in believing that they can circumscribe the whole within their own special and narrow barriers; for—they can never do so. In this respect Science, Theology, and even Spiritualism show little more wisdom than the ostrich does, when it hides its head in the sand at its feet, feeling sure that there can be thus nothing beyond its own point of observation and the limited area occupied by its foolish head.

As the only works now extant upon the subject under consideration within reach of the profane of the Western “civilized” races are the above-mentioned Hermetic Books, or rather Hermetic Fragments, we may contrast them in the present case with the teachings of Esoteric philosophy. To quote for this purpose from any other would be useless, since the public knows nothing of the Chaldean works which are translated into Arabic and preserved by some Sufi initiates. Therefore the “Definitions of Asclepios,” as lately compiled and glossed by Mrs. Kingsford, F.T.S., some of which sayings are in remarkable agreement with the Esoteric Eastern doctrine, have to be resorted to for comparison. Though not a few passages show a strong impression of some later Christian hand, yet on the whole the characteristics of the genii²⁸⁹ and gods are those of eastern teachings, while concerning other things there are passages which differ widely in our doctrines. The following are a few:

 

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289 A FEW OCCULT APHORISMS.

Extracts from a private commentary,²⁹⁰ hitherto secret:—

(xvii.) “The Initial Existence in the first twilight of the Maha-Manwantara (after the Maha-Pralaya that follows every age of Brahmâ) is a conscious spiritual quality. In the manifested worlds (solar systems) it is, in its objective subjectivity, like the film from a Divine Breath to the gaze of the entranced seer. It spreads as it issues from Laya²⁹¹ throughout infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid It is on the seventh plane, and in its seventh state in our planetary world.²⁹²

(xviii.) “It is Substance to our spiritual sight. It cannot be called so by men in their waking state; therefore they have named it in their ignorance ‘God-Spirit.’

(xix.) “It exists everywhere and forms the first Upadhi (foundation) on which our World (solar system) is built. Outside the latter it is to be found in its pristine purity only between (the solar systems or) the Stars of the Universe, the worlds already formed or forming; those in Laya resting meanwhile in its bosom. As its substance is of a different kind from that known on earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing through it, believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space. There is not one finger’s breath (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless (Universe). . . . .

(xx.) “Matter or Substance is septenary within our World, as it is so beyond it. Moreover, each of its states or principles is graduated into seven degrees of density. Sûrya (the Sun), in its visible reflection, exhibits the first, or lowest state of the seventh, the highest state of the Universal presence, the pure of the pure, the first manifested Breath of the ever Unmanifested sat (Be-ness). All the Central physical or objective Suns are in their substance the lowest state of the first Principle of the breath. Nor are any of these any more than the reflections of their primaries which are concealed from the gaze of all but the Dhyan Chohans, whose Corporeal substance belongs to the fifth division of the seventh Principle of the Mother substance, and is,

 

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290 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

therefore, four degrees higher than the solar reflected substance. As there are seven Dhâtu (principal substances in the human body) so there are seven Forces in Man and in all Nature.

(xxi.) “The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance.²⁹³ It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe. It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in action the atoms in their functional duties, and the focus within which they again meet in their seventh essence every eleventh year. He who tells thee he has seen the sun, laugh at him²⁹⁴ as if he had said that the sun moves really onward on his diurnal path . . . .

(xxiii.) “It is on account of his septenary nature that the Sun is spoken of by the ancients as one who is driven by seven horses equal to the metres of the Vedas; or, again, that, though he is identified with the seven “Gaina” (classes of being) in his orb, he is distinct from them,²⁹⁵ as he is, indeed; as also that he has seven rays, as indeed he has . . . .

(xxv.) “The Seven Beings in the Sun are the Seven Holy Ones, Self-born from the inherent power in the matrix of Mother substance. It is they who send the Seven Principal Forces, called rays, which at the beginning of Pralaya will centre into seven new Suns for the next Manvantara. The energy from which they spring into conscious existence in every Sun, is what some people call Vishnu (see foot-note below), which is the Breath of the absoluteness.

We call it the One manifested life—itself a reflection of the Absolute . . . . .

(xxvi.) “The latter must never be mentioned in words or speech lest it should take away some of our spiritual energies that aspire towards its state, gravitating ever onward unto it spiritually, as the whole physical universe gravitates towards its manifested centre—cosmically.

(xxvii.) “The former—the Initial existence—which may be called while in

 

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291 OCCULT APHORISMS.

this state of being the One Life, is, as explained, a Film for creative or formative purposes. It manifests in seven states, which, with their septenary subdivisions, are the Forty-nine Fires²⁹⁶ mentioned in sacred books . . . . . .

(xxix.) “The first is the . . . . ‘Mother’ (prima materia). Separating itself into its primary seven states, it proceeds down cyclically; when²⁹⁷ having consolidated itself in its last principle as gross matter, it revolves around itself and informs, with the seventh emanation of the last, the first and the lowest element (the Serpent biting its own tail). In a hierarchy, or order of being, the seventh emanation of her last principle is:—

(a) In the mineral, the spark that lies latent in it, and is called to its evanescent being by the Positive awakening the Negative (and so forth) . . . .

(b) In the plant it is that vital and intelligent Force which informs the seed and develops it into the blade of grass, or the root and sapling. It is the germ which becomes the Upadhi of the seven principles of the thing it resides in, shooting them out as the latter grows and develops.

(c) In every animal it does the same. It is its life principle and vital power; its instinct and qualities; its characteristics and special idiosyncrasies . . . .

(d) To man, it gives all that it bestows on all the rest of the manifested units in nature; but develops, furthermore, the reflection of all its Forty-nine Fires in him. Each of his seven principles is an heir in full to, and a partaker of, the seven principles of the “great Mother.” The breath of her first principle is his spirit (Atma). Her second principle is Buddhi (soul). We call it, erroneously, the seventh. The third furnishes him with (a) the brain stuff on the physical plane, and (b) with the Mind that moves it—[which is the human soul.—h. p. b.]—according to his organic capacities.

(e) It is the guiding Force in the Cosmic and terrestrial elements. It resides in the Fire provoked out of its latent into active being; for the whole of the seven subdivisions of the * * * principle reside in the terrestrial Fire. It whirls in the breeze, blows with the hurricane, and sets the air in motion, which element participates in one of its principles also. Proceeding cyclically, it regulates the motion

 

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292 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the water, attracts and repels the waves²⁹⁸ according to fixed laws of which its seventh principle is the informing soul.

(f) Its four higher principles contain the germ that develops into the Cosmic Gods; its three lower ones breed the lives of the Elements (Elementals).

(g) In our Solar world, the One Existence is Heaven and the Earth, the Root and the flower, the Action and the Thought. It is in the Sun, and is as present in the glow-worm. Not an atom can escape it. Therefore, the ancient Sages have wisely called it the manifested God in Nature. . . .”

It may be interesting, in this connection, to remind the reader of what Mr. Subba Row said of the Forces—mystically defined. See “Five Years of Theosophy” and “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac.” Thus he says:

“Kanyâ (the sixth sign of the Zodiac, or Virgo) means a Virgin, and represents Sakti or Mahamaya. The sign . . . is the 6th Rasi or division, and indicates that there are six primary forces in Nature (synthesized by the Seventh)” . . . These Sakti stand as follows:

(1.) Parasakti. Literally the great or Supreme Force or power. It means and includes the powers of light and heat.

(2.) Jnanasakti. . . . The power of intellect, of real Wisdom or Knowledge. It has two aspects:

The following are some of its manifestations when placed under the influence or control of material conditions. (a) The power of the mind in interpreting our sensations. (b) Its power in recalling past ideas (memory) and raising future expectation. (c) Its power as exhibited in what are called by modern psychologists “the laws of association,” which enables it to form persisting connections between various groups of sensations and possibilities of sensations, and thus generate the notion or idea of an external object. (d) Its power in connecting our ideas together by the mysterious link of memory, and thus generating the notion of self or individuality; some of its manifestations when liberated from the bonds of matter are—(a) Clairvoyance, (b) Psychometry.

(3.) Itchasakti—the power of the Will. Its most ordinary manifesta-

 

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293 THE SEVEN POWERS.

tion is the generation of certain nerve currents which set in motion such muscles as are required for the accomplishment of the desired object.

(4.) 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 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 and Kriyasakti.

(5.) Kundalini Sakti. The power or Force which moves in a curved path. It is the Universal life-Principle manifesting everywhere in nature. This force includes the two great forces of attraction and repulsion. Electricity and magnetism are but manifestations of it. This is the power which brings about that “continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations” which is the essence of life according to Herbert Spencer, and that “continuous adjustment of external relations to internal relations” which is the basis of transmigration of souls, punar janman (re-birth) in the doctrines of the ancient Hindu philosophers. A Yogi must thoroughly subjugate this power before he can attain Moksham. . . .

(6.) Mantrika-sakti. The force or power of letters, speech or music. The Mantra Shastra has for its subject-matter this force in all its manifestations. . . . . The influence of melody is one of its ordinary manifestations. The power of the ineffable name is the crown of this Sakti.

Modern Science has but partly investigated the first, second and fifth of the forces above named, but is altogether in the dark as regards the remaining powers. The six forces are in their unity represented by the “Daiviprakriti” (the Seventh, the light of the Logos).

The above is quoted to show the real Hindu ideas on the same. It is all esoteric, though not covering the tenth part of what might be said. For one, the six names of the Six Forces mentioned are those of the six Hierarchies of Dhyan Chohans synthesized by their Primary, the seventh, who personify the Fifth Principle of Cosmic Nature, or of the “Mother” in its Mystical Sense. The enumeration alone of the yogi Powers would require ten volumes. Each of these Forces has a living Conscious Entity at its head, of which entity it is an emanation.

294 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

But let us compare with the commentary just cited the words of Hermes, the “thrice great”:

“The creation of Life by the Sun is as continuous as his light; nothing arrests or limits it. Around him, like an army of Satellites, are innumerable choirs of genii. These dwell in the neighbourhood of the Immortals, and thence watch over human things. They fulfil the will of the gods (Karma) by means of storms, tempests, transitions of fire and earthquakes; likewise by famines and wars, for the punishment of impiety.²⁹⁹ . . . It is the sun who preserves and nourishes all creatures; and even as the Ideal World which environs the sensible world fills this last with the plenitude and universal variety of forms, so also the Sun, enfolding all in his light, accomplishes everywhere the birth and development of creatures.” . . . “Under his orders is the choir of Genii, or rather the choirs, for there are many and diverse, and their number corresponds to that of the stars. Every star has its genii, good and evil by nature, or rather by their operation, for operation is the essence of the genii. . . . All these Genii preside over mundane affairs,³⁰⁰ they shake and overthrow the constitution of States and of individuals; they imprint their likeness on our Souls, they are present in our nerves, our marrow, our veins, our arteries, and our very brain-substance . . . at the moment when each of us receives life and being, he is taken in charge by the genii (Elementals) who preside over births,³⁰¹ and who are classed beneath the astral powers (Superhuman astral Spirits). They change perpetually, not always identically, but revolving in circles.³⁰² They permeate by the body two parts of the Soul, that it may receive from each the impress of his own energy. But the reasonable part of the Soul is not subject to the genii; it is designed

 

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295 UNIVERSAL ILLUSION.

for the reception of (the) God,³⁰³ who enlightens it with a sunny ray. Those who are thus illumined are few in number, and from them the genii abstain: for neither genii nor Gods have any power in the presence of a single ray of God.³⁰⁴ But all other men, both soul and body, are directed by genii, to whom they cleave, and whose operations they affect. . . . . . The genii have then the control of mundane things and our bodies serve them as instruments. . . . .”

The above, save a few sectarian points, represents that which was a universal belief common to all nations till about a century or so back. It is still as orthodox in its broad outlines and features among pagans and Christians alike, if one excepts a handful of materialists and men of Science.

For whether one calls the genii of Hermes and his “Gods,” “Powers of Darkness” and “Angels,” as in the Greek and Latin Churches; or “Spirits of the Dead,” as in Spiritualism; or, again, Bhoots and Devas, Shaitan or Djin, as they are still called in India and Mussulman countries—they are all one and the same thing—illusion. Let not this, however, be misunderstood in the sense into which the great philosophical doctrine of the Vedantists has been lately perverted by Western schools.

All that which is, emanates from the absolute, which, from this qualification alone, stands as the one and only reality—hence, everything extraneous to this Absolute, the generative and causative Element, must be an illusion, most undeniably. But this is only so from the purely metaphysical view. A man who regards himself as mentally sane, and is so regarded by his neighbours, calls the visions of an insane brother—whose hallucinations make the victim either happy or supremely wretched, as the case may be—illusions and fancies likewise. But, where is that madman for whom the hideous shadows in his deranged mind, his illusions, are not, for the time being, as actual and as real as the things which his physician or keeper may see? Everything is relative in this Universe, everything is an illusion. But

 

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296 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the experience of any plane is an actuality for the percipient being, whose consciousness is on that plane; though the said experience, regarded from the purely metaphysical standpoint, may be conceived to have no objective reality. But it is not against metaphysicians, but against physicists and materialists that Esoteric teachings have to fight, and for these Vital Force, Light, Sound, Electricity, even to the objectively pulling force of magnetism, have no objective being, and are said to exist merely as “modes of motion,” “sensations and affections of matter.”

Neither the Occultists generally, nor the Theosophists, reject, as erroneously believed by some, the views and theories of the modern scientists, only because these views are opposed to Theosophy. The first rule of our Society is to render unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s. The Theosophists, therefore, are the first to recognize the intrinsic value of science. But when its high priests resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being unphilosophical, self-contradictory, and simply absurd, from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the occult aspect of the esoteric knowledge.

For truly the astral light of the derided Kabalists has strange and weird secrets for him who can see in it; and the mysteries concealed within its incessantly disturbed waves are there, the whole body of Materialists and scoffers notwithstanding.³⁰⁵ These secrets, along with

 

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297 NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

many other mysteries, will remain non-existent to the materialists of our age, in the same way as America was a non-existent myth for Europeans during the early part of the mediæval ages, whereas Scandinavians and Norwegians had actually reached and settled in that very old “New World” several centuries before. But, as a Columbus was born to re-discover, and to force the Old World to believe in Antipodal countries, so will there be born scientists who will discover the marvels now claimed by Occultists to exist in the regions of Ether, with their varied and multiform denizens and conscious Entities. Then, nolens volens, Science will have to accept the old “Superstition,” as it has several others. And having been once forced to accept it—judging from past experience—its learned professors will, in all probability, as in the case of Mesmerism and Magnetism, now re-baptised Hypnotism, father the thing and reject its name. The choice of the new appellation will depend, in its turn, on the “modes of motion,” the new name for the older “automatic physical processes among the nerve fibrils of the (Scientific) brain” of Moleschott; as also, very likely, upon the last meal of the namer; since, according to the Founder of the new Hylo-Idealistic Scheme, “Cerebration is generically the same as chylification.”³⁰⁶ Thus, were one to believe this preposterous proposition, the new name of the archaic thing would have to take its chance, on the inspiration of the namer’s liver, and then only would these truths have a chance of becoming scientific!

But truth, however distasteful to the generally blind majorities, has always had her champions, ready to die for her, and it is not the Occultists who will protest against its adoption by Science under whatever new name. But, until absolutely forced on the notice and acceptance of Scientists, many an Occult truth will be tabooed, as the phenomena of the Spiritualists and other psychic manifestations were, to be finally appropriated by its ex-traducers without the least acknowledgment or thanks. Nitrogen has added considerably to chemical knowledge, but its discoverer, Paracelsus, is to this day called a “quack.”

 

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298 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

How profoundly true are the words of H. T. Buckle, in his admirable “History of Civilization” (Vol. I., p. 256), when he says:

“Owing to circumstances still unknown (Karmic provision, H.P.B.) there appear from time to time great thinkers, who, devoting their lives to a single purpose, are able to anticipate the progress of mankind, and to produce a religion or a philosophy by which important effects are eventually brought about. But if we look into history we shall clearly see that, although the origin of a new opinion may be thus due to a single man, the result which the new opinion produces will depend on the condition of the people among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a philosophy is too much in advance of a nation it can do no present service but must bide its time³⁰⁷ until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. . . . Every science, every creed has had its martyrs. According to the ordinary course of affairs, a few generations pass away, and then there comes a period when these very truths are looked upon as commonplace facts, and a little later there comes another period in which they are declared to be necessary, and even the dullest intellect wonders how they could ever have been denied.”

It is barely possible that the minds of the present generations are not quite ripe for the reception of Occult truths. Such will be the retrospect furnished to the advanced thinkers of the Sixth Root Race of the history of the acceptance of Esoteric Philosophy—fully and unconditionally. Meanwhile the generations of our Fifth Race will continue to be led away by prejudice and preconceptions. Occult Sciences will have the finger of scorn pointed at them from every street corner, and everyone will seek to ridicule and crush them in the name, and for the greater glory, of Materialism and its so-called Science. The Addendum which completes the present Book shows, however, in an anticipatory answer to several of the forthcoming Scientific objections, the true and mutual positions of the defendant and plaintiff. The Theosophists and Occultists stand arraigned by public opinion, which still holds high the banner of the inductive Sciences. The latter have, then, to be examined; and it must be shown how far their achievements and discoveries in the realm of natural laws are opposed, not so much to our claims, as to the facts in nature. The hour has now struck to ascertain whether the

 

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299 MEN WELCOME ERROR, AND CRUCIFY THE TRUTH.

walls of the modern Jericho are so impregnable that no blast of the Occult trumpet is ever likely to make them crumble.

The so-called Forces, with Light and Electricity heading them, and the constitution of the Solar orb must be carefully examined; as also Gravitation and the Nebular theories. The Natures of Ether and of other Elements must be discussed: thus contrasting scientific with other Occult teachings, while revealing some of the hitherto secret tenets of the latter. (Vide Addendum.)

Some fifteen years ago, the writer was the first to repeat, after the Kabalists, the wise Commandments in the Esoteric Catechism. “Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of this (the mystery), and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of our alliance.” (Sepher Jezireh, Book of Creation.) And again: “This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal it to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside.” (Rules of Initiation.)

A few years later, a corner of the Veil of Isis had to be lifted; and now another and a larger rent is made. . . .

But old and time-honoured errors—such as become with every day more glaring and self-evident—stand arrayed in battle-order now, as they did then. Marshalled by blind conservatism, conceit and prejudice, they are constantly on the watch, ready to strangle every truth, which, awakening from its age-long sleep, happens to knock for admission. Such has been the case ever since man became an animal. That this proves in every case moral death to the revealers, who bring to light any of these old, old truths, is as certain as that it gives life and regeneration to those who are fit to profit even by the little that is now revealed to them.

301

BOOK I., PART II.

THE

EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM

IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER.

——————

EXPLANATORY SECTIONS.

302

303

BOOK I., PART II.

(SECRET DOCTRINE.)

§ I. SYMBOLISM AND IDEOGRAPHS.

“A symbol is ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like. Through all there glimmers something of a divine idea; nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under the cross itself, had no meaning, save an accidental extrinsic one.” Carlyle.

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

“For thirty years past Professor Max Müller has been teaching in his books and lectures, in the Times and various magazines, from the platform of the Royal Institution, the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, and his chair at Oxford, that mythology is a disease of language, and that the ancient symbolism was a result of something like a primitive aberration.

“‘We know,’ says Renouf, echoing Max Müller, in his Hibbert lectures, ‘we know that mythology is the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture.’ Such is the shallow explanation of the non-evolutionists, and such explanations are still accepted by the British public, that gets its think-

304 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ing done by proxy. Professor Max Müller, Cox, Gubernatis, and other propounders of the Solar Mythos, have portrayed the primitive myth-maker for us as a sort of Germanised-Hindu metaphysician, projecting his own shadow on a mental mist, and talking ingeniously concerning smoke, or, at least, cloud; the sky overhead becoming like the dome of dreamland, scribbled over with the imagery of aboriginal nightmares! They conceive the early man in their own likeness, and look upon him as perversely prone to self-mystification, or, as Fontenelle has it, ‘subject to beholding things that are not there.’ They have misrepresented primitive or archaic man as having been idiotically misled from the first by an active but untutored imagination into believing all sorts of fallacies, which were directly and constantly contradicted by his own daily experience; a fool of fancy in the midst of those grim realities that were grinding his experience into him, like the grinding icebergs making their imprints upon the rocks submerged beneath the sea. It remains to be said, and will one day be acknowledged, that these accepted teachers have been no nearer to the beginnings of mythology and language than Burns’ poet Willie had been near to Pegasus. My reply is,’Tis but a dream of the metaphysical theorist that mythology was a disease of language, or of anything else except his own brain. The origin and meaning of mythology have been missed altogether by these solarites and weather-mongers! Mythology was a primitive mode of thinking the early thought. It was founded on natural facts, and is still verifiable in phenomena. There is nothing insane, nothing irrational in it, when considered in the light of evolution, and when its mode of expression by sign-language is thoroughly understood. The insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation.³⁰⁸ Mythology is the repository of man’s most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this—when truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth.³⁰⁹ In modern phraseology a statement is sometimes said to be mythical in proportion to its being untrue; but the ancient mythology was not a system or mode of falsifying in that sense. Its fables were the means of conveying facts; they were neither forgeries nor fictions. . . . For example, when the Egyptians portrayed the moon as a Cat, they were not ignorant enough to suppose that the moon was a cat; nor did their wandering fancies see any likeness in the moon to a cat; nor was a cat-myth any mere expansion of verbal metaphor; nor had they any intention of making puzzles or riddles. . . . They had observed the simple fact that the cat saw in the dark, and that her eyes became full-orbed, and grew most luminous by night. The moon was the seer by night in heaven, and the cat was its equivalent on the earth; and so the familiar cat was adopted as a representative, a natural sign, a living pictograph of the lunar orb. . . . And so it followed that the sun which saw down in the under-world at night could also be called the cat, as it was, because it also saw in the dark. The name of the

 

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305 EMBLEM AND SYMBOL DIFFER.

cat in Egyptian is mau, which denotes the seer, from mau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the Egyptians ‘imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the cat’s eye.’ But this imagining is all modern. It is the Müllerite stock in trade. The moon as cat was the eye of the sun, because it reflected the solar light, and because the eye gives back the image in its mirror. In the form of the goddess Pasht, the cat keeps watch for the sun, with her paw holding down and bruising the head of the serpent of darkness, called his eternal enemy. . . .”

This is a very correct exposition of the lunar-mythos from its astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of the divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly—if one is permitted to coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient in more than its astronomical meaning. The moon (vide § IX., “The Moon, Deus Lunus, Phœbe” [p. 368]) is intimately related to the Earth, as shown in Stanza VI. of Book I., and is more directly concerned with all the mysteries of our globe than is even Venus-Lucifer, the occult sister and alter-ego of the Earth.

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

This every scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. G. Massey alone are sufficient in themselves to convince any fair-minded Christian that to accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander. But the point to which even the most truth-loving and truth-searching Orientalists—whether Aryanists or Egyptologists—seem to remain blind, is the fact that every symbol in papyrus or olla is a many-faced diamond, each of whose facets not merely bears several interpretations, but relates likewise to several sciences. This is instanced in the just quoted interpretation of the moon symbolized by the cat—an example of sidero-terrestrial imagery; the moon bearing many other meanings besides this with other nations. As a learned Mason and Theosophist, the late Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie, has shown in his Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, there is a great difference between emblem and symbol. The former “comprises a larger series of thoughts than a symbol, which may be said rather to illustrate some single special idea.” Hence, the symbols (say lunar, or solar) of several countries, each illustrating such a special idea, or series of ideas, form collectively an esoteric emblem. The latter is “a concrete visible

306 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

picture or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, recognizable by those who have received certain instructions” (initiates). To put it still plainer, an emblem is usually a series of graphic pictures viewed and explained allegorically, and unfolding an idea in panoramic views, one after the other. Thus the Purânas are written emblems. So are the Mosaic and Christian Testaments, or the Bible, and all other exoteric Scriptures. As the same authority shows:

“All esoteric Societies have made use of emblems and symbols, such as the Pythagorean Society, the Eleusinian, the Hermetic Brethren of Egypt, the Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons. Many of these emblems it is not proper to divulge to the general eye, and a very minute difference may make the emblem or symbol differ widely in its meaning. The magical sigillæ, being founded on certain principles of numbers, partake of this character, and although monstrous or ridiculous in the eyes of the uninstructed, convey a whole body of doctrine to those who have been trained to recognise them.”

The above enumerated societies are all comparatively modern, none dating back earlier than the middle ages. How much more proper, then, that the students of the oldest Archaic School should be careful not to divulge secrets of far more importance to humanity (in the sense of being dangerous in the hands of the latter) than any of the so-called “Masonic Secrets,” which have now become, as the French say, those of “Polichinelle!” But this restriction can apply only to the psychological or rather psycho-physiological and Cosmical significance of symbol and emblem, and even to that only partially. An adept must refuse to impart the conditions and means that lead to a correlation of elements, whether psychic or physical, that may produce a hurtful result as well as a beneficent one. But he is ever ready to impart to the earnest student the secret of the ancient thought in anything that regards history concealed under mythological symbolism, and thus to furnish a few more land-marks towards a retrospective view of the past, as containing useful information with regard to the origin of man, the evolution of the races and geognosy; yet it is the crying complaint to-day, not only among theosophists, but also among the few profane interested in the subject. “Why do not the adepts reveal that which they know?” To this, one might answer, “Why should they, since one knows beforehand that no man of science will accept, even as an hypothesis, let alone as a theory or axiom, the facts imparted. Have you so much as accepted or believed in the A B C of the Occult philosophy contained in the Theosophist, “Esoteric Buddhism,” and other works and periodicals? Has not even the little which was given, been ridiculed and derided, and made to face the “animal” and “ape theory” of Huxley—Hæckel, on one hand, and the rib of Adam and the apple on the other? Notwithstanding such an unenviable prospect, a mass of facts is given in the present work. And now the origin of man, the evolution of the globe and

307 MAGIC POTENCY OF SOUND.

the races, human and animal, are as fully treated here as the writer is able to treat them.

The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations. The Purânas, the Zendavesta, and the old classics are full of them; but no one has ever gone to the trouble of collecting and collating together those facts. The reason for this is, that all such events were recorded symbolically; and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our Aryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or another preconception; still oftener, by one-sided views of the secret meaning. Yet even a parable is a spoken symbol: a fiction or a fable, as some think; an allegorical representation, we say, of life-realities, events, and facts. And, as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, that moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so an historical, real event was deduced—by those versed in the hieratic sciences—from certain emblems and symbols recorded in the ancient archives of the temples. The religious and esoteric history of every nation was embedded in symbols; it was never expressed in so many words. All the thoughts and emotions, all the learning and knowledge, revealed and acquired, of the early races, found their pictorial expression in allegory and parable. Why? Because the spoken word has a potency unknown to, unsuspected and disbelieved in, by the modern “sages.” Because sound and rhythm are closely related to the four Elements of the Ancients; and because such or another vibration in the air is sure to awaken corresponding powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case may be. No student was ever allowed to recite historical, religious, or any real events in so many unmistakable words, lest the powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such events were narrated only during the Initiation, and every student had to record them in corresponding symbols, drawn out of his own mind and examined later by his master, before they were finally accepted. Thus was created in time the Chinese Alphabet, as, before that, the hieratic symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language, the alphabet of which may be read in any language,³¹⁰ and which is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian alphabet of Thoth, every word has its corresponding symbol conveying the word needed in a pictorial form. The language possesses many thousands of such symbol letters, or logograms, each meaning a whole word; for letters proper, or an alphabet, do not exist in the Chinese language any more than they did in the Egyptian till a far later period.

 

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308 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

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

“The writer is quite certain that there was an ancient language which modernly and up to this time appears to have been lost, the vestiges of which, however, abundantly exist. . . . The author discovered that this (integral ratio in numbers of diameter to circumference of a circle) geometrical ratio was the very ancient, and probably the divine origin of linear measures. . . . It appears almost proven that the same system of geometry, numbers, ratio, and measures were known and made use of on the continent of North America, even prior to the knowledge of the same by the descending Semites. . . . .”

“The peculiarity of this language was that it could be contained in another, concealed and not to be perceived, save through the help of special instruction; letters and syllabic signs possessing at the same time the powers or meaning of numbers, of geometrical shapes, pictures, or ideographs and symbols, the designed scope of which would be determinatively helped out by parables in the shape of narratives or parts of narratives; while also it could be set forth separately, independently, and variously, by pictures, in stone work, or in earth construction.”

“To clear up an ambiguity as to the term language: Primarily the word means the expression of ideas by human speech; but, secondarily, it may mean the expression of ideas by any other instrumentality. This old language is so composed in the Hebrew text, that by the use of the written characters, which will be the language first defined, a distinctly separated series of ideas may be intentionally communicated, other than those ideas expressed by the reading of the sound signs. This secondary language sets forth, under a veil, series of ideas, copies in imagination of things sensible, which may be pictured, and of things which may be classed as real without being sensible; as, for instance, the number 9 may be taken as a reality, though it has no sensible existence, so also a revolution of the moon, as separate from the moon itself by which that revolution has been made, may be taken as giving rise to, or causing a real idea, though such a revolution has no substance. This idea-language may consist of symbols restricted to arbitrary terms and signs, having a very limited range of conceptions, and quite valueless, or it may be a reading of nature in some of her manifestations of a value almost immeasurable, as regards human civilization. A picture of something natural may give rise to ideas of co-ordina-

309 MYSTERY LANGUAGE.

tive subject-matter, radiating out in various and even opposing directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and producing natural realities in departments very foreign to the apparent tendency of the reading of the first or starting picture. Notion may give rise to connected notion, but if it does, then, however apparently incongruous, all resulting ideas must spring from the original picture and be harmonically connected, or related. . . . Thus with a pictured idea radical enough, the imagination of the Cosmos itself even in its details of construction might result. Such a use of ordinary language is now obsolete, but it has become a question with the writer whether at one time, far back in the past, it, or such, was not the language of the world and of universal use, possessed, however, as it became more and more moulded into its arcane forms, by a select class or caste. By this I mean that the popular tongue or vernacular commenced even in its origin to be made use of as the vehicle of this peculiar mode of conveying ideas. Of this the evidences are very strong; and, indeed, it would seem that in the history of the human race there happened, from causes which at present, at any rate, we cannot trace, a lapse or loss from an original perfect language and a perfect system of science—shall we say perfect because they were of divine origin and importation?”

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

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310‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ II. THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE AND ITS KEYS.

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

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

The many-sided facets of the mystery language have led to the adoption of widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals. It is they, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church, e.g., the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the Resurrection; the seven capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The seven keys to the mystery tongue, however, having always been in

311 EGYPT’S MANY RELIGIONS.

the keeping of the highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity, it is only the partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of some early Church Fathers—ex-initiates of the Temples—into the hands of the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery.

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

“Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt,” writes M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of Mariette Bey, “I am tempted to ask which of the Egyptian religions they are talking about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the 4th Dynasty, or of the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned men? Of that which was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that other which was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class? For, between the first tomb of Memphis, which bears the cartouche of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones at Esnêh under Cæsar-Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the Shepherds, the Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its political life, Egypt has passed during those five thousand years through many vicissitudes of life, moral and intellectual. Chapter XVII. of the Book of the Dead which seems to contain the exposition of the system of the world as it was understood at Heliopolis during the time of the first dynasties, is known to us only by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Each of the verses composing it was already at the time interpreted in three or four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this or another school, the Demiurge became the solar fire—Ra-shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number of readings had increased considerably. Time had, in its course, modified the ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled it. During the hardly 18 centuries that Christianity exists, it has worked,

312 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

developed and transformed most of its dogmas; how many times, then, might not the Egyptian clergy have altered its dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids?”

Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed only during the mysteries of initiation. The Egyptian priests have forgotten much, they altered nothing. The loss of a good deal of the primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants, who passed away before they had time to reveal all to their successors; mostly, to the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the secret doctrine. Thus, in the seventeenth chapter mentioned by Maspero, one finds (1) Osiris saying he is Toum (the creative force in nature, giving form to all Beings, spirits and men), self-generated and self-existent, issued from Noun, the celestial river, called Father-mother of the gods, the primordial deity, which is chaos or the Deep, impregnated by the unseen spirit. (2) He has found Shoo (solar force) on the staircase in the City of the Eight (the two cubes of good and Evil), and he has annihilated the evil principles in Noun (chaos) the children of Rebellion. (3) He is the Fire and Water, i.e., Noun the primordial parent, and he created the gods out of his limbs—14 gods (twice seven) seven dark and seven light gods (the seven Spirits of the Presence of the Christians and the Seven dark Evil Spirits). (4) He is the Law of existence and Being (v. 10), the Bennoo (or phœnix, the bird of resurrection in Eternity), in whom night follows the day, and day the night—an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human re-incarnation; for what can this mean? “The wayfarer who crosses millions of years, in the name of One, and the great green (primordial water or Chaos) the name of the other” (v. 17), one begetting millions of years in succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. (5) He speaks of the Seven Luminous ones who follow their Lord, who confers justice (Osiris in Amenti).

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

Yet their system is now proven identical in this special department of symbology—the key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of generation and conception—with those ideas of ancient religions, the theology of which has developed the phallic element. The Jewish system of sacred measures applied to religious symbols is the same,

313 THE JEWS, AND THEIR SYSTEM.

so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of Chaldea, Greece, and Egypt, having been adopted by the Jews during the centuries of their slavery and captivity with those nations.³¹¹ What was that system? It is the intimate conviction of the author of “The Source of Measures” that “the Mosaic Books were intended, by a mode of art speech, to set forth a geometrical and numerical system of exact science, which should serve as an origin of measures.” Piazzi Smyth believes likewise. This system and these measures are found by some scholars to be identical with those used in the construction of the great pyramid—but this is only partially so. “The foundation of these measures was the Parker ratio,” says Mr. R. Skinner, in “The Source of Measures.”

The author of this very extraordinary work has found it out, he says, in the use of the integral ratio in numbers of diameter to circumference of a circle, discovered by John Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6,561 for diameter, and 20,612 for circumference. Furthermore, that this geometrical ratio was the very ancient (and probably) the divine origin of what have now become through exoteric handling and practical application the British linear measures, “the underlying unit of which, viz., the inch, was likewise the base of one of the royal Egyptian cubits and of the Roman foot. He also found out that there was a modified form of the ratio, viz., 113-355 (explained in his work); and that while this last ratio pointed through its origin to the exact integral pi, or to 6,561 to 20,612, it also served as a base for astronomical calculations. The author discovered that a system of exact science, geometrical, numerical, and astronomical, founded on these ratios and to be found in use in the construction of the Great Egyptian Pyramid, was in part the burden of this language as contained in, and concealed under, the verbiage of the Hebrew text of the Bible. The inch and the two-foot rule of 24 inches interpreted for use through the elements of the circle (see first pages of Book I.) and the ratios mentioned, were found to be at the basis or foundation of this natural and Egyptian and Hebrew system of science, while, moreover, it seems evident enough that the system itself was looked upon as of divine origin and of divine revela-

 

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314 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

Mr. Petrie seems to deny them, and to have made short work altogether of Piazzi Smyth’s calculations in their Biblical connection. So does Mr. Proctor, the champion “Coincidentalist” for many years past in every question of ancient arts and sciences. Speaking of “the multitude of relations independent of the Pyramid, which have turned up while the Pyramidalists have been endeavouring to connect the pyramid with the solar system . . . . these coincidences,” he says, “are altogether more curious than any coincidence between the Pyramid and astronomical numbers: the former are as close and remarkable as they are real” (i.e., those “coincidences” that would remain if even the pyramid had no existence); “the latter which are only imaginary (?) have only been established by the process which schoolboys call ‘fudging,’ and now new measures have left the work to be done all over again” (Petrie’s letter to the Academy, Dec. 17, 1881.) To this Mr. Staniland Wake justly observes in his work on “The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid” (London, 1882): “They must, however, have been more than mere coincidences, if the builders of the Pyramid had the astronomical knowledge displayed in its perfect orientation and in its other admitted astronomical features.”

They had it; and it is on this “knowledge” that the programme of the mysteries and of the series of Initiations was based: thence, the construction of the Pyramids, the everlasting record and the indestructible symbol of these Mysteries and Initiations on Earth, as the courses of the stars are in Heaven. The cycle of Initiation was a reproduction in miniature of that great series of Cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of tropical or sidereal year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the sidereal year [25,868 years], the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the inner man has regained the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnation.

Moses, an Initiate into the Egyptian Mystagogy, based the religious mysteries of the new nation which he created, upon the same abstract formula derived from this sidereal cycle, which he symbolised under the form and measurements of the tabernacle, that he is supposed to have constructed in the wilderness. On these data, the later Jewish High Priests constructed the allegory of Solomon’s Temple—a building which never had a real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is simply, and as much a solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif, of the Masons, as Ragon has well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical temple, the symbol of the cycle of

315 PIAZZI SMYTH AND PETRIE DISAGREE.

Initiation, coincide with those of the Great Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the latter through the Tabernacle of Moses.

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

“As to the results of the whole investigation, perhaps many theories will agree with an American who was a warm believer in Pyramid theories when he came to Gizeh. I had the pleasure of his company there for a couple of days, and at our last meal together he said to me in a saddened tone—‘Well, sir! I feel as if I had been to a funeral. By all means let the old theories have a decent burial, though we should take care that in our haste none of the wounded ones are buried alive.’” As regards the late J. Parker’s calculation in general, and his third proposition especially, we have consulted some eminent mathematicians, and this is the substance of what they say:

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

Proposition III., namely, that—

“The circle is the natural basis or beginning of all area, and the square being made so in mathematical science, is artificial and arbitrary——”

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

“Because the circle is the primary shape in nature, and hence the basis of area; and because the circle is measured by, and is equal to the square only in ratio of half its circumference by the radius, therefore, circumference and radius, and not the square of diameter, are the only natural and legitimate elements of area, by which all regular shapes are made equal to the square, and equal to the circle.”

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

316 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“The circle and the equilateral triangle are opposite to one another in all the elements of their construction, and hence the fractional diameter of one circle, which is equal to the diameter of one square, is in the opposite duplicate ratio to the diameter of an equilateral triangle whose area is one,” etc., etc.

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

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

317 TRUTH MUST PREVAIL AT LAST.

the Hebrew language being the divine language, and that (b) this universal language belongs to direct revelation!

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

On the other hand, the proofs afforded by tradition are too constantly rejected for us to hope to settle the question in our present age. Meanwhile, materialistic science will be laughing impartially at both Kabalists and Occultists. But the said vexed question of priority once laid aside, Science, in its departments of philology and comparative religion, will find itself finally taken to task, and be compelled to admit the common claim.³¹² Its greatest scholars, instead of pooh-poohing that supposed

 

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318 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

But while supposing that the whole cycle of the universal mystery language will not be mastered for whole centuries to come, even that which has been hitherto discovered in the Bible by some scholars is quite sufficient to demonstrate the claim—mathematically. Judaism having availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and these two keys having been now rediscovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual speculation and hypothesis, least of all of “coincidence,” but one of a correct reading of the Bible texts, as anyone acquainted with arithmetic reads and verifies an addition or total.³¹³ A few years longer and this system will kill the dead letter of the Bible, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing the dogmas in their real, naked meaning.

And then this undeniable meaning, however incomplete, will unveil the mystery of Being, besides changing entirely the modern scientific systems of Anthropology, Ethnology and especially that of Chronology. The element of Phallicism, found in every God-name and narrative in the Old (and to some degree in the New) Testament, may also in time considerably change modern materialistic views in Biology and Physiology. Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of nature and man, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries,

 

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319 MOSES COPIED FROM SARGON.

will unveil the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of thought. The so-called phallic symbols have become offensive only because of the element of materiality and animality in them. As they originated with the archaic races, which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry, were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the separation of sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn—such symbols were but natural. If later races have degraded them, especially the “chosen people,” this does not affect the origin of those symbols. The little Semitic tribe—one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the 4th and 5th sub-races (the Mongolo-Turanian and the Indo-European, so-called, after the sinking of the great Continent)—could only accept its symbology in the spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived. Perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, that symbology was not as crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. For the glyph of Pharaoh’s daughter (the woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby-boy found floating therein in the ark of rushes, has not been primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It has been found anticipated in the Babylonian fragments on the tiles, in the story of King Sargon,³¹⁴ who lived far earlier than Moses. Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly that which gives us the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by him while at Babylon,

 

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320 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but re-fabricated from old materials by Ezra.

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

All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of biblical glyphs and numbers as suggested by astronomical observations—astronomy and theology being closely connected—is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes—the last term having now passed even into our modern botany to distinguish male and female plants (the unisexual, polygamous, monœcious, diœcious, etc., etc.)—are known in astronomy as sextiles, quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and æons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a plane, a cube, a pentacle, and a hexagon, and plane figures with various sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical symbology to be as old as the world.

Starting from this, it becomes easy to understand how nature herself could have taught primeval mankind, even without the help of its divine instructors, the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol language.³¹⁵ Hence one finds numbers and figures used as an

 

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321 THE CROSS, A PHALLIC SYMBOL.

expression and a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever the same, with only certain variations growing out of the first figures. Thus the evolution and correlation of the mysteries of Kosmos, of its growth and development—spiritual and physical, abstract and concrete—were first recorded in geometrical changes of shape. Every Cosmogony began with a circle, a point, a triangle, and a cube, up to number 9, when it was synthesized by the first line and a circle—the Pythagorean mystic Decade, the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire Kosmos; recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindu system, for him who can understand its mystic language. The numbers 3 and 4, in their blending of 7, as those of 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the very corner-stone of Occult Cosmogonies. This decade and its thousand combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes them in the caves and rock-cut temples of Hindostan and Central Asia, as in the pyramids and lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Osymandýas [Ramesses II], in the mounds of the Caucasian snow-capped fastnesses, in the ruins of Palenque, in Easter Island, everywhere whither the foot of ancient man has ever journeyed. The 3 and the 4, the triangle and the cube, or the male and female universal glyph, showing the first aspect of the evolving deity, is stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in the Egyptian Crux-Ansata. As well expressed, “The Cube unfolded is in display a cross of the tau, or Egyptian form, or of the Christian cross form. . . . A circle attached to the first, gives the ansated cross. . . numbers 3 and 4 counted on the cross, showing a form of the (Hebrew) golden candlestick (in the Holy of Holies), and of the 3 + 4 = 7, and 6 + 1 = 7, days in the circle of the week, as 7 lights of the sun. So also as the week of 7 lights gave origin to the month and year, so it is the time marker of birth. . . . The cross form being shown, then, by the connected use of the form 113:355, the symbol is completed by the attachment of a man to the cross.³¹⁶ This kind of measure was made to co-ordinate with the idea of the origin of human life, and hence the phallic form.³¹⁷”

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

 

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322 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Under the general view taken of the nature of the number forms. . . . it becomes a matter of research of the utmost interest as to when and where their existence and their use first became known. Has it been a matter of revelation in what we know as the historic age—a cycle exceedingly modern when the age of the human race is contemplated? It seems, in fact, as to the date of its possession by man, to have been farther removed in the past from the old Egyptians than are the old Egyptians from us.

“The Easter Isles in ‘mid Pacific’ present the feature of the remaining peaks of the mountains of a submerged continent, for the reason that these peaks are thickly studded with Cyclopean statues, remnants of the civilization of a dense and cultivated people, who must have of necessity occupied a widely extended area. On the back of these images is to be found the ‘ansated cross’ and the same modified to the outlines of the human form. A full description, with plate showing the land, with the thickly planted statues, also with copies of the images, is to be found in the January number 1870 of the London Builder.

“In the ‘Naturalist,’ published at Salem, Massachusetts, in one of the early numbers, is to be found a description of some very ancient and curious carving on the crest walls of the mountains of South America, older by far, it is averred, than the races now living. The strangeness of these tracings is in that they exhibit the outlines of a man stretched out on a cross,³¹⁸ by a series of drawings, by which from the form of a man that of a cross springs, but so done that the cross may be taken as the man, or the man as the cross; thus exhibiting a symbolic display of the interdependency of the forms set forth.

“It is known that tradition among the Aztecs has handed down a very perfect account of the deluge. . . . Baron Humboldt says that we are to look for the country of Aztalan, the original country of the Aztecs, as high up at least as the 42nd parallel north; whence, journeying, they at last arrived in the vale of Mexico. In that vale the earthen mounds of the far north become the elegant stone pyramidal and other structures whose remains are now found. The correspondences between the Aztec remains and those of the Egyptians are well known. . . . Attwater, from examination of hundreds of them, is convinced that they had a knowledge of astronomy. As to one of the most perfect of the pyramidal structures among the Aztecs, Humboldt gives a description to the following effect:

“‘The form of this pyramid (of Papantla) which has seven stories, is more tapering than any other monument of this kind yet discovered, but its height is not remarkable, being but 57 feet, its base but 25 feet on each side. However, it is remarkable on one account: it is built entirely of hewn stones, of an extraordinary size, and very beautifully shaped. Three staircases lead to the top, the steps of which are decorated with hieroglyphical sculptures and small niches arranged with great symmetry. The number of these niches seems to allude to the 318 simple and compound signs of the days of their civil calendar.’

“318 is the Gnostic value of Christ,” remarks the author, “and the famous number of the trained or circumcised servants of Abraham. When it is consi-

 

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323 IDENTITY OF THE ANCIENT SYMBOLS.

dered that 318 is an abstract value, and universal, as expressive of a diameter value to a circumference of unity, its use in the composition of the civil calendar becomes manifest.”

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

Shall one, for fear of incurring the penalty of being called a superstitious fool, and even a liar, abstain from furnishing proofs—as good as any—only because that day, when all the seven keys shall be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in the symbological department, has not yet dawned? In the face of the crushing discoveries of Geology and Anthropology with regard to the antiquity of man, shall we—in order to avoid the usual penalty that awaits every one who strays outside the beaten paths of either Theology or Materialism—hold to the 6,000 years and “special creation,” or accept in submissive admiration our genealogy and descent from the ape? Not so, as long as it is known that the secret records hold the said seven keys to the mystery of the genesis of man. Faulty, materialistic, and biassed as the scientific theories may be, they are a thousand times nearer the truth than the vagaries of theology. The latter are in their death agony for every one but the most uncompromising bigot and fanatic.³¹⁹ Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of Science, or to cut adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, being fully prepared to bear the consequences.

But let us see whether Science in its materialistic speculations, and even theology in its death-rattle and supreme struggle to reconcile the 6,000 years since Adam with Sir Charles Lyell’s “Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man,” do not themselves give us unconsciously a helping hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its very learned votaries, finds it already impossible to account for the varieties in the human race, unless the hypothesis of the creation of several Adams be accepted. They speak of “a white Adam and a black Adam, a red

 

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324 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Adam and a yellow Adam.”³²⁰ Were they Hindus enumerating the rebirths of Vamadeva from the Linga Purâna, they could say little more. For, enumerating the repeated births of Siva, the latter show him in one Kalpa of a white complexion, in another of a black colour, in still another of a red colour, after which the Kumâra becomes “four youths of a yellow colour.” This strange coincidence, as Mr. Proctor would say, speak only in favour of scientific intuition, as Siva-Kumâra represents only allegorically the human races during the genesis of man. But it led to another intuitional phenomenon—in the theological ranks this time. The unknown author of “Primeval Man” in a desperate effort to screen the divine Revelation from the merciless and eloquent discoveries of geology and anthropology, remarking that “it would be unfortunate if the defenders of the Bible should be driven into the position of either surrendering the inspiration of Scripture, or denying the conclusions of geologists”—finds a compromise. Nay, he devotes a thick volume to proving this fact: “Adam was not the first man³²¹ created upon this earth.” . . . The exhumed relics of pre-Adamic man, “instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity” (p. 194). How so? In the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth “we” (the clergy) “are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies without attempting to coerce them by the fear of heresy”. . . (this must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir C. Lyell). . . . “The Bible narrative does not commence with creation, as is commonly supposed, but with the formation of Adam and Eve, millions of years after our planet had been created. Its previous history, so far as Scripture is concerned, is yet unwritten.” . . . . . “There may have been not one, but twenty different races upon the earth before the time of Adam, just as there may be twenty different races of men on other worlds” (p. 55). . . . Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that Adam is the first man of our race? It was the satanic race and races! “Satan (was) never in heaven, Angels and men (being) one species.” It was the pre-Adamic race of “Angels that sinned.” Satan was “the first Prince of this world,” we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he remained on earth as a disembodied Spirit, and tempted Adam and Eve. “The earlier ages of the Satanic race, and more especially during the life-time of Satan (!!!) may have been a period

 

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325 THE IMPARTIALITY OF SCIENTIFIC DENIALS.‌

of patriarchal civilization and comparative repose—a time of Tubal-Cains and Jubals, when both Sciences and arts attempted to strike their roots into the accursed ground. . . . . What a subject for an epic. . . . (when) there are inevitable incidents which must have occurred. We see before us . . . . the gay primeval lover wooing his blushing bride at dewy eve under the Danish oaks, that then grew where now no oaks will grow . . . . the grey primeval patriarch . . . . the primeval offspring innocently gambolling by his side. . . . . A thousand such pictures rise before us”! . . . . (pp. 206-207).

The retrospective glance at this Satanic “blushing bride” in the days of Satan’s innocence, does not lose in poetry as it gains in originality. Quite the reverse. The modern Christian bride—who does not often blush nowadays before her gay modern lovers—might even derive a moral lesson from this daughter of Satan, in the exuberant fancy of her first human biographer. These pictures—and to appreciate them at their true value they must be examined in the volume that describes them—are all suggested with a view to reconcile the infallibility of revealed Scripture with Sir C. Lyell’s “Antiquity of Man” and other damaging scientific works. But this does not prevent truth and fact appearing at the foundation of these vagaries, which the author has never dared to sign with his own, or even a borrowed name. For, his pre-Adamic races—not Satanic but simply Atlantic, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter—are mentioned in the Bible when read esoterically, as they are in the Secret Doctrine. The seven keys open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven great Root Races, as of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and even the esoteric geology, will surely be rejected by Science just as much as the Satanic and pre-Adamic races, yet if having no other way out of their difficulties the Scientists have to choose between the two, we feel certain that, Scripture notwithstanding, once the mystery language is approximately mastered, it is the archaic teaching that will be accepted.

———

§ III. PRIMORDIAL SUBSTANCE AND DIVINE THOUGHT.

“As it would seem irrational to affirm that we already know all existing causes, permission must be given to assume, if need be, an entirely new agent.

“Assuming, what is not strictly accurate as yet, that the undulatory hypothesis accounts for all the facts, we are called on to decide whether the existence of an undulating Ether is thereby proved. We cannot positively affirm

326 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

that no other supposition will explain the facts. Newton’s corpuscular hypothesis is admitted to have broken down on Interference; and there is, at the present day, no rival. Still, it is extremely desirable in all such hypotheses to find some collateral confirmation, some evidence aliunde, of the supposed ether. . . . . Some Hypotheses consist of assumptions as to the minute structure and operations of bodies. From the nature of the case, these assumptions can never be proved by direct means. Their only merit is their suitability to express the phenomena. They are representative fictions.”—(“Logic,” by Alexander Bain, LL.D., Part II., p. 133)

Ether, this hypothetical Proteus, one of the “representative Fictions” of modern Science—which, nevertheless, was so long accepted—is one of the lower “principles” of what we call primordial substance (Akâsa, in Sanskrit), one of the dreams of old, and which has now become again the dream of modern science. It is the greatest, just as it is the boldest, of the surviving speculations of ancient philosophers. For the Occultists, however, both ether and the Primordial Substance are a reality. To put it plainly, ether is the Astral Light, and the Primordial Substance is Akâsa, the Upadhi of divine thought.

In modern language, the latter would be better named cosmic ideation—Spirit; the former, cosmic substance, Matter. These, the Alpha and the Omega of Being, are but the two facets of the one Absolute Existence. The latter was never addressed, or even mentioned, by any name in antiquity, except allegorically. In the oldest Aryan race, the Hindu, the worship of the intellectual classes never consisted (as with the Greeks) in a fervent adoration of marvellous form and art, which led later on to anthropomorphism. But while the Greek philosopher adored form, and the Hindu sage alone “perceived the true relation of earthly beauty and eternal truth”—the uneducated of every nation understood neither, at any time.

They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man’s own intellectual evolution. So true it is that the noblest ideal to which the religious Spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch! The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the ancients in relation to this most metaphysical subject. Otherwise—outside such initiation—for every thinker there will be a “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther,” mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as unmistakeably as there is for the progress of any nation or race in its cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped and remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic as well as realistic thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural product of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of both are only

327 DIVINE THOUGHT, OR CINERITIOUS MATTER.

the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest flights of modern (Western) metaphysics have fallen far short of the truth. Much of current Agnostic speculation on the existence of the “First Cause” is little better than veiled materialism—the terminology alone being different. Even so great a thinker as Mr. Herbert Spencer speaks of the “Unknowable” occasionally in terms that demonstrate the lethal influence of materialistic thought, which, like the deadly Sirocco, has withered and blighted all current ontological speculation.³²²

From the early ages of the Fourth Race, when Spirit alone was worshipped and the mystery was made manifest, down to the last palmy days of Grecian art at the dawn of Christianity—the Hellenes alone had dared to raise publicly an altar to the Unknown God. Whatever St. Paul may have had in his profound mind when declaring to the Athenians that this “unknown,” ignorantly worshipped by them, was the true God announced by himself—that Deity was not “Jehovah” (see “The Holy of Holies”), nor was he “The Maker of the world and all things.” For it is not the “God of Israel” but the “Unknown” of the ancient and modern Pantheist that “dwelleth not in temples made with hands” (Acts xviii., 23-4).

Divine thought cannot be defined, or its meaning explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who can do so. To say this, after having defined it as the Unknown Deity, abstract, impersonal, sexless, which must be placed at the root of every Cosmogony and its subsequent evolution, is equivalent to saying nothing at all. It is like attempting a transcendental equation of conditions for the true values of a set, having in hand for deducing them only a number of unknown quantities. Its place is found in the old primitive Symbolic charts, in which, as shown in the text, it is represented by a boundless darkness, on the ground of which appears the first central point in white—thus symbolising coeval and co-eternal Spirit-Matter making its appearance in the phenomenal world, before its first differentiation. When “the one becomes two,” it may then be

 

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328 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

referred to as Spirit and matter. To “Spirit” is referable every manifestation of consciousness, reflective or direct, and of unconscious purposiveness (to adopt a modern expression used in Western philosophy, so-called) as evidenced in the Vital Principle, and Nature’s submission to the majestic sequence of immutable law. “Matter” must be regarded as objectivity in its purest abstraction—the self-existing basis whose septenary manvantaric differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the phenomena of each phase of conscious existence. During the period of Universal Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non-existent; and the variously differentiated states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again into the primary state of abstract potential objectivity.

Manvantaric impulse commences with the re-awakening of Cosmic Ideation (the “Universal Mind”) concurrently with, and parallel to the primary emergence of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvantaric vehicle of the former—from its undifferentiated pralayic state. Then, absolute wisdom mirrors itself in its Ideation; which, by a transcendental process, superior to and incomprehensible by human Consciousness, results in Cosmic Energy (Fohat). Thrilling through the bosom of inert Substance, Fohat impels it to activity, and guides its primary differentiations on all the Seven planes of Cosmic Consciousness. There are thus Seven Protyles (as they are now called), while Aryan antiquity called them the Seven Prakriti, or Natures, serving, severally, as the relatively homogeneous basis, which in the course of the increasing heterogeneity (in the evolution of the Universe) differentiate into the marvellous complexity presented by phenomena on the planes of perception. The term “relatively” is used designedly, because the very existence of such a process, resulting in the primary segregations of undifferentiated Cosmic Substance into its septenary bases of evolution, compels us to regard the protyle³²³ of each plane as only a mediate phase assumed by Substance in its passage from abstract, into full objectivity.

Cosmic Ideation is said to be non-existent during Pralayic periods, for the simple reason that there is no one, and nothing, to perceive its effects. There can be no manifestation of Consciousness, semi-consciousness, or even “unconscious purposiveness,” except through the

 

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329 THE UNIVERSAL ILLUSION.

vehicle of matter; that is to say, on this our plane, wherein human consciousness in its normal state cannot soar beyond what is known as transcendental metaphysics, it is only through some molecular aggregation or fabric that Spirit wells up in a stream of individual or sub-conscious subjectivity. And as Matter existing apart from perception is a mere abstraction, both of these aspects of the Absolute—Cosmic Substance and Cosmic Ideation—are mutually inter-dependent. In strict accuracy—to avoid confusion and misconception—the term “Matter” ought to be applied to the aggregate of objects of possible perception, and “Substance” to noumena; for inasmuch as the phenomena of our plane are the creation of the perceiving Ego—the modifications of its own subjectivity—all the “states of matter representing the aggregate of perceived objects” can have but a relative and purely phenomenal existence for the children of our plane. As the modern Idealists would say, the co-operation of Subject and Object results in the Sense-object or phenomenon. But this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is the same on all other planes; that the co-operation of the two on the planes of their septenary differentiation results in a septenary aggregate of phenomena which are likewise non-existent per se, though concrete realities for the Entities of whose experience they form a part, in the same manner as the rocks and rivers around us are real from the stand-point of a physicist, though unreal illusions of sense from that of the metaphysician. It would be an error to say, or even conceive such a thing. From the stand-point of the highest metaphysics, the whole Universe, gods included, is an illusion; but the illusion of him who is in himself an illusion differs on every plane of consciousness; and we have no more right to dogmatise about the possible nature of the perceptive faculties of an Ego on, say, the sixth plane, than we have to identify our perceptions with, or make them a standard for, those of an ant, in its mode of consciousness. The pure object apart from consciousness³²⁴ is unknown to us, while living on the plane of our three-dimensional World; as we know only the mental states it excites in the perceiving Ego. And, so long as the contrast of Subject and Object endures—to wit, as long as we enjoy our five senses and no more, and do not know how to divorce our all-perceiving Ego (the Higher Self) from the thraldom of these senses—so long will it be impossible for the personal Ego to break through the barrier which separates it from a

 

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330 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

knowledge of things in themselves (or Substance). That Ego, progressing in an arc of ascending subjectivity, must exhaust the experience of every plane. But not till the Unit is merged in the all, whether on this or any other plane, and Subject and Object alike vanish in the absolute negation of the Nirvanic State (negation, again, only from our plane), is scaled that peak of Omniscience—the Knowledge of things-in-themselves; and the solution of the yet more awful riddle approached, before which even the highest Dhyan Chohan must bow in silence and ignorance—the unspeakable mystery of that which is called by the Vedantins, the Parabrahmam.

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

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

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

“From Intelligence (called Mahat in the Purânas) associated with Ignorance (Iswar, as a personal deity) attended by its projective power, in which the quality of dulness (tamas, insensibility) predominates, proceeds Ether—from ether, air; from air, heat; from heat, water; and from water, earth “with everything on it.” “From this, from this same self, was the Ether produced,” says the Veda. (Taittirîya Upanishad II. 1).

It becomes thus evident that it is not this Ether—sprung at the fourth

331 ETHER, AS ITS NOUMENON.

remove from an Emanation of Intelligence “associated with Ignorance”—which is the high principle, the deific Entity worshipped by the Greeks and Latins under the name of “Pater omnipotens Æther,” and “Magnus Æther” in its collective aggregates. The septenary gradation, and the innumerable subdivisions and differences, made by the ancients between the powers of Ether collectively, from its outward fringe of effects, with which our Science is so familiar, up to the “Imponderable Substance,” once admitted as the “Ether of Space,” now about to be rejected, has been ever a vexing riddle for every branch of knowledge. The mythologists and symbologists of our day, confused by this incomprehensible glorification, on the one hand, and degradation on the other, of the same deified entity and in the same religious systems, are often driven to the most ludicrous mistakes. The Church, firm as a rock in each and all of her early errors of interpretation, has made of Ether the abode of her Satanic legions.³²⁵ The whole hierarchy of the “Fallen” angels is there; the Cosmocratores—or the “world bearers,” (according to Bossuet); Mundi Tenentes—the “world holders,” as Tertullian calls them; and Mundi Domini “world dominations,” or rather dominators, the Curbati, or “Curved,” etc., who thus make of the stars and celestial orbs in their course—Devils!

The difference made between the seven states of Ether (itself one of the Seven Cosmic principles), while the Æther of the Ancients is universal Fire, may be seen in the injunctions by Zoroaster and Psellus, respectively. The former said: “Consult it only when it is without form or figure,” absque formâ et figurâ, which means without flames or burning coals. “When it has a form—heed it not,” teaches Psellus; “but when it is formless, obey it, for it is then sacred fire, and all it will reveal thee, shall be true.”³²⁶ This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of Akâsa, has in its turn several aspects or “principles.”

All the ancient nations deified Æther in its imponderable aspect and potency. Virgil calls Jupiter, Pater omnipotens Æther, “the great Æther.”³²⁷ The Hindus have also placed it among their deities; under the name of Akâsa (the synthesis of Æther). And the author of the Homoiomerian

 

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332 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

System of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless Ether where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned—an Occult teaching.

It thus becomes clear that it is from Ether in its highest synthetic aspect, once anthropomorphised, that sprung the first idea of a personal creative deity. With the philosophical Hindus the elements are Tamas, i.e., “unenlightened by intellect, which they obscure.”

We have now to exhaust the question of the mystical meaning of “Primordial Chaos” and of the Root-Principle, and show how they were connected in the ancient philosophies with Akâsa, wrongly translated Æther, and also with Maya (illusion)—of which Ishwara is the male aspect. We shall speak further on of the intelligent “principle,” or rather of the invisible immaterial properties, in the visible and material elements, that “sprung from the primordial Chaos.”

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

It will be an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge by the ancients of those sciences, which have allied themselves in our days in support of the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that those ancients were far better acquainted with the fact of evolution itself, embracing both its physical and spiritual aspects, than we are now. “With the old philosophers, evolution was a universal theorem, a doctrine embracing the whole, and an established principle; while our modern evolutionists are enabled to present us merely with speculative theoretics; with particular, if not wholly negative theorems. It is idle for the representatives of our modern wisdom to close the debate and pretend that the question is settled, merely because the obscure phraseology of the Mosaic, far later, account clashes with the definite exegesis of ‘Exact Science’” (“Isis Unveiled”).

333 WHAT MANU SAYS OF THIS.

If one turns to the “Laws (or Ordinances) of Manu,” one finds the prototype of all these ideas. Mostly lost (to the Western world) in their original form, disfigured by later interpolations and additions, they have, nevertheless, preserved quite enough of their ancient Spirit to show its character. “Removing the darkness, the Self-existent Lord” (Vishnu, Narayana, etc.) becoming manifest, and “wishing to produce beings from his Essence, created, in the beginning, water alone. In that he cast seed. . . . . That became a golden Egg.” (V. 6, 7, 8, 9.) Whence this Self-existent Lord? It is called this, and is spoken of as “Darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable as if wholly in sleep.” (V. 5.) Having dwelt in that Egg for a whole divine year, he “who is called in the world Brahmâ,” splits that Egg in two, and from the upper portion he forms the heaven, from the lower the earth, and from the middle the sky and “the perpetual place of waters.” (12, 13.)

But there is, directly following these verses, something more important for us, as it corroborates entirely our esoteric teachings. From verse 14 to 36, evolution is given in the order described in the Esoteric philosophy. This cannot be easily gainsaid. Even Medhâtithi, the son of Viraswâmin, and the author of the Commentary, “the Manubhâsya,” whose date, according to the western Orientalists, is 1,000 a.d., helps us with his remarks to the elucidation of the truth. He showed himself either unwilling to give out more, because he knew that truth which has to be kept from the profane, or else he was really puzzled. Still, what he does give out makes the septenary principle in men and nature plain enough.

Let us begin with Chapter I. of the “Ordinances” or “Laws” after the Self-existent Lord, the unmanifesting Logos of the Unknown “Darkness,” becomes manifested in the golden Egg. It is from this “Egg,” from——

(11.) That which is the indiscrete (undifferentiated) cause, eternal, which Is and Is not, from It issued that male who is called in the world Brahmâ. . . . .

Here we find, as in all genuine philosophical systems, even the “Egg” or the Circle (or Zero), boundless Infinity, referred to as It,³²⁸ and Brahmâ, the first unit only, referred to as the male god, i.e., the fructifying Principle. It is  or 10 (ten) the Decade. On the plane of the Septenary or our World only, it is called Brahmâ. On that of the Unified Decade in the realm of Reality, this male Brahmâ is an illusion.

(14.) “From Self (âtmanah) he created mind, (1) which is and is not;

 

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334 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(2) and from mind, Ego-ism (Self-Consciousness) the ruler; (3) the Lord.”

(1.) The mind is Manas. Medhâtithi, the commentator, justly observes here that it is the reverse of this and shows already interpolation and rearranging; for it is Manas that springs from Ahamkara or (Universal) Self-Consciousness, as Manas in the microcosm springs from Mahat, or Maha-Buddhi (Buddhi, in man). For Manas is dual, and as shown and translated by Colebrooke, “is serving both for sense and action, is an organ by affinity, being cognate with the rest.” “The rest” means, here, that Manas, our fifth principle (the fifth, because the body was named the first, which is the reverse of the true philosophical order)³²⁹ is in affinity both with Atma-Buddhi and with the lower four principles. Hence, our teaching: namely, that Manas follows Atma-Buddhi to Devachan, and that the lower (dregs, the residue of) Manas remains with Kama rupa, in Limbus, or Kama-loka, the abode of the “Shells.”

(2.) Such is the meaning of Manas, which “is, and is not.”

(3.) Medhâtithi translates it as “the one conscious of the I,” or Ego, not “ruler,” as the Orientalists do. Thus they translate verse 16: “He also, having made the subtle parts of those six (the Great Self and the five organs of sense) of unmeasured brightness, to enter into the elements of Self (Atmamâtrâsu) created all beings.”

When, according to Medhâtithi, it ought to read mâtrâ-Chit instead of “Atmamâtrâsu,” and thus be made to say:

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

This latter reading must be the correct one, since he, the Self, is what we call Atmâ, and thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of the “six.” Such is also the opinion of the editor of Mânava-dharma Shâstra, who seems to have intuitionally entered far deeper into the spirit of the philosophy than has the translator of the “Ordinances of Manu,” the late Dr. Burnell. For he hesitates little between the text of Kulluka and the Commentaries of Medhâtithi. Rejecting the tanmâtra, or subtle elements, and the âtmamâtrâsu of Kulluka, he says, applying the principles to the Cosmic Self: “The six appear rather to be the manas plus the five principles of Ether, air, fire, water, earth”; “having united five portions of these six with the spiritual element (the seventh) he (thus) created all existing things”; âtmamâtra is therefore the spiritual atom as opposed to the elementary, not reflective “elements of himself.” Thus he corrects the translation of verse—“17. As the subtle elements of bodily forms of This One depend on these six, so

 

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335 THE SEVEN PRAKRITIS.

the wise call his form çarira” (sharira)”—and he says that “Elements” mean here portions or parts (or principles), which reading is borne out by verse 19, which says:

“19. This non-eternal (Universe) arises then from the Eternal, by means of the subtle elements of forms of those seven very glorious principles” (purusha).

Commenting upon which, according to Medhâtithi, the Editor remarks that “the five elements plus mind (Manas) and Self-Consciousness (Ahamkara)³³⁰ are meant”; “subtle elements,” as before (meaning) “five portions of form” (or principles). For verse 20 shows it, when saying of these (five elements, or “five portions of form” (rupa, plus Manas and Self-Consciousness) that they constitute the “seven purusha,” or principles, called in the Purânas the “Seven Prâkritis.”

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

This creative Brahmâ, issuing from the mundane or golden egg, unites in himself both the male and the female principles. He is, in short, the same as all the creative Protologoi. Of Brahmâ, however, it could not be said, as of Dionysos: “πρωτόγονον διφυῆ τρίγονον Βακχεῖον ῞Ανακτα ῞Αγριον ἀρρητὸν κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμορφν”—a lunar Jehovah—Bacchus truly, with David dancing nude before his symbol in the ark—because no licentious Dionysia were ever established in his name and honour. All such public worship was exoteric, and the great universal symbols were distorted universally, as those of Krishna are now by the Vallabachâryas of Bombay, the followers of the infant god. But are these popular gods the true Deity? Are they the Apex and synthesis of the sevenfold creation, man included? Never! Each and all are one of the rungs of that septenary ladder of Divine Consciousness, pagan as Christian. For Ain-Soph also is said to manifest through the Seven Letters of Jehovah’s name who, having usurped the place of the Unknown Limitless, was given by his devotees his Seven Angels of the Presence—his Seven Principles. Yet they are mentioned in almost every school. In the pure Sankhya philosophy mahat, ahamkara and the five tanmâtras are called the seven Prakritis (or Natures), and they are counted from Maha-Buddhi or Mahat down to Earth. (See Sánkhya Karika III. and Commentaries.)

Nevertheless, however disfigured for Rabbinical purposes is the original Elohistic version by Ezra, however repulsive at times even the

 

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336 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

esoteric meaning in the Hebrew scrolls, which is far more so than its outward veil or cloaking may be³³¹—once the Jehovistic portions are eliminated, the Mosaic books are found full of purely occult and priceless knowledge, especially in the first six chapters.

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

Let anyone read the first verses of chapter i. of Genesis and reflect upon them. There “God” commands to another “god,” who does his bidding—even in the cautious English Protestant translation of James the First’s authorised edition.

In the “beginning,” the Hebrew language having no word to express the idea of Eternity,³³² “God” fashions the heaven and the Earth; and the latter is “without form and void,” while the former is no Heaven in fact, but the “Deep,” Chaos, with darkness upon its face.³³³

“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters” (v. 2), or the great Deep of the Infinite Space. And this Spirit is Nara-yana, or Vishnu.

 

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337 DARKNESS, IS LIGHT.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament. . .” (v. 6), and “God,” the second, obeyed and “made the firmament” (v. 7). “And God said let there be light,” and “there was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but in the Kabala, the androgyne “Adam Kadmon,” or Sephira (Spiritual light), for they are one; or, according to the Chaldean “Book of Numbers,” the secondary angels, the first being the Elohim who are the aggregate of that “fashioning” god. For to whom are those words of command addressed? And who is it who commands? That which commands is the eternal Law, and he who obeys, the Elohim, the known quantity acting in and with x, or the coefficient of the unknown quantity, the Forces of the one Force. All this is Occultism, and is found in the archaic stanzas. It is perfectly immaterial whether we call these “Forces” the Dhyan Chohans, or the Ophanim, as St. John does.

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

In the Sepher Jezireh, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it, the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.³³⁴ “One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be Its name, which liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit”;³³⁵ and this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphised by the Christian Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air (the Father), the creative element; and then number Three, Water (the Mother), proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic four, the Arba-il.³³⁶ “When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a point (primordial point, or the first Sephiroth, air, or Holy Ghost), shaped into a sacred form (the ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly man), and covered it with a rich and splendid garment, that is the world.” ³³⁷

 

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338 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“He maketh the wind His messengers, flaming Fire His servants,” says the Jezireh, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerised Elements,³³⁸ and that the Spirit permeates every atom in Kosmos. This “primordial Substance” is called by some Chaos: Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World after it had been impregnated by the Spirit of that which broods over the Primeval Waters, or Chaos. It is by being reflected in it, say the Kabalists, that the brooding Principle created the phantasmagoria of a visible, manifested Universe. Chaos, before—Ether, after, the “reflection”; it is still the deity that pervades all Space and things. It is the invisible, imponderable Spirit of things and the invisible, but too tangible fluid that radiates from the fingers of the healthy magnetizer, for it is Vital Electricity—Life itself. Called in derision by the Marquis de Mirville “the nebulous Almighty,” it is termed by the Theurgists and Occultists to this day “the living Fire”; and there is not a Hindu who practises at dawn a certain kind of meditation but knows its effects.³³⁹ It is the “Spirit of

 

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339 THE MYSTIC FIRE.

Light” and Magnes. As truly expressed by an opponent, Magus and magnes are two branches growing from the same trunk and shooting forth the same resultants. And in this appellation of “living fire” we may also discover the meaning of the puzzling sentence in the Zend-Avesta saying that there is “a fire that gives knowledge of the future, science, and amiable speech,” i.e., develops an extraordinary eloquence in the sybil, the sensitive, and even some orators.

This “fire” is spoken of in all the Hindu Books, as also in the Kabalistic works. The Zohar explains it as the “white hidden fire, in the Rēšā Ḥiwwārā” (the White Head), whose Will causes the fiery fluid to flow in 370 currents in every direction of the universe. It is identical with the “Serpent that runs with 370 leaps” of the Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā, which, when the “Perfect Man,” the Metatron, is raised, i.e., when the divine man indwells in the animal man, it, the Serpent, becomes three spirits, that is to say, is Atma-Buddhi-Manas, in our theosophical phraseology. (Vide Vol. II., Part II., “The Many Meanings of the War in Heaven.” [p. 492])

Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance—one of whose principles is Ether—are one, and include the elements, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyan Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc., etc. The Ether of science—the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of Chemistry—constitutes, so to speak, the rude material (relatively) out of which the above-named “Builders,” following the plan traced out for them eternally in the divine thought, fashion the systems in the Cosmos. They are “myths,” we are told. “No more so than Ether and the Atoms,” we answer. The two latter are absolute necessities of physical science; the “Builders” are as absolute a necessity of metaphysics. We are twitted with: “You never saw them.” We ask the materialists: “Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your force?” Moreover, one of the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, the coadjutor of Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural Selection alone to account for the physical form of Man, admits the guiding action of “higher intelligences” as a “necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe” (A. R. Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 1870, [p. 360]).

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

Indeed, there are few Myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have an historical as well as a scientific foundation. “Myths,” justly observes Pococke, “are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood.” The one prevailing, most distinct idea—found in all ancient teaching,

340 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first “creation” of our Globe with all its products, organic and inorganic (strange word for an Occultist to use)—is that the whole Kosmos has sprung from the divine thought. This thought impregnates matter, which is co-eternal with the one reality; and all that lives and breathes evolves from the emanations of the one Immutable—Parabrahm = Mulaprakriti, the eternal one-root. The former of these is, so to say, the aspect of the central point turned inward into regions quite inaccessible to human intellect, and is absolute abstraction; whereas, in its aspect as Mulaprakriti—the eternal root of all,—it gives one some hazy comprehension at least of the Mystery of Being.

“Therefore, it was taught in the inner temples that this visible universe of spirit and matter is but the concrete image of the ideal abstraction; it was built on the model of the first divine idea. Thus our universe existed from Eternity in a latent state. The soul animating this purely spiritual universe is the central sun, the highest deity itself. It was not the One who built the concrete form of the idea, but the first-begotten; and as it was constructed on the geometrical figure of the dodecahedron,³⁴⁰ the first-begotten ‘was pleased to employ twelve thousand years in its creation.’ The latter number is expressed in the Tyrrhenian cosmogony,³⁴¹ which shows man created in the sixth millenium. This agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 ‘years’³⁴² and with the Hebrew computation. But it is the exoteric form of it. The secret computation explains that the ‘twelve thousand and the 6,000 years’ are years of Brahma—one day of Brahmâ being equal to 4,320,000,000 years. Sanchoniathon³⁴³ in his Cosmogony, declares that when the wind (spirit) became enamoured of its own principles (the chaos), an intimate union took place, which connection was called pothos, and from this sprang the seed of all. And the chaos knew not its own production, for it was senseless; but from its embrace with the wind was generated Môt, or the ilus (mud).³⁴⁴ From this proceeded the spores of creation and the generation of the universe.

“Zeus-Zen (æther), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (the water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona—the former god also representing ether—the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of light; the goddess earth and water again; Mithras,³⁴⁵ 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 (female, or passive, elements of Cosmical generation).

 

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341 ONE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

Mithras is the son of Bordj, the Persian mundane mountain,³⁴⁶ from which he flashed out as a radiant ray of light. Brahmâ, the fire-god, and his prolific consort; and the Hindu Agni, the refulgent deity from whose body issue a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame, and in whose honour certain Brahmans preserve to this day a perpetual fire; Siva, personated by the mundane mountain of the Hindus, the Meru: these terrific fire-gods, who are said in the legend to have descended from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah, in a pillar of fire, and a dozen other Archaic double-sexed deities, all loudly proclaim their hidden meaning. And what could these dual myths mean but the psycho-chemical principle of primordial creation? The first Evolution in its triple manifestation of spirit, force and matter; the divine correllation at its starting point, allegorized as the marriage of Fire and water, products of electrifying spirit, union of the male active principle with the female passive element, which become the parents of their tellurian child, cosmic matter, the prima materia, whose soul is Æther, and whose shadow is the astral light!” (Isis Unveiled).

The fragments of the systems that have now reached us are rejected as absurd fables. Nevertheless, occult Science—having survived even the great Flood that submerged the antediluvian giants and with them their very memory, save in the Secret Doctrine, the Bible and other Scriptures—still holds the Key to all the world problems.

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

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342‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ IV. CHAOS—THEOS—KOSMOS.

These three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has defined it, “Space, the all containing uncontained, is the primary embodiment of simply Unity. . . . boundless extension.”³⁴⁷ But, he asks again, “boundless extension of what?”—and makes the correct reply—“The unknown container of all, the Unknown FIRST CAUSE.” This is a most correct definition and answer, most esoteric and true, from every aspect of occult teaching.

SPACE, which, in their ignorance and iconoclastic tendency to destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have proclaimed “an abstract idea” and a void, is, in reality, the container and the body of the Universe with its seven principles. It is a body of limitless extent, whose PRINCIPLES, in Occult phraseology—each being in its turn a septenary—manifest in our phenomenal world only the grossest fabric of their sub-divisions. “No one has ever seen the Elements in their fulness,” the Doctrine teaches. We have to search for our Wisdom in the original expressions of the primeval people and in their synonyms. Even the latest of them—the Jews—show in their Kabalistic teachings this idea, e.g., the seven-headed Serpent of Space, called “the great Sea.” “In the beginning, the Alhim created the heavens and the earth; the 6 (Sephiroth). . . . They created six, and on these all things are based. And those (six) depend upon the seven forms of the cranium up to Dignity of all Dignities (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b.6), see part ii., vol. ii. “Ancient Divisions and the Mystic Numbers.”

Now Wind, Air and Spirit have ever been synonymous with every nation. Pneuma (Spirit) and Anemos (the wind) with the Greeks, Spiritus and Ventus with the Latins, were convertible terms even if dissociated from the original idea of the breath of life. In the “Forces” of Science we see but the material effect of the spiritual affect of one or the other of the four primordial Elements, transmitted to us by the 4th Race, as we shall transmit Ether (or rather the gross subdivision of it) in its fulness to the Sixth Root Race. This is explained in the text of this and the following Book.

“Chaos” is called senseless by the ancients, because it represented and contained in itself (Chaos and Space being synonymous) all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made of Ether, the fifth element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek philosophers is not its dregs—of which indeed they knew more

 

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343 THE UNION OF CHAOS AND SPIRIT.

than science does now—which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Akâsa of the Hindus; the Ether accepted in physics is but one of its subdivisions, on our plane,—the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as good effects.

On account of the Essence of Æther, or the Unseen Space, being held divine as the supposed veil of Deity, it was regarded as the medium between this life and the next one. The ancients considered that when the directing active “Intelligences” (the gods) retired from any portion of Ether in our Space—the four realms which they superintend—then that particular place was left in the possession of evil, so called by reason of the absence of the Good from it.

“The existence of spirit in the common mediator, the ether, is denied by materialism; while theology makes of it a personal god. But the Kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in ether, the elements represent but matter—the blind cosmic forces of nature; while Spirit represents the intelligence which directs them. The Aryan, Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchoniathon and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz., that the æther and chaos, or, in the Platonic language, mind and matter, were the two primeval and eternal principles of the universe, utterly independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying intellectual principle; the chaos, a shapeless liquid principle, without ‘form or sense,’ from the union of which two sprung into existence the universe, or rather the universal world, the first androgynous deity—the chaotic matter becoming its body, and ether its soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermias, ‘chaos, from this union with spirit, obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos (the first-born) light.’³⁴⁸ This is the universal trinity, based on the metaphysical conceptions of the ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man, who is a compound of intellect and matter, the microcosm of the macrocosm, or great universe.” (Isis Unveiled.)

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

That Chaos, however, became the “Soul of the World,” according to Plato and the Pythagoreans. According to Hindu teaching, Deity in the shape of Æther (Akâsa) pervades all things; and it was called there-

 

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344 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

fore by the theurgists “the living fire,” the “Spirit of Light,” and sometimes Magnes. It was the highest Deity itself which, according to Plato, built the Universe in the geometrical form of the Dodecahedron; and its “first begotten” was born of Chaos and Primordial Light (the Central Sun). This “First-Born,” however, was only the aggregate of the Host of the “Builders,” the first constructive Forces, who are called in ancient Cosmogonies the Ancients (born of the Deep, or Chaos) and the “First Point.” He is the Tetragrammaton, so-called, at the head of the Seven lower Sephiroth. This was the belief of the Chaldees. “These Chaldeans,” writes Philo, the Jew, speaking very flippantly of the first instructors of his ancestors, “were of opinion that the Kosmos, among the things that exist (?) is a single point, either being itself God (Theos) or that in it is God, comprehending the soul of all things.” (See his “Migration of Abraham,” 32.)

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

There, also, Brahmâ is the Theos, evolving out of Chaos, or the great “Deep,” the waters, over which Spirit=space, personified by ayana—the Spirit moving over the face of the future boundless Kosmos—is silently hovering, in the first hour of re-awakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta-Sacha, the great Serpent of Eternity, of which Western theology, ignorant of the Kabala, the only key that opens the secrets of the Bible, has made—the Devil. It is the first triangle or the Pythagorean triad, the “God of the three Aspects,” before it is transformed through its perfect quadrature of the infinite Circle into the “four-faced Brahmâ.”

“Of him who is and yet is not, from the not-being, Eternal Cause, is born the Being-Purusha,” says Manu, the legislator.

In Isis Unveiled, it is said that:

“In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed God, is represented by a snake emblem of Eternity encircling a water urn, with its head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with its breath. In this case the serpent is the Agathodæmon, the good spirit: in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodæmon—the bad one. In the Scandinavian Eddas, the honey dew, the fruit of the gods and of the creative busy Yggdrasill (bees), falls during the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive principle of creation, it typifies the

345 THE BIRTH OF MIND.

creation of the universe out of water; this dew is the astral light in one of its combinations, and possesses creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant world created out of water, and all beings originating from this prima materia. Moses teaches that only earth and water can bring a living soul: and we read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until the Eternal caused it to rain upon earth. In the Mexican Popol-Vuh, man is created out of mud or clay (terre glaise), taken from under the water. Brahmâ creates the great Muni (or first man) seated on his lotus, only after having called into being spirits who thus enjoyed over mortals a priority of existence, and he creates him out of water, air and earth. Alchemists claim that the primordial or pre-Adamic earth, when reduced to its first substance, is in its second stage of transformation like clear water, the first being the alkahest proper. This primordial substance is said to contain within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man; it has not only all the elements of his physical being, but even the “breath of life” itself in a latent state, ready to be awakened. This it derives from the “incubation” of the “Spirit of God” upon the face of the waters—chaos: in fact, this substance is chaos itself. From this it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his “homunculi”; and this is why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained that water was the principle of all things in nature.³⁴⁹ . . . Job says, in chap. xxvi. 5, that “dead things are formed from under the waters, and inhabitants thereof.” 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.”

“In the primordial state of the creation,” says Polier’s Mythologie des Indous, “the rudimental universe, submerged in water, reposed in the bosom of Vishnu. Sprung from this chaos and darkness, Brahmâ, the architect of the world, poised on a lotus-leaf, floated (moved) upon the waters, unable to discern anything but water and darkness.” Perceiving such a dismal state of things, Brahmâ soliloquises in consternation: “Who am I? Whence came I?” Then he hears a voice:³⁵⁰ “Direct your thoughts to Bhagavat.” Brahmâ, rising from his natatory position, seats himself upon the lotus in an attitude of contemplation, and reflects upon the Eternal, who, pleased with this evidence of piety, disperses the primeval darkness and opens his understanding. “After this Brahmâ issues from the universal egg (infinite chaos) as light, for his understanding is now opened, and he sets himself to work: he moves on the eternal waters, with the spirit of God within himself; and in his capacity of mover of the waters he is Vishnu, or Narayana.” This is

 

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346 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

exoteric, of course, yet in its main idea as identical as possible with the Egyptian cosmogony, which shows in its opening sentences Athtor,³⁵¹ or Mother Night (which represents illimitable darkness), as the primeval element which covered the infinite abyss, animated by water and the universal spirit of the Eternal, dwelling alone in Chaos. Similarly in the Jewish Scriptures, the history of the creation opens with the spirit of God and his creative emanation—another Deity.³⁵²

The Zohar teaches that it is the primordial elements—the trinity of Fire, Air and Water—the four cardinal points, and all the Forces of Nature, which form collectively the Voice of the Will Memrab, or the “Word,” the Logos of the Absolute Silent all. “The indivisible point, limitless and unknowable” spreads itself over the endless space, and thus forms a veil (the Mulaprakriti of Parabraham) which conceals this Absolute point. (Vide infra).

In the cosmogonies of all the nations it is the “Architects” synthesized by Demiurgos (in the Bible the “Elohim”), who fashion Kosmos out of Chaos, and who are the collective Theos, “male-female,” Spirit and matter. “By a series (yom) of foundations (hasoth) the Alhim caused earth and heaven to be” (Gen. ii., 4). In the Bible it is first Alhim, then Jahva-Alhim, and finally Jehovah—after the separation of the sexes in chapter iv. of Genesis. It is noticeable that nowhere, except in the later, the last Cosmogonies of our Fifth race, is the ineffable and unutterable Name³⁵³—the symbol of the Unknown Deity, which was used only in the Mysteries—used in connection with the “Creation” of the Universe. It is the “Movers,” the “Runners,” the theoi (from θέειν, “to run”), who do the work of formation, the “Messengers” of the manvantaric law, who have now become in Christianity the “messengers” (malachim); and it seems the same in Hinduism or early Brahmanism. For it is not Brahmâ who creates in the Rig Veda, but the Prajâpati, the “Lords of Being,” who are the Rishis; the word Rishi (according to Professor Mahadeo Kunte) being connected with the word to move, to lead on, applied to them in their terrestrial character, when, as Patriarchs, they lead their hosts on the Seven Rivers.

Moreover, the very word “God” in the singular, embracing all the gods—or theos from theoi—came to the “superior” civilized nations from a strange source, one entirely and as pre-eminently phallic as the

 

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347 THE MYSTIC ELEMENTS.

sincere, open-spoken lingham of India. The attempt to derive God from the Anglo-Saxon synonym “good” is an abandoned idea, for in no other language, in all of which the term varies more or less, from the Persian Khoda down to the Latin Deus, has an instance been found of a name of God being derived from the attribute of Goodness. To the Latin races it comes from the Aryan Dyaus (the Day); to the Slavonian, from the Greek Bacchus (Bagh-bog); and to the Saxon races directly from the Hebrew Yodh or Jod. The latter is י, the number-letter 10, male and female, and Jod the phallic hook:—hence the Saxon Godh, the Germanic Gott, and the English God. This symbolic term may be said to represent the Creator of physical “Humanity,” on the terrestrial plane; but surely it had nothing to do with the formation or “Creation” of Spirit, gods, or Kosmos!

Chaos-Theos-Kosmos, the triple deity, is all in all. Therefore, it is said to be male and female, good and evil, positive and negative: the whole series of contrasted qualities. When latent (in pralaya) it is incognizable and becomes the unknowable Deity. It can be known only in its active functions; hence as matter-Force and living Spirit, the correlations and outcome, or the expression, on the visible plane, of the ultimate and ever-to-be unknown unity.

In its turn this triple unit is the producer of the four primary “Elements,”³⁵⁴ which are known in our visible terrestrial nature as the seven (so far the five) Elements, each divisible into forty-nine (or seven times seven) sub-elements, with about seventy of which Chemistry is acquainted. Every Cosmical Element such as Fire, Air, Water, Earth, partaking of the qualities and defects of their Primaries, are in their nature Good and Evil, Force (or Spirit) and Matter, etc., etc.; and each, therefore, is at one and the same time Life and Death, Health and Disease, Action and Reaction. (See Section XIV., “The Four Elements.”) They are ever and constantly forming matter under the never-ceasing impulse of the One Element (the incognizable), represented in the world of phenomena by Æther, or “the immortal gods who give birth and life to all.”

In “the Philosophical writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol” (translated in Mr. Isaac Myer’s Kabbalah, just published) it is said on the structure of the Universe, “R. Yehudah began, it is written: ‘Elohim said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.’ Come, see, at the time that the Holy. . . . created the World, He

 

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348 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

created 7 heavens above, 7 earths below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7 years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the world has been. The Holy is the seventh of all,” etc. (p. 415).

This, besides showing a strange identity with the cosmogony of the Purânas (e.g., Vishnu Purâna 1st Book), corroborates with regard to number seven, all our teachings as briefly given in “Esoteric Buddhism.”

The Hindus have an endless series of allegories to express this idea. In the primordial Chaos, before it became developed into the Seven Oceans (Sapta Samudra)—emblematical of the seven gunas (conditioned qualities) composed of trigunas (Satwa, Rajas and Tamas, see Purânas)—lie latent both Amrita (immortality) and Visha (poison, death, evil). This allegory is found in the “Churning of the Ocean” by the gods. Amrita is beyond any guna, for it is unconditioned per se; yet when fallen into the phenomenal creation it got mixed up with Evil, Chaos, with latent theos in it, and before Kosmos was evolved. Hence, one finds Vishnu—standing here for eternal Law—periodically calling forth Kosmos into activity—“churning out of the primitive Ocean (boundless Chaos) the Amrita of Eternity, reserved only for the gods and devas; and he has to employ in the task Nagas and Asuras—demons in exoteric Hinduism. The whole allegory is highly philosophical, and we find it repeated in every philosophical System. Plato, having fully embraced the ideas of Pythagoras—who had brought them from India—compiled and published them in a form more intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the Greek Sage. Thus the Kosmos is “the Son” with Plato, having for his father and mother the Divine Thought and Matter.³⁵⁵

“The Egyptians,” says Dunlap,³⁵⁶ “distinguish between an older and younger Horus; the former the brother of Osiris, the latter the son of Osiris and Isis.” The first is the Idea of the world remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in darkness before the creation of the world.” The second Horus is this “Idea” going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter, and assuming an actual existence.³⁵⁷

“The Mundane God, eternal, boundless, young and old, of winding form,”³⁵⁸ say the Chaldean oracles.

This “winding form” is a figure to express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient priests were perfectly well acquainted, though its name was invented by the Martinists.

Now Cosmolatry has the finger of scorn pointed at its superstitions by modern Science, which ought, however, as advised by a French

 

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349 THE MANY ARE ONE.‌

savant, before laughing at it “to remodel entirely its own system of cosmo-pneumatological education.” Satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parvum. Cosmolatry like Pantheism may be made to yield in its ultimate expression the words applied to Vishnu . . . . “He is only the ideal Cause of the Potencies to be created in the work of creation; and from him proceed the potencies to be created, after they have become the real cause. Save that one ideal cause, there is no other to which the world can be referred. . . . . Through the potency of that cause, every created thing comes by its proper nature.” (Original Sanskrit Texts, Part iv., pp. 32, 33.)

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§ V. ON THE HIDDEN DEITY, ITS SYMBOLS AND GLYPHS.

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

In the Zohar, En-Soph is also the One, and the infinite Unity. This was known to the very few learned Fathers of the Church, who were aware that Jehovah was but a third rate potency and no “highest” God. But while complaining bitterly of the Gnostics and saying . . . “our Heretics hold . . . that Propator is known but to the Only begotten Son³⁵⁹ (who is Brahmâ among the rest) that is to the mind” (nous), Irenæus never mentioned that the Jews did the same in their real secret books. Valentinus, “the profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” held that “there was a perfect aion who existed before Bythos, or Buthon (the first father of unfathomable nature, which is the second Logos) called Propator.” It is thus Aion, who springs as a Ray from Ain-Soph (who does not create), and Aion, who creates, or through whom, rather, everything is created, or evolves.

 

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350 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

For, as the Basilidians taught, “there was a supreme god, Abraxax, by whom was created mind” (Mahat, in Sanskrit, Nous in Greek). “From Mind proceeded the word, Logos, from the word, Providence (Divine Light, rather), then from it Virtue and Wisdom in Principalities, Powers, Angels, etc., etc.” By these (Angels) the 365 Æons were created. “Amongst the lowest, indeed, and those who made this world, he (Basilides) sets last of all the God of the Jews, whom he denies to be God (and very rightly), affirming he is one of the angels” (Ibid.). Here, then, we find the same system as in the Purânas, wherein the Incomprehensible drops a seed, which becomes the golden egg, from which Brahmâ is produced. Brahmâ produces Mahat, etc., etc. True Esoteric philosophy, however, speaks neither of “creation” nor of “evolution” in the sense the exoteric religions do. All these personified Powers are not evolutions from one another, but so many aspects of the one and sole manifestation of the Absolute all. The same system as the gnostic prevails in the Sephirothal aspects of Ain-Soph, yet, as these aspects are in Space and Time, a certain order is maintained in their successive appearances. Therefore, it becomes impossible not to take notice of the great changes that the Zohar has undergone under the handling of generations of Christian Mystics. For, even in the metaphysics of the Talmud, the “lower Face” (or “Lesser Countenance”), the microprosopus, in fact, could never be placed on the plane of the same abstract ideal as the Higher, or “Greater Countenance,” macroprosopus. The latter is, in the Chaldean Kabala, a pure abstraction; the Word or Logos, or Dabar (in Hebrew), which Word, though it becomes in fact a plural number, or “Words”—D(a)B(a)Rim, when it reflects itself, or falls into the aspect of a Host (of angels, or Sephiroth, “numbers”) is still collectively One, and on the ideal plane a nought—0, a “No-thing.” It is without form or being, “with no likeness with anything else.” (Franck, “Die Kabbala,” p. 126.) And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who stands next God, “the Second God,” and “the second God who is his (Highest God’s) Wisdom” (Philo. Quæst. et Solut). Deity is not God. It is nothing, and darkness. It is nameless, and therefore called Ain-Soph—“the word Ayin meaning nothing.” See Franck “Die Kabbala,” p. 153. See also Section XII., “Theogony of the Creative Gods.” The “Highest God” (the unmanifested Logos) is its Son.

Nor are most of the gnostic systems, which come down to us mutilated by the Church Fathers, anything better than the distorted shells of the original speculations. Nor were they open to the public or reader, at any time; i.e., had their hidden meaning or esotericism been revealed, it would have been no more an esoteric teaching, and this could never be. Alone Marcus (the chief of the Marcosians, 2nd century), who taught

351 THE GNOSTIC IDEA.

that deity had to be viewed under the symbol of four syllables, gave out more of the esoteric truths than any other Gnostic. But even he was never well understood. For it is only on the surface or dead letter of his Revelation that it appears that God is a quaternary, to wit: “the Ineffable, the Silence, the Father, and Truth,”—in reality it is quite erroneous, and divulges only one more esoteric riddle. This teaching of Marcus was that of the early Kabalists and ours. For he makes of Deity, the number 30 in 4 syllables, which, translated esoterically, means a Triad or Triangle, and a Quaternary or a square, in all seven, which, on the lower plane made the seven divine or secret letters of which the God-name is composed. This requires demonstration. In his “Revelation,” speaking of divine mysteries expressed by means of letters and numbers, Marcus narrates how the “Supreme Tetrad came down unto me (him) from the region which cannot be seen nor named, in a female form, because the world would have been unable to bear her appearing under a male figure,” and revealed to him “the generation of the universe, untold before to either gods or men.”

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

“When first the Inconceivable, the Beingless and Sexless (the Kabalistic Ain-Soph) began to be in labour (i.e., when the hour of manifesting Itself had struck) and desired that Its Ineffable should be born (the first Logos, or Æon, or Aion), and its invisible should be clothed with form, its mouth opened and uttered the word like unto itself. This word (logos) manifested itself in the form of the Invisible One. The uttering of the (ineffable) name (through the word) came to pass in this manner. He (the Supreme Logos) uttered the first word of his name, which is a syllable of four letters. Then the second syllable was added, also of four letters. Then the third, composed of ten letters; and after this the fourth, which contains twelve letters. The whole name consists thus of thirty letters and of four syllables. Each letter has its own accent and way of writing, but neither understands nor ever beholds that form of the whole Name,—no; not even the power of the letter that stands next to Itself (to the Beingless and the Inconceivable.)³⁶⁰ All these sounds when united are the collective Beingless,

 

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352 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

unbegotten Æon, and these are the Angels that are ever beholding the face of the Father³⁶¹ (the Logos, the “second God,” who stands next God, “the Inconceivable,” according to Philo).

This is as plain as ancient esoteric secrecy would make it. It is as Kabalistic, but less veiled than the Zohar in which the mystic names or attributes are also four syllabled, twelve, forty-two, and even seventy-two syllabled words! The Tetrad shows to Marcus the truth in the shape of a naked woman, and letters every limb of that figure, calling her head Ω, her neck Ψ, shoulders and hands Γ, and Χ, etc., etc. In this Sephira is easily recognised, the Crown (Kether) or head being numbered one; the brain or Chochmah, 2; the heart, or Intelligence (Binah), 3; and the other seven Sephiroth representing the limbs of the body. The Sephirothal Tree is the Universe, and Adam Kadmon represents it in the West as Brahmâ represents it in India.

Throughout, the 10 Sephiroth are represented as divided into the three higher, or the spiritual Triad, and the lower Septenary. The true Esoteric meaning of the sacred number seven is cleverly veiled in the Zohar; yet was betrayed by the double way of writing “in the beginning” or Be-resheeth, and Be-raishath, the latter the “Higher, or Upper Wisdom.” As shown by Mr. Macgregor Mathers in his Kabbalah (p. 47), and in the Qabbalah of Mr. T. Myer (p. 233), both of these Kabalists being supported by the best ancient authorities, these words have a dual and secret meaning. Braisheeth bara Elohim means that the six, over which stands the seventh Sephiroth, belong to the lower material class, or, as the author says: “Seven . . . . are applied to the Lower Creation, and three to the spiritual man, the Heavenly Prototypic or first Adam.”

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

He who studies the Kabala will soon find the same idea in the ultimate thought of its authors, the earlier and great Hebrew Initiates, who got this secret Wisdom at Babylonia from the Chaldean Hierophants, while Moses got his in Egypt. The Zohar cannot well be judged by its after translations in Latin and other tongues, as all those ideas were, of course, softened and made to fit in with the views and policy of its Christian arrangers; but in truth its ideas are identical with those of all other religious systems. The various Cosmogonies show that the Archaic Universal Soul was held by every nation as the “Mind” of the Demiurgic Creator; and that it

 

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353 THE EGYPTIAN VERSION.

was called the “Mother,” Sophia with the Gnostics (or the female Wisdom), the Sephira with the Jews, Saraswati or Vâch, with the Hindus, the Holy Ghost being a female Principle.

Hence, born from it, the Kurios or Logos was, with the Greeks, the “God, mind” (nous). “Now Koros (Kurios) signifies the pure and unmixed nature of intellect—wisdom,” says Plato in “Cratylus”; and Kurios is Mercury, the Divine Wisdom, and “mercury is the Sol” (Sun) (“Arnobius” vi., xii.), from whom Thot-Hermes received this divine Wisdom. While, then, the Logoi of all countries and religions are correlative (in their sexual aspects) with the female Soul of the World or the “Great Deep”; the deity, from which these two in one have their being, is ever concealed and called the “Hidden One,” connected only indirectly with Creation,³⁶² as it can act only through the Dual Force emanating from the Eternal Essence. Even Æsculapius, called the “Saviour of all,” is identical, according to ancient classics, with Phta, the Egyptian Creative Intellect (or Divine Wisdom), and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis and Hercules (see Dunlap’s “Mystery of Adonis,” pp. 23 and 95); and Phta is, in one of its aspects, the “Anima Mundi,” the Universal Soul of Plato, the “Divine Spirit” of the Egyptians, the “Holy Ghost” of the early Christians and Gnostics, and the Akâsa of the Hindus, and even, in its lower aspect, the Astral Light. For Phta was originally the “God of the Dead,” he in whose bosom they were received, hence the Limbus of the Greek Christians, or the Astral Light. It is far later that Phta was classed with the Sun-gods, his name signifying “he who opens,” as he is shown to be the first to unveil the face of the dead mummy, to call the soul to life in his bosom. (See Maspero’s “Bulaq Museum.”) Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed, is represented by the snake-emblem of eternity encircling a water-urn, with its head hovering over the “waters” which it incubates with its breath—another form of one and the same idea of “Darkness,” its ray moving on the waters, etc. As “Logos-Soul,” this permutation is called Phta; as Logos-Creator, he becomes Imhot-pou, his son, “the god of the handsome face.” In their primitive characters these two were the first Cosmic Duad, Noot, “space or Sky,” and Noo, “the primordial Waters,” the Androgyne Unity, above whom was the Concealed Breath of Kneph. And all of them had the aquatic animals and plants sacred to them, the ibis, the swan, the goose, the crocodile, and the lotus.

Returning to the Kabalistic deity, this Concealed Unity is then אין סוף [ʾēn sōf] = τό πάν = ἄπειρος, Endless, Boundless, non-Existent, אין [ʾēn] so

 

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354 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

long as the Absolute is within Oulom,³⁶³ the boundless and termless time, as such, En-Soph cannot be the Creator or even the modeller of the Universe, nor can he be Aur (light). Therefore En-Soph is also Darkness. The immutably Infinite and the absolutely Boundless can neither will, think, nor act. To do this it has to become finite, and it does so, by its ray penetrating into the mundane egg—infinite space—and emanating from it as a finite god. All this is left to the ray latent in the one. When the period arrives, the absolute will expands naturally the force within it, according to the Law of which it is the inner and ultimate Essence. The Hebrews did not adopt the egg as a symbol, but they substituted for it the “Duplex heavens,” for, translated correctly, the sentence “God made the heavens and the earth” would read: “In and out of his own essence as a womb (the mundane egg), God created the two heavens.” But the Christians have chosen as the symbol of their Holy Ghost, the dove.

“Whosoever acquaints himself with the ה״ד the Merkāḇāh and the laḥaš (secret speech or incantation), will learn the secret of secrets.” Laḥaš is nearly identical in meaning with Vâch, the hidden power of the Mantras.

When the active period has arrived, from within the eternal essence of Ain-Soph, comes forth Sephira, the active Power, called the Primordial Point, and the Crown, Kether. It is only through her that the “Un-bounded Wisdom” could give a concrete form to the abstract Thought. Two sides of the upper triangle by which the ineffable Essence and the universe—its manifested body—are symbolized, the right side and the base are composed of unbroken lines; the third, the left side, is dotted. It is through the latter that emerges Sephira. Spreading in every direction, she finally encompasses the whole triangle. In this emanation the triple triad is formed. From the invisible Dew falling from the higher Uni-triad (thus leaving 7 sephiroths only), the “Head” Sephira creates primeval waters, i.e., Chaos takes shape. It is the first stage towards the solidification of spirit which through various modifications will produce earth. “It requires earth and water to make a living soul,” says Moses. It requires the image of an aquatic bird to connect it with water, the female element of procreation with the egg and the bird that fecundates it.

When Sephira emerges like an active power from within the latent Deity, she is female; when she assumes the office of a creator, she becomes a male; hence, she is androgyne. She is the “Father and

 

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355 INTERNATIONAL CORRELATION OF GODS.

Mother Aditi,” of the Hindu Cosmogony and of the Secret Doctrine. If the oldest Hebrew scrolls had been preserved, the modern Jehovah-worshipper would have found that many and uncomely were the symbols of the creative god. The frog in the moon, typical of his generative character, was the most frequent. All the birds and animals now held “unclean” in the Bible had been the symbols of the Deity in days of old. It was because they were too sacred that a mask of uncleanness was placed over them, in order to preserve them from destruction. The brazen serpent was not a bit more poetical than the goose or swan, if symbols are to be accepted à la lettre.

In the words of the Zohar: “The Indivisible Point, which has no limit and cannot be comprehended because of its purity and brightness, expanded from without, forming a brightness that served the indivisible Point as a veil”; yet the latter also “could not be viewed in consequence of its immeasurable light. It too expanded from without, and this expansion was its garment. Thus through a constant upheaving (motion) finally the world originated” (Zōhar 1:20a.2-4). The Spiritual substance sent forth by the Infinite Light is the first Sephira or Shekinah: Sephira exoterically contains all the other nine Sephiroths in her. Esoterically she contains but two,³⁶⁴ Chochmah or Wisdom, “a masculine, active potency whose divine name is Jah (יה),” and Binah, a feminine passive potency, Intelligence, represented by the divine name Jehovah (יהוה); which two potencies form, with Sephira the third, the Jewish trinity or the Crown, Kether. These two Sephiroths called Father, Abba, and Mother Amona, are the duad or the double-sexed logos from which issued the other seven Sephiroths. (See Zohar.) This first Jewish triad (Sephira, Chochmah, and Binah) is the Hindu Trimurti.³⁶⁵ However veiled, even in the Zohar, and more still in the exoteric Pantheon of India, every particular connected with one is reproduced in the other. The Prajâpati are the Sephiroths. Ten with Brahmâ they dwindle to seven, when the Trimurti, and the Kabalistic triad, are separated from the rest. The seven Builders (Creators) become the seven Prajâpati, or the seven Rishis, in the same order as the Sephiroths become the Creators; then the Patriarchs, etc. In both Secret Systems, the One Universal Essence is incomprehensible and inactive in its absoluteness, and can be connected with the building of the Universe only in an indirect way. In both, the primeval Male-female or androgynous Principle, and their ten and seven Emanations (Brahmâ-Virâj and Aditi-Vâch on the one part and the Elohim-Jehovah, or Adam-Adami (Adam Kadmon) and Sephira Eve on the

 

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356 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

other), with their Prajâpati and Sephiroths, represent in their totality, first of all the Archetypal man, the Proto-logos; and only in their secondary aspect do they become Cosmic powers, and astronomical or sidereal bodies. If Aditi is the mother of the gods, Deva-Matri, Eve is the mother of all living; they are the Sakti or generative power in their female aspect of the “Heavenly man,” and they are all compound Creators. Says a “Gupta Vidya” Sûtra: “In the beginning, a ray issuing from Paramârthika (the one and only true existence), it became manifested in Vyavahârika (conventional existence) which was used as a Vahan to descend into the Universal Mother, and to cause her to expand (swell, brih).” And in the Zohar it is stated: “The Infinite Unity, formless and without similitude, after the form of the heavenly man was created, used it. The Unknown Light³⁶⁶ (Darkness) used the אדם עילאה [ʾāḏām ʿīllāʾāh] (heavenly form) as a chariot מרכבה [merkāḇāh] through which to descend, and wished to be called by this form, which is the sacred name Jehovah.”

As the Zohar says: “In the beginning was the Will of the King, prior to any other existence. . . . It (the Will) sketched the forms of all things that had been concealed but now came into view. And there went forth as a sealed secret from the head of Ain Soph, a nebulous spark of matter, without shape or form. [Zōhar 1:15a.1] . . . Life is drawn from below, and from above the source renews itself, the sea is always full and spreads its waters everywhere.” Thus the deity is compared to a shoreless sea, to water which is “the fountain of life” (see Zōhar 3:290b). “The seventh palace, the fountain of life, is the first in the order from above” (Zōhar 2:261a.1). Hence the Kabalistic tenet on the lips of the very Kabalistic Solomon, who says in Proverbs ix., 1: “Wisdom hath builded her house; it hath hewn out its seven pillars.”

Whence then, all this identity of ideas, if there was no primeval Universal Revelation? The few points shown are like a few straws in a hayrick, in comparison to that which will be shown as the work proceeds. If we turn to that most hazy of all Cosmogonies—the Chinese, even there the same idea is found. Tsi-tsai (the Self-Existent) is the unknown Darkness, the root of the Wúliàngshòu (Boundless Age), Amitābha, and Tien (heaven) come later on. The “great Extreme” of Confucius gives the same idea, his “straws” notwithstanding. The latter are a source of great amusement to the missionaries. These laugh at every “heathen” religion, despise and hate that of their

 

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357 ORNITHOLOGICAL SYMBOLS.

brother Christians of other denominations, and yet one and all accept à la lettre their own Genesis. If we turn to Chaldea we find in it Anu, the concealed deity, the One, whose name, moreover, shows it to be of Sanskrit origin. Anu, which means in Sanskrit “atom,” aníyámsam anîyasâm (smallest of the small), is a name of Parabrahm in the Vedantic philosophy; Parabrahm being described as smaller than the smallest atom, and greater than the greatest sphere or universe: “Anagraniyam and Mahatorvavat.” This is what George Smith gives as the first verses of the Akkadian Genesis as found in the Cuneiform Texts on the “Lateras Coctiles.” There also, we find Anu the passive deity or En-Soph, Bel, the Creator, the Spirit of God (Sephira) moving on the face of the waters, hence water itself, and Hea, the Universal Soul or wisdom of the three combined.

The first eight verses read thus:

1. When above, were not raised the heavens;

2. And below on the earth a plant had not grown up.

3. The abyss had not broken its boundaries.

4. The chaos (or water) Tiamat (the sea) was the producing mother of the whole of them. (This is the Cosmical Aditi and Sephira.)

5. Those waters at the beginning were ordained but—

6. A tree had not grown, a flower had not unfolded.

7. When the gods had not sprung up, any one of them.

8. A plant had not grown, and order did not exist.

This was the chaotic or ante-genetic period—the double Swan and the Dark Swan, which becomes white, when Light is created.³⁶⁷

The symbol chosen for the majestic ideal of the Universal Principle will seem little calculated to answer its sacred character. A goose, or even a swan, may appear unfit, no doubt, to represent the grandeur of the Spirit. Nevertheless, it must have had some deep occult meaning, since it figures not only in every cosmogony and world religion, but even was chosen by the mediæval Christians, the Crusaders, as the vehicle of the Holy Ghost supposed to lead the army to Palestine, to wrench the Tomb of the Saviour from the hands of the Saracen. If we are to credit Professor Draper’s statement in his “Intellectual Development of Europe,” the Crusaders, led on by Peter the Hermit, were preceded, at the head of the army, by the Holy Ghost under the shape of a white gander in company of a goat. The Egyptian God of Time, Seb, carries a goose on his head. Jupiter assumes the form of a swan and Brahmâ also, because the root of all this is that mystery of mysteries—the Mundane Egg. (See preceding §).

 

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358 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

One has to learn the reason of a symbol before one depreciates it. The dual element of Air and Water is that of the ibis, swan, goose and pelican, of crocodiles and frogs, lotus flowers and water lilies, etc.; and the result is the choice of the most unseemly symbols among the modern as much as the ancient mystics. Pan, the great god of nature, was generally figured in connection with aquatic birds, geese especially, and so were other gods. If, later on, with the gradual degeneration of religion, the gods to whom geese were sacred, became Priapic deities, it does not stand to reason that water fowls were made sacred to Pan and other Phallic deities as some scoffers even of antiquity would have it (see Petronii Satyrica, cxxxvi.); but that the abstract and divine power of procreative nature had become grossly anthropomorphized. Nor does the Swan of Leda show “Priapic doings and her enjoyment thereof,” as Mr. Hargrave Jennings chastely expresses it; for the myth is but another version of the same philosophical idea of cosmogony. Swans are frequently found associated with Apollo, as they are the emblems of water and fire (sun-light also), before the separation of the Elements.

Our modern symbologists might profit by some remarks made by a well-known writer, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child. “From time immemorial an emblem has been worshipped in Hindostan as the type of creation, or the origin of life. . . . Siva or the Mahadeva being not only the reproducer of human forms, but also the fructifying principle, the generative power that pervades the Universe. The maternal emblem is likewise a religious type. This reverence for the production of life, introduced into the worship of Osiris the sexual emblems. Is it strange that they regarded with reverence the great mystery of human birth? Were they impure thus to regard it? Or are we impure that do not so regard it? But no clean and thoughtful mind could so regard them. . . . We have travelled far, and unclean have been the paths, since those old Anchorites first spoke of God and the soul in the solemn depths of their first sanctuaries. Let us not smile at their mode of tracing the infinite and the incomprehensible Cause throughout all the mysteries of nature, lest by so doing we cast the shadow of our own grossness on their patriarchal simplicity.” (“Progress of Religious Ideas,” Vol. 1, p. 17, et seq.)

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359 THE EGG-BORN GOD.‌

§ VI. THE MUNDANE EGG.

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

The secret teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the Symbolism of the prehistoric races. The “First Cause” had no name in the beginnings. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg becomes the Universe. Hence Brahm was called Kalahansa, “the swan in (Space and) Time.” He became the “Swan of Eternity,” who lays at the beginning of each Mahamanvantara a “Golden Egg.” It typifies the great Circle, or O, itself a symbol for the universe and its spherical bodies.

The second reason for its having been chosen as the symbolical representation of the Universe, and of our earth, was its form. It was a Circle and a Sphere; and the ovi-form shape of our globe must have been known from the beginning of symbology, since it was so universally adopted. The first manifestation of the Kosmos in the form of an egg was the most widely diffused belief of antiquity. As Bryant shows (A New System, Vol. 3, 1807, p. 165), it was a symbol adopted among the Greeks, the Syrians, Persians, and Egyptians. In chap. liv. of the Egyptian Ritual, Seb, the god of Time and of the Earth, is spoken of as having laid an egg, or the Universe, “an egg conceived at the hour of the great one of the Dual Force” (liv., 3; Livre des Morts, tr. Paul Pierret, 1882, p. 173).

Ra is shown like Brahmâ gestating in the Egg of the Universe. The deceased is “resplendent in the Egg of the land of mysteries” (xxii., 1). For, this is “the Egg to which is given life among the gods” (xlii., 13). “It is the Egg of the great clucking Hen, the Egg of Seb, who issues from it like a hawk” (liv., 1-3; lxxvii., 1).

With the Greeks the Orphic Egg is described by Aristophanes, and was part of the Dionysiac and other mysteries, during which

360 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Mundane Egg was consecrated and its significance explained; Porphyry showing it a representation of the world, ’Eρμήνενει δέ τὸ ὠὸν κόσμον. Faber and Bryant have tried to show that the egg typified the ark of Noah, which, unless the latter is accepted as purely allegorical and symbolical, is a wild belief. It can have typified the ark only as a synonym of the moon, the argha which carries the universal seed of life; but had surely nothing to do with the ark of the Bible. Anyhow, the belief that the universe existed in the beginning in the shape of an egg was general. And as Wilson has it: “A similar account of the first aggregation of the elements in the form of an egg is given in all the (Indian) Purânas, with the usual epithet Haima or Hiranya, ‘golden’ as it occurs in Manu.” Hiranya, however, means “resplendent,” “shining,” rather than “golden,” as proven by the great Indian scholar, the late Swami Dayanand Sarasvati, in his unpublished polemics with Professor Max Müller. As said in the Vishnu Purâna: “Intellect (Mahat) . . . the (unmanifested) gross elements inclusive, formed an egg . . . and the lord of the universe himself abided in it, in the character of Brahmâ. In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents, and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons and mankind.” (Book i., ch. 2.) Both in Greece and in India the first visible male being, who united in himself the nature of either sex, abode in the egg and issued from it. This “first born of the world” was Dionysius, with some Greeks; the god who sprang from the mundane egg, and from whom the mortals and immortals were derived. The god Ra is shown in the Ritual (Book of the Dead, xvii., 50) beaming in his egg (the Sun), and he starts off as soon as the god Shoo (the Solar energy) awakens and gives him the impulse. “He is in the Solar egg, the egg to which is given life among the gods” (Ibid., xlii., 13). The Solar god exclaims: “I am the creative soul of the celestial abyss. None sees my nest, none can break my egg, I am the Lord!” (Ibid, lxxxv.).

In view of this circular form, the “” issuing from the “,” or the egg, or the male from the female in the androgyne, it is strange to find a scholar saying—on the ground that the most ancient Indian MSS. show no trace of it—that the ancient Aryans were ignorant of the decimal notation. The 10, being the sacred number of the universe, was secret and esoteric, both as the unit and cipher, or zero, the circle. Moreover, Professor Max Müller says that “the two words cipher and zero, which are but one, are sufficient to prove that our figures are borrowed from the Arabs.³⁶⁸ Cipher is the Arabic “cifron,” and means

 

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361 WHENCE OUR FIGURES?

empty, a translation of the Sanscrit name of nought “śūnya,” he says.³⁶⁹ The Arabs had their figures from Hindustan, and never claimed the discovery for themselves.³⁷⁰ As to the Pythagoreans, we need but turn to the ancient manuscripts of Boethius’s Geometry, composed in the sixth century, to find among the Pythagorean numerals³⁷¹ the 1 and the nought, as the first and final ciphers. And Porphyry, who quotes from the Pythagorean Moderatus,³⁷² says that the numerals of Pythagoras were “hieroglyphical symbols, by means whereof he explained ideas concerning the nature of things,” or the origin of the universe.

Now, if, on the other hand, the most ancient Indian manuscripts show as yet no trace of decimal notation in them, and Max Müller states very clearly that until now he has found but nine letters (the initials of the Sanscrit numerals) in them; on the other hand, we have records as ancient to supply the wanted proof. We speak of the sculptures and the sacred imagery in the most ancient temples of the far East. Pythagoras derived his knowledge from India; and we find Professor Max Müller corroborating this statement, at least so far as to allow the Neo-Pythagoreans to have been the first teachers of “ciphering,” among the Greeks and Romans; that “they at Alexandria, or in Syria, became acquainted with the Indian figures, and adapted them to the Pythagorean abacus” (our figures). This cautious admission implies that Pythagoras himself was acquainted with but nine figures. Thus we might reasonably answer that, although we possess no certain proof (exoterically) that the decimal notation was known by Pythagoras, who lived on the very close of the archaic ages,³⁷³ we have yet sufficient evidence to show that the full numbers, as given by Boethius, were known to the Pythagoreans, even before Alexandria was built.³⁷⁴ This evidence we find in Aristotle, who says that “some philosophers hold that ideas and numbers are of the same nature, and amount to ten in all.”³⁷⁵ This, we believe, will be sufficient to show that the decimal notation was known among them at least as early as four centuries b.c., for Aristotle does not seem to treat the question as an innovation of the “Neo-Pythagoreans.”

 

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362 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

The symbolism of the Lunar and Solar Deities is so inextricably mixed up, that it is next to impossible to separate such glyphs as the egg, the lotus, and the “sacred” animals from each other. The ibis, for instance, sacred to Isis, who is often represented with the head of that bird, sacred also to Mercury or Thoth, because that god assumed its form while escaping from Typhon,—the ibis was held in the greatest veneration in Egypt. There were two kinds of ibises, Herodotus tells us (Lib. II. c. 75 et seq.) in that country: one quite black, the other black and white. The former is credited with fighting and exterminating the winged serpents which came every spring from Arabia and infested the country. The other was sacred to the moon, because the latter planet is white and brilliant on her external side, dark and black on that side which she never turns to the earth. Moreover, the ibis kills land serpents, and makes the most terrible havoc amongst the eggs of the crocodile, and thus saves Egypt from having the Nile infested by those horrible Saurians. The bird is credited with doing so in the moonlight, and thus being helped by Isis, as the moon, her sidereal symbol. But the nearer esoteric truth underlying these popular myths is, that Hermes, as shown by Abenephius (De cultu Egypt.), watched under the form of that bird over the Egyptians, and taught them the occult arts and sciences. This means simply that the ibis religiosa had and has “magical” properties in common with many other birds, the albatross pre-eminently, and the mythical white swan, the swan of Eternity or Time, the Kalahansa.

Were it otherwise, indeed, why should all the ancient peoples, who were no more fools than we are, have had such a superstitious dread of killing certain birds? In Egypt, he who killed an ibis, or the golden hawk—the symbol of the Sun and Osiris—risked and could hardly escape death. The veneration of some nations for birds was such that Zoroaster, in his precepts, forbids their slaughter as a heinous crime. We laugh in our age at every kind of divination. Yet why should so many generations have believed in divination by birds, and even in zoomancy, said by Suidas to have been imparted by Orpheus, who taught how to perceive in the yoke and white of

363 EGG-BORN LOGOÏ.

the egg, under certain conditions, that which the bird born from it would have seen around it during its short life. This occult art, which demanded 3,000 years ago the greatest learning and the most abstruse mathematical calculations, has now fallen into the depths of degradation: it is old cooks and fortune-tellers who read their future to servant-girls in search of husbands, by means of the white of an egg in a glass.

Nevertheless, even Christians have to this day their sacred birds; for instance, the dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Nor have they neglected the sacred animals. The Evangelical zoolatry—the Bull, the Eagle, the Lion, and the Angel (in reality the Cherub, or Seraph, the fiery-winged Serpent), is as much pagan as that of the Egyptians or the Chaldeans. These four animals are, in reality, the symbols of the four elements, and of the four lower principles in man. Nevertheless, they correspond physically and materially to the four constellations that form, so to speak, the suite or cortège of the Solar God, and occupy during the winter solstice the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle. These four “animals” may be seen in many of the Roman Catholic New Testaments where the portraits of the evangelists are given. They are the animals of Ezekiel’s Mercabah.

As truly stated by Ragon, “the ancient Hierophants have combined so cleverly the dogmas and symbols of their religious philosophies, that these symbols can be fully explained only by the combination and knowledge of all the keys.” They can be only approximately interpreted, even if one finds out three out of these seven systems: the anthropological, the psychic, and the astronomical. The two chief interpretations, the highest and the lowest, the spiritual and the physiological, they preserved in the greatest secrecy until the latter fell into the dominion of the profane. Thus far, with regard only to the pre-historic Hierophants, with whom that which has now become purely (or impurely) phallic, was a science as profound and as mysterious as biology and physiology are now. This was their exclusive property, the fruit of their studies and discoveries. The other two were those which dealt with the creative gods (theogony), and with creative man, i.e., the ideal and the practical mysteries. These interpretations were so cleverly veiled and combined, that many were those who, while arriving at the discovery of one meaning, were baffled in understanding the significance of the others, and could never unriddle them sufficiently to commit dangerous indiscretions. The highest, the first and the fourth—theogony in relation to anthropogony—were almost impossible to fathom. We find the proofs of this in the Jewish “Holy Writ.”

It is owing to the serpent being oviparous, that it became a symbol of wisdom and an emblem of the Logoi, or the self-born. In the temple of Philœ in Upper Egypt, an egg was artificially prepared of clay made of

364 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

various incenses, and it was made to hatch by a peculiar process, when a cerastes (the horned viper) was born. The same was done in antiquity for the cobra in the Indian temples. The creative God emerges from the egg that issues from the mouth of Kneph—as a winged serpent—because the Serpent is the symbol of the All-wisdom. With the Hebrews he is glyphed by the “flying or fiery serpents” of the Wilderness and Moses, and with the Alexandrian mystics he becomes the Ophio-Christos, the Logos of the Gnostics. The Protestants try to show that the allegory of the Brazen Serpent and of the “fiery serpents” has a direct reference to the mystery of Christ and Crucifixion³⁷⁶; but it has a far nearer relation, in truth, to the mystery of generation, when dissociated from the egg with the central germ, or the circle with its central point. The brazen Serpent had no such holy meaning as that; nor was it, in fact, glorified above the “fiery serpents” for the bite of which it was only a natural remedy. The symbological meaning of the word “brazen” being the feminine principle, and that of fiery, or “gold,” the male one.³⁷⁷

In the Book of the Dead, as just shown, reference is often made to the Egg. Ra, the mighty one, remains in his Egg, during the struggle between the “children of the rebellion” and Shoo (the Solar Energy and the Dragon of Darkness) (ch. xvii.). The deceased is resplendent in his

 

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365 THE WINGED GLOBE.

Egg when he crosses to the land of mystery (xxii. i.). He is the Egg of Seb (liv. 1—3). . . . The Egg was the symbol of life in immortality and eternity; as also the glyph of the generative matrix; and the tau, associated with it, only of life and birth in generation. The Mundane Egg was placed in Khnoom, the “Water of Space,” or the feminine abstract principle (Khnoom becoming, with the fall of mankind into generation and phallicism, Ammon, the creative God); and when Phtah, the “fiery god,” carries the Mundane egg in his hand, then the symbolism becomes quite terrestrial and concrete in its significance. In conjunction with the hawk, the symbol of Osiris-Sun, the symbol is dual: it relates to both lives—the mortal and the immortal. In Kircher’s Œdipus Egyptiacus (vol. iii., p. 124) one can see, on the papyrus engraved in it, an egg floating above the mummy. This is the symbol of hope and the promise of a second birth for the Osirified dead; his Soul, after due purification in the Amenti, will gestate in this egg of immortality, to be reborn from it into a new life on earth. For this Egg, in the esoteric Doctrine, is the Devachan, the abode of Bliss; the winged scarabeus being alike a symbol of it. The “winged globe” is but another form of the egg, and has the same significance as the scarabeus, the Khopiroo (from the root Khoproo “to become,” “to be reborn,”) which relates to the rebirth of man, as well as to his spiritual regeneration.

In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Æther first, and then the air, from which Ulom, the intelligible (νοήτος) deity (the visible Universe of Matter) is born out of the Mundane Egg. (Möver’s Phoinizer, p. 282.)

In the Orphic Hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the divine Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, wind being “the Spirit of the unknown Darkness”—“the spirit of God” (as explains K. O. Müller, 236); the divine “Idea,” says Plato, “who is said to move Æther.”

In the Hindu Kaṭha Upaniṣad [1:3:11], Purusha, the divine spirit, already stands before the original matter, “from whose union springs the great soul of the world,” Mahā-Ātmā, Brahmâ, the Spirit of Life,³⁷⁸ etc., etc.³⁷⁹ Besides this there are many charming allegories on this subject scattered through the sacred books of the Brahmins. In one place it is the female creator who is first a germ, then a drop of heavenly dew, a pearl, and then an egg. In such cases—of which there are too many to enumerate them separately—the Egg gives birth to the four elements within the fifth, Ether, and is covered with seven coverings, which become later on the seven upper and the seven lower worlds. Breaking in two, the shell becomes the heaven, and the meat in the egg the earth, the white forming the terres-

 

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366 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

trial waters. Then again, it is Vishnu who emerges from within the egg with a lotus in his hand. Vinata, a daughter of Daksha and wife of Kasyapa (“the Self-born sprung from Time,” one of the seven “creators” of our world), brought forth an egg from which was born Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu, the latter allegory having a relation to our Earth only, as Garuda is the Great Cycle.

The egg was sacred to Isis; the priests of Egypt never ate eggs on that account.³⁸⁰

Diodorus Siculus states that Osiris was born from an Egg, like Brahmâ. From Leda’s Egg Apollo and Latona were born, as also Castor and Pollux—the bright Gemini. And though the Buddhists do not attribute the same origin to their Founder, yet, no more than the ancient Egyptians or the modern Brahmins, do they eat eggs, lest they should destroy the germ of life latent in them, and commit thereby Sin. The Chinese believe that their first man was born from an egg, which Tien, a god, dropped down from heaven to earth into the waters.³⁸¹ This symbol is still regarded by some as representing the idea of the origin of life, which is a scientific truth, though the human ovum is invisible to the naked eye. Therefore we see respect shown to it from the remotest past, by the Greeks, Phœnicians, Romans, the Japanese, and the Siamese, the North and South American tribes, and even the savages of the remotest islands.

With the Egyptians, the concealed god was Ammon (Mon). All their gods were dual: the scientific reality for the Sanctuary; its double, the fabulous and mythical Entity, for the masses. For instance, as observed in “Chaos, Theos, Kosmos,” the older Horus was the Idea of the world remaining in the demiurgic mind “born in Darkness before the creation of the world”; the second Horus³⁸² was the same Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter and assuming an actual existence. (Compare Möver’s “Phoinizer,” p. 268.) The same with Khnoum and Ammon;³⁸³ both are represented ram-headed, and both often confused, though their functions are different. Khnoum is “the modeller of men,” fashioning men and things out of the Mundane Egg on a potter’s wheel;

 

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367 THE SCANDINAVIAN LOGOS.

Ammon-Ra, the generator, is the secondary aspect of the concealed deity. Khnoum was adored at Elephanta and Philœ,³⁸⁴ Ammon at Thebes. But it is Emepht, the One, Supreme Planetary principle, who blows the egg out of his mouth, and who is, therefore, Brahmâ. The shadow of the deity, Kosmic and universal, of that which broods over and permeates the egg with its vivifying Spirit until the germ contained in it is ripe, was the mystery god whose name was unpronounceable. It is Phtah, however, “he who opens,” the opener of life and Death,³⁸⁵ who proceeds from the egg of the world to begin his dual work. (Book of Numbers.)

According to the Greeks, the phantom form of the Chemis (Chemi, ancient Egypt) which floats on the ethereal waves of the Empyrean Sphere, was called into being by Horus-Apollo, the Sun god, who caused it to evolve out of the Mundane egg.³⁸⁶

In the Scandinavian Cosmogony—placed by Professor Max Müller, in point of time, as “far anterior to the Vedas” in the poem of Voluspa (the song of the prophetess), the Mundane egg is again discovered in the phantom-germ of the Universe, which is represented as lying in the Ginnungagap—the cup of illusion (Maya) the boundless and void abyss. In this world’s matrix, formerly a region of night and desolation, Nebelheim (the mist-place, the nebular as it is called now, in the astral light) dropped a ray of cold light which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible blew a scorching wind which dissolved the frozen waters and cleared the mist. These waters (chaos), called the streams of Elivagar, distilling in vivifying drops, fell down and created the earth and the giant Ymir, who only had “the semblance of man” (the Heavenly man), and the cow, Audhumla (the “mother” or astral light, Cosmic Soul) from whose udder flowed four streams of milk (the four cardinal points: the four heads of the four rivers of Eden, etc., etc.) and which “four” allegorically are symbolized by the cube in all its various and mystical meanings.

The Christians—especially the Greek and Latin Churches—have fully adopted the symbol, and see in it a commemoration of life eternal,

 

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368‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

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§ VII. THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF BRAHMÂ.

This is the name given to the Periods called Manvantara (Manu-antara, or between the Manus) and Pralaya (Dissolution); one referring to the active periods of the Universe, the other to its times of relative and complete rest—according to whether they occur at the end of a “Day,” or an “Age” (a life) of Brahmâ. These periods, which follow each other in regular succession, are also called Kalpas, small and great, the minor and the Maha Kalpa; though, properly speaking, the Maha Kalpa is never a “day,” but a whole life or age of Brahmâ, for it is said in the Brahmâ Vaivarta: “Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the Life of Brahmâ; minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous.” In sober truth they are infinite; as they have never had a commencement, i.e., there never was a first Kalpa, nor will there ever be a last one, in Eternity.

One Parardha—in the ordinary acceptation of this measure of time—or half of the existence of Brahmâ (in the present Maha Kalpa) has already expired; the last Kalpa was the Padma, or that of the Golden Lotus; the present one being Vârâha³⁸⁷ (the “boar” incarnation, or Avatar).

 

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369 HUMAN GODS AND DIVINE MEN.

By the scholar who studies the Hindu religion from the Purânas, one thing is to be especially noted. He must not take literally, and in one sense only, the statements therein found; since those which especially concern the Manvantaras or Kalpas have to be understood in their several references. So, for instance, these periods relate in the same language to both the great and the small periods, to Maha Kalpas and to minor Cycles. The Matsya, or Fish Avatar, happened before the Vârâha or Boar Avatar; the allegories, therefore, must relate to both the Padma and the present manvantara, and also to the minor cycles which took place since the reappearance of our Chain of Worlds and Earth. And, as the Matsya Avatar of Vishnu and Vaivasvata’s Deluge are correctly connected with an event that happened on our Earth during this Round, it is evident that while it may relate to pre-cosmic events (in the sense of our Kosmos or Solar system) it has reference in our case to a distant geological period. Not even Esoteric philosophy can claim to know, except by analogical inference, that which took place before the reappearance of our Solar System and previous to the last Maha Pralaya. But it teaches distinctly that after the first geological disturbance in the Earth’s axis which ended in the sweeping down to the bottom of the Seas of the whole second Continent, with its primeval races—of which successive “Earths” or Continents Atlantis was the fourth—there came another disturbance by the axis resuming as rapidly its previous degree of inclination; when the Earth was indeed raised once more out of the Waters, and—as above so it is below; and vice versâ. There were “gods” on Earth in those days—gods, and not men, as we know them now, says the tradition. As will be shown in Book II., the computation of periods in exoteric Hinduism refers to both the great cosmic and the small terrestrial events and cataclysms, and the same may be shown for names. For instance Yudishthira—the first King of the Sacea, who opens the Kali Yuga era, which has to last 432,000 years—“an actual King and man who lived 3,102 years b.c.,” applies also, name and all, to the great Deluge at the time of the first sinking of Atlantis. He is the “Yudishthira³⁸⁸ born on the mountain of the hundred peaks at the extremity of

 

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370 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the world beyond which nobody can go” and “immediately after the flood.” (See Royal Asiat. Soc., Vol. 9, p. 364.) We know of no “Flood” 3,102 years b.c.—not even that of Noah, for, agreeably with Judæo-Christian chronology, it took place 2,349 years b.c.

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

Let us see, however, what were the three kinds of pralayas, and what is the popular belief about them. For once it agrees with Esotericism. Of the pralaya before which fourteen Manvantaras elapse, having over them as many presiding Manus, and at whose close occurs the “incidental” or Brahmâ’s dissolution, it is said in Vishnu Purâna, in condensed form, that “at the end of a thousand periods of four ages, which complete a day of Brahmâ, the earth is almost exhausted. The eternal Avyaya (Vishnu) assumes then the character of Rudra (the destroyer, Siva) and re-unites all his creatures to himself. He enters the Seven rays of the Sun and drinks up all the waters of the globe; he causes the moisture to evaporate, thus drying up the whole Earth. Oceans and rivers, torrents and small streams, are all exhaled. Thus fed with abundant moisture the seven solar rays become sevens suns by dilation, and they finally set the world on fire. Hari, the destroyer of all things, who is ‘the flame of time, Kalâgni,’ finally consumes the Earth. Then Rudra, becoming Janardana, breathes clouds and rain.”

There are many kinds of Pralaya, but three chief ones are specially mentioned in old Hindu books; and of these, as Wilson shows: The first is called Naimittika³⁸⁹ “occasional” or “incidental,” caused by the intervals of “Brahmâ’s Days”; it is the destruction of creatures, of all that lives and has a form, but not of the substance which remains in statu quo till the new dawn in that “Night.” The

 

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371 THE RE-BIRTH OF GODS.

other is called Prakritika—and occurs at the end of the Age or Life of Brahmā, when everything that exists is resolved into the primal element, to be remodelled at the end of that longer night. But the third, Atyantika, does not concern the Worlds or the Universe, but only the individualities of some people; it is thus individual pralaya or nirvana; after having reached which, there is no more future existence possible, no rebirth till after the Maha Pralaya. The latter night, lasting as it does 311,040,000,000,000 years, and having the possibility of being almost doubled in case the lucky Jivanmukti reaches Nirvana at an early period of a Manvantara, is long enough to be regarded as eternal, if not endless. The Bhagavata (XII., iv, 35) speaks of a fourth kind of pralaya, the Nitya or constant dissolution, and explains it as the change which takes place imperceptibly in everything in this Universe from the globe down to the atom—without cessation. It is growth and decay (life and death).

When the Maha Pralaya arrives, the inhabitants of Swar-loka (the upper sphere) disturbed by the conflagration, seek refuge “with the Pitris, their progenitors, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the various orders of celestial Spirits and the Gods, in Maharloka.” When the latter is reached also, the whole of the above enumerated beings migrate in their turn from Maharloka, and repair to Jana-loka in “their subtle forms, destined to become re-embodied, in similar capacities as their former, when the world is renewed at the beginning of the succeeding Kalpa” (Vâyu Purâna).

“. . . . These clouds, mighty in size, and loud in thunder, fill up all space (Nabhas-tala),” goes on Vishnu Purâna.—(Book VI., ch. iii.) “Showering down torrents of water, these clouds quench the dreadful fires, and then they rain uninterruptedly for a hundred (divine) years, and deluge the whole world (Solar System). Pouring down, in drops as large as dice, these rains overspread the earth, and fill the middle region (Bhuvaloka) and inundate heaven. The world is now enveloped in darkness, and all things animate, or inanimate, having perished, the clouds continue to pour down their waters” . . . “and the Night of Brahmâ reigns supreme over the scene of desolation . . . . .”

This is what we call in the Esoteric Doctrine a “Solar Pralaya” . . . When the waters have reached the region of the Seven Rishis, and the world (our Solar System) is one ocean, they stop. The breath of Vishnu becomes a strong wind, which blows for another hundred (divine) years until all clouds are dispersed. The wind is then reabsorbed: and “That, of which all things are made, the Lord by whom all things exist, He who is inconceivable, without beginning, the beginning of the universe, reposes, sleeping upon Sesha (the Serpent of Infinity) in the midst of the deep. The Adikrit

372 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(Creator?) Hari, sleeps upon the ocean of Space in the form of Brahmâ—glorified by Sanaka³⁹⁰ and the Siddha (Saints) of Jana-loka, and contemplated by the holy denizens of Brahmâ-loka, anxious for final liberation, involved in mystic slumber, the celestial personification of his own illusions. . . .” This is the Pratisanchara (dissolution?) termed incidental because Hari is its incidental (ideal) Cause. . . . .³⁹¹ When the Universal Spirit wakes, the world revives; when he closes his eyes, all things fall upon the bed of mystic slumber. In like manner, as 1,000 great ages constitute a Day of Brahmâ (in the original it is Padma-yoni, the same as Abjayoni—“lotus-born,” not Brahmâ), so his Night consists of the same period. “Awaking at the end of his night, the unborn . . . creates the Universe anew. . . .” (Vishnu Purâna.)

This is “incidental” pralaya; what is the Elemental Dissolution? “When by dearth and fire,” says Pârâsara to Maitreya, “all the worlds and Pâtâlas (hells) are withered up . . .³⁹² the progress of elemental dissolution is begun. Then, first the waters swallow up the property of Earth (which is the rudiment of smell), and earth deprived of this property proceeds to destruction—and becomes one with water . . . . when the Universe is thus pervaded by the waves of the watery Element, its rudimentary flavour is locked up by the elements of fire . . . on account of which the waters themselves are destroyed . . . and become one with fire; and the Universe is therefore, entirely filled with flame (ethereal) which gradually overspreads the whole world. While Space is one flame, the element of wind seizes upon the rudimental property or form, which is the cause of light, and that being withdrawn (pralina) all becomes of the nature of air. The rudiment of form being destroyed, and Vibhâvasu (fire?) deprived of its rudiment, air extinguishes fire and spreads over space, which is deprived of light when fire merges into air. Air, then, accompanied by sound, which is the source of Ether, extends everywhere throughout the ten regions . . . . until Ether seizes upon cohesion (Sparsa—Touch?) its rudimental property, by the loss of which, air is destroyed, and kha remains unmodified; devoid of form, flavour, touch (Sparsa), and smell, it exists, embodied (mûrttimat) and vast, and pervades the whole Space. Akâsa, whose characteristic property and rudiment is sound (the “Word”), occupies the whole containment of Space. Then the origin (Noumenon?) of the Elements (Bhutadi), devours sound (collective Demiurgos); and the hosts of Dhyan Chohans, and all the existing

 

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373 THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EGG.

Elements³⁹³ are at once merged into their original. The primary Element, Consciousness, combined with tamasa (spiritual darkness) is itself disintegrated by mahat (the Universal Intellect), whose characteristic property is Buddhi, and earth and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe.” Thus as (in the beginning) “were the seven forms of Prakriti (nature) reckoned from Mahat to earth, so these seven successively re-enter into each other.”³⁹⁴

“The Egg of Brahmâ (Sarva-mandala) is dissolved in the waters that surround it, with its seven zones (dwipas) seven oceans, seven regions, and their mountains; the investure of water is drunk by the fire; the (stratum of) fire is absorbed by (that of) air; air blends itself with ether (Akâsa); the Bhutadi (the origin, or rather the cause, of the primary element) devours the ether and is (itself) destroyed by Mahat (the Great, the Universal mind), which along with all these is seized upon by Prakriti and disappears. The Prakriti is essentially the same, whether discrete or indiscrete; only that which is discrete is finally absorbed by and lost in the indiscrete. Pums (Spirit) also, which is one, pure, imperishable, eternal, all-pervading, is a portion of that Supreme spirit which is all things. That Spirit (Sarvesa) which is other than (embodied) Spirit, and in which there are no attributes of name, species (nâman and jati, or rupa, hence body rather than species), or the like—remains as the sole existence (Sattâ). . . Prakriti and Purusha both resolving finally into Supreme Spirit. . . .” (From Vishnu Purâna, Wilson’s mistakes being here corrected, and original words put in brackets).

This is the final Pralaya³⁹⁵—the Death of Kosmos—after which its Spirit rests in Nirvana, or in that for which there is neither Day nor Night. All the other pralayas are periodical and follow, in regular succession, the Manvantaras, as the night follows the day of every human creature, animal, and plant. The cycle of creation of the lives of Kosmos is run down, the energy of the manifested “Word” having

 

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374 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

its growth, culmination, and decrease, as have all things temporary, however long their duration. The Creative Force is Eternal as Noumenon; as a phenomenal manifestation in its aspects, it has a beginning and must, therefore, have an end. During that interval it has its periods of activity and its periods of rest. And these are the “Days and the nights of Brahmâ.” But Brahma, the Noumenon, never rests, as it never changes and ever is, though it cannot be said to be anywhere. . . . .

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

“As Moses was keeping a vigil on Mount Sinai, in company with the deity, who was concealed from his sight by a cloud, he felt a great fear overcome him, and suddenly asked: ‘Lord, where art thou . . . . sleepest thou, O Lord? . . .’ And the Spirit answered him: ‘I never sleep: were I to fall asleep for a moment before my time, all the creation would crumble into dissolution in one instant.’”

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

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

“Bərēšīṯ bārā ʾĕlōhīm ʾēṯ hašāmayim wəʾēṯ hāʾāreṣ—i.e., ‘In the beginning the God(s) created the heavens and the earth”; (the meaning of which is:) the six Səfīrōṯ of Construction,³⁹⁶ over which Bərēšīṯ stands, all belong Below. It created six (and) on these stand all Things. And those depend upon the seven forms of the Cranium up to the Dignity of all Dignities. And the second ‘Earth’ does not come into calculation, therefore it has been said: ‘And from it (that Earth) which underwent the curse, came it forth.’ . . . ‘It (the Earth) was without form and void; and darkness was over the face of the Abyss, and the Spirit of ʾĕlōhīm . . . was breathing (məraḥefeṯ)—i.e., hovering, brooding over, moving. . . . Thirteen depend on thirteen

 

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375 ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM.

(forms) of the most worthy Dignity. Six thousand years hang (are referred to) in the first six words. The seventh (thousand, the millenium) above it (the cursed Earth) is that which is strong by Itself. And it was rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours (one . . . Day) as is written. . . . In the thirteenth, It (the Deity) shall restore all . . . and everything shall be renewed as before; and all those six shall continue . . . etc.” (Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, pp. 232-233; Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b.6-7).

The “Sephiroth of Construction” are the six Dhyan Chohans, or Manus, or Prajâpati, synthesized by the seventh “B’raisheeth (the First Emanation or Logos), and who are called, therefore, the Builders of the Lower or physical Universe” all belong Below. These six  whose essence is of the Seventh—are the Upadhi, the base or fundamental stone on which the objective Universe is built, the noumenoi of all things. Hence they are, at the same time, the Forces of nature, the Seven Angels of the Presence, the sixth and seventh principles in man; the spirito-psycho-physical spheres of the Septenary chain, the Root Races, etc., etc. They all “depend upon the Seven forms of the Cranium” up to the highest. The “second Earth” “does not come into calculation” because it is no Earth, but the Chaos or Abyss of Space in which rested the paradigmatic, or model universe in ideation of the over-soul brooding over it. The term “Curse” is here very misleading, for it means simply doom or destiny, or that fatality which sent it forth into the objective state. This is shown by that “Earth” under the “Curse” being described as “without form and void,” in whose abysmal depths the “Breath” of the Elohim (collective Logoi) produced or photographed the first divine Ideation of the things to be. This process is repeated after every Pralaya before the beginnings of a new Manvantara, or period of sentient individual being. “Thirteen depend on thirteen forms,” refers to the thirteen periods personified by the thirteen Manus, with Swayambhûva the fourteenth (13, instead of 14, being an additional veil): those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a Mahayuga, a “Day” of Brahmâ. These (thirteen-fourteen) of the objective Universe depend on the thirteen (fourteen) paradigmatic, ideal forms. The meaning of the “Six thousand years” which “hang in the first six words,” has again to be sought in the Indian Wisdom. They refer to the primordial six (seven) “Kings of Edom” who typify the worlds (or spheres) of our chain during the first Round, as well as the primordial men of this Round. They are the septenary pre-Adamic (or before the Third, Separated Race) first Root-race. As they were shadows, and senseless (they had not eaten yet of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), they could not see the

376 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Parguphim, or “Face could not see Face” (primeval men were unconscious), “therefore, the primordial (seven) Kings died,” i.e., were destroyed (vide Sepherah Djenioutha). Now, who are they? They are the Kings who are “the Seven Rishis, certain (secondary) divinities, Sakra (Indra), Manu, and the Kings his Sons, who are created and perish at one period,” as said in Vishnu Purâna (Book I. chap. iii.). For the seventh (“thousand”) (not the millennium of exoteric Christianity, but that of Anthropogenesis) represents both the “seventh period of creation,” that of physical man (Vishnu Purâna), and the seventh Principle—both macrocosmic and microcosmic,—as also the pralaya after the Seventh period, the “Night” which has the same duration as the “Day” of Brahmâ. “It was rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours, as is written.” It is in the Thirteenth (twice six and the Synthesis) that everything shall be restored “and the six will continue.”

Thus the author of the Qabbalah remarks quite truly that “Long before his (Ibn Gebirol’s) time . . . many centuries before the Christian era, there was in Central Asia a ‘Wisdom Religion’; fragments of which subsequently existed among the learned men of the archaic Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, Hindus, etc. . . .” and that . . . . . “The Qabbalah most likely originally came from Aryan sources, through Central Asia, Persia, India and Mesopotamia, for from Ur and Haran came Abraham and many others into Palestine” (p. 221). And such was the firm conviction of C. W. King, the author of “The Gnostics and their Remains.”

Vamadeva Modelyar (Modely) describes the coming “night” most poetically. Though it is given in Isis Unveiled, it is worthy of repetition. “Strange noises are heard, proceeding from every point . . . These are the precursors of the Night of Brahmâ; dusk rises at the horizon, and the Sun passes away behind the thirteenth degree of Macara (sign of the Zodiac), and will reach no more the sign of the Minas (zodiacal pisces, or fish). The gurus of the pagodas appointed to watch the rasi-chakr (Zodiac), may now break their circle and instruments, for they are henceforth useless.

“Gradually light pales, heat diminishes, uninhabited spots multiply on the earth, the air becomes more and more rarified; the springs of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the ocean shows its sandy bottom and plants die. Men and animals decrease in size daily. Life and motion lose their force, planets can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one, like a lamp which the hand of the chokra (servant) neglects to replenish. Sourya (the Sun) flickers and goes out, matter falls into dissolution (pralaya), and Brahmâ merges back into Dayus, the Unrevealed God, and, his task being

377 THE PURÂNIC PROPHECY.

accomplished, he falls asleep. Another day is passed, night sets in, and continues until the future dawn.

“And now again he re-enters into the golden egg of His Thought, the germs of all that exist, as the divine Manu tells us. During His peaceful rest, the animated beings, endowed with the principles of action, cease their functions, and all feeling (manas) becomes dormant. When they are all absorbed in the Supreme Soul, this Soul of all the beings sleeps in complete repose till the day when it resumes its form, and awakes again from its primitive darkness.”³⁹⁷

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

“There will be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth—kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women, children, and cows; they will seize upon the property of their subjects, and be intent upon the wives of others; they will be of unlimited power, their lives will be short, their desires insatiable. . . . People of various countries intermingling with them, will follow their example; and the barbarians being powerful (in India) in the patronage of the princes, while purer tribes are neglected, the people will perish (or, as the Commentator has it, ‘The Mlechchas will be in the centre and the Aryas in the end.’)³⁹⁸ Wealth and piety will decrease until the world will be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification. . . . . . External types will be the only distinction of the several orders of life; . . . . . a man if rich will be reputed pure; dishonesty (anyaya) will be the universal means of subsistence, weakness the cause of dependence, menace and presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; mutual assent, marriage; fine clothes, dignity. He who is the strongest will reign; the people, unable to bear the heavy burthen, Khara bhara (the load of taxes) will take refuge among the valleys. . . . Thus, in the Kali age will decay constantly proceed, until

 

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378 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the human race approaches its annihilation (pralaya). . . . When the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine being which exists, of its own spiritual nature . . . shall descend on Earth . . . (Kalki Avatar) endowed with the eight superhuman faculties. . . . He will re-establish righteousness on earth, and the minds of those who live at the end of Kali Yuga shall be awakened and become as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed . . . shall be the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, the age of purity. As it is said, ‘When the sun and moon and the lunar asterism Tishya and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the Krita (or Satya) age shall return.’”

“. . . . Two persons, Devapi, of the race of Kuru and Moru, of the family of Ikshwaku, continue alive throughout the four ages, residing at Kalapa.³⁹⁹ They will return hither in the beginning of the Krita age . . . Moru⁴⁰⁰ the son of Sighru through the power of Yoga is still living . . . . and will be the restorer of the Kshattriya race of the Solar dynasty.”⁴⁰¹ (Vayu Purâna, Vol. III, p. 197).

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

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379 LOTUS AND LILY.‌

§ VIII. THE LOTUS, AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL.

There are no ancient symbols, without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them; their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to nature and her Gods, and represents the abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both spiritual and physical nature. It was held sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the Buddhists after them; revered in China and Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who made of it a messenger as the Christians do now, who replace it with the water lily.⁴⁰² It had, and still has, its mystic meaning which is identical with every nation on the earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones.⁴⁰³ With the Hindus, the lotus is the emblem of the productive power of nature, through the agency of fire and water (spirit and matter). “Eternal!” says a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, “I see Brahm the creator enthroned in thee above the lotus!”; and Sir W. Jones shows, as noted in the Stanzas, that the seeds of the lotus contain, even before they germinate, perfectly-formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what one day, as perfected plants, they will become. The lotus, in India, is the symbol of prolific earth, and what is more, of Mount Meru. The four angels or genii of the four quarters of Heaven (the Maharajahs, see Stanzas) stand each on a lotus. The lotus is the two-fold type of the Divine and human hermaphrodite, being of dual sex, so to say.

The spirit of Fire (or Heat), which stirs up, fructifies, and develops into concrete form everything (from its ideal prototype), which is born of water or primordial Earth, evolved Brahmâ—with the Hindus. The lotus flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu’s navel—that God resting on the waters of space and his Serpent of Infinity—is the most graphic allegory ever made: the Universe evolving from the central Sun, the point, the ever-concealed germ. Lakshmi, who is the

 

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380 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

female aspect of Vishnu,⁴⁰⁴ and who is also called Padma, the lotus, is likewise shown floating at “Creation,” on a lotus flower, and during the “churning of the ocean” of space, springing from the “sea of milk,” like Venus from the froth.

“. . . Then seated on a lotus
Beauty’s bright goddess, peerless Srî, arose
Out of the waves . . .”

sings an English Orientalist and poet (Sir Monier Williams).

The underlying idea in this symbol is very beautiful, and it shows, furthermore, its identical parentage in all the religious systems. Whether in the lotus or water-lily shape it signifies one and the same philosophical idea—namely, the emanation of the objective from the subjective, divine Ideation passing from the abstract into the concrete or visible form. For, as soon as Darkness—or rather that which is “darkness” for ignorance—has disappeared in its own realm of eternal Light, leaving behind itself only its divine manifested Ideation, the creative Logoi have their understanding opened, and they see in the ideal world (hitherto concealed in the divine thought) the archetypal forms of all, and proceed to copy and build or fashion upon these models forms evanescent and transcendent.

At this stage of action, the Demiurge⁴⁰⁵ is not yet the Architect. Born in the twilight of action, he has yet to first perceive the plan, to realise the ideal forms which lie buried in the bosom of Eternal Ideation, as the future lotus-leaves, the immaculate petals, are concealed within the seed of that plant. . . . .

In chapter lxxxi. of the Ritual (Book of the Dead), called “Transformation into the Lotus,” a head emerging from this flower, the god exclaims: “I am the pure lotus, emerging from the Luminous one. . . . . I carry the messages of Horus. I am the pure lotus which comes from the Solar Fields. . . . .”

The lotus-idea may be traced even in the Elohistic chapter, the 1st of Genesis, as stated in Isis.

 

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381 THE EXOTERIC AND THE ESOTERIC.

It is in this idea that we must look for the origin and explanation of the verse in the Jewish cosmogony, which reads: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth . . . . the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.” In all the primitive religions, the “Son of the Father” is the creative God—i.e., His thought made visible; and before the Christian era, from the Trimurti of the Hindus down to the three kabalistic heads of the scriptures as explained by the Jews, the triune godhead of each nation was fully defined and substantiated in its allegories.

Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern peoples. But, applied to practical and exoteric worship—which had also its esoteric symbology—the lotus became in time the carrier and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever escaped the sexual element in it; and to this day it soils the moral beauty of the root idea. The following is quoted from the same Kabalistic MSS. already mentioned:

“Pointing to like signification was the lotus growing in the waters of the Nile. Its mode of growth peculiarly fitted it as a symbol of the generative activities. The flower of the lotus, which is the bearer of the seed for reproduction, as the result of its maturing, is connected by its placenta-like attachment with mother-earth, or the womb of Isis, through the water of the womb, that is, the river Nile, by means of the long cord-like stalk, the umbilicus. Nothing can be plainer than the symbol, and to make it perfect in its intended signification, a child is sometimes represented as seated in or issuing from the flower.⁴⁰⁶ Thus Osiris and Isis, the children of Chronos, or time without end, in the development of their nature-forces, in this picture become the parents of man under the name Horus. . .” (See § IX., “The Moon, Deus Lunus, Phœbe” [p. 368].)

“We cannot lay too great stress upon the use of this generative function as a basis for a symbolical language and a scientific art-speech. Thought upon the idea leads at once to reflection upon the subject of creative cause. In its workings Nature is observed to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism governed by an added living soul; the life development and history of which soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpasses all efforts of the human intellect.⁴⁰⁷ The new born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence that

 

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382 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

within the workshop of the womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine. The amazing wonderfulness of the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all connected with the organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident constructive intervention of deity.”

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

“The locality of the womb is to be taken as the most holy place, the sanctum sanctorum, and the veritable Temple of the Living God.⁴⁰⁸ With man the possession of the woman has always been considered as an essential part of himself, to make one out of two, and jealously guarded as sacred. Even the part of the ordinary house or home consecrated to the dwelling of the wife was called the penetralia, the secret or sacred, and hence the metaphor of the Holy of Holies of sacred constructions taken from the idea of the sacredness of the organs of generation. Carried to the extreme of description⁴⁰⁹ by metaphor, this part of the house is described in the Sacred Books as the “between the thighs of the house,” and sometimes the idea is carried out constructively in the great door-opening of Churches placed inward between flanking buttresses.”

No such thought “carried to the extreme” ever existed among the old primitive Aryans. This is proven by the fact that in the Vedic period their women were not placed apart from men in penetralia, or “Zenanas.” Their seclusion began when the Mahomedans—the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism after Christian ecclesiasticism—had conquered the land and gradually enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindus. The pre- and post-Vedic woman was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the religious symbo-

 

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383 THE PURITY OF EARLY PHALLICISM.

logy of the early Aryans. The idea and application are purely Semitic. This is corroborated by the writer of the said intensely learned and Kabalistic revelation himself, when he closes the above-quoted passages by adding:

“If to these organs as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of the origin of measures as well as of time-periods can be attached, then indeed, in the constructions of the Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy place, should borrow its title from the recognised sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause. With the ancient wise, there was no name and no idea, and no symbol of a first cause.” . . . .

Most decidedly not. Rather never give a thought to it and leave it for ever nameless, as the early Pantheists did, than degrade the sacredness of that Ideal of Ideals, by dragging down its symbols into such anthropomorphic forms! Here again one perceives the immense chasm between Aryan and Semitic religious thought: two opposite poles—Sincerity and Concealment. With the Brahmins, who have never invested with an “original Sin” element the natural procreative functions of mankind, it is a religious duty to have a son. A Brahmin, in days of old, having accomplished his mission of human creator, retired to the jungle and passed the rest of his days in religious meditations. He had accomplished his duty to nature as mortal man and its co-worker, and henceforth gave all his thoughts to the spiritual immortal portion in himself, regarding the terrestrial as a mere illusion, an evanescent dream—which it is. With the Semite, it was different. He invented a temptation of flesh in a garden of Eden; showed his God (esoterically, the Tempter and the Ruler of Nature) cursing for ever an act, which was in the logical programme of that nature.⁴¹⁰ All this exoterically, as in the cloak and dead letter of Genesis and the rest; and at the same time esoterically he regarded the supposed sin and fall as an act so sacred, as to choose the organ, the perpetrator of the original sin, as the fittest and most sacred symbol to represent that God, who is shown as branding its entering into function as disobedience and everlasting sin!

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

Whether the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the Hebrew (Old) Testament, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, while the others remained ignorant of the secret, is for

 

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384 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

posterity to decide. One thing is certain, at any rate. As the esotericism of the New Testament agrees perfectly with that of the Hebrew Mosaic Books; and since, at the same time, a number of purely Egyptian symbols and pagan dogmas in general—the Trinity for example—have been copied by, and incorporated into, the Synoptics and St. John, it becomes evident that the identity of those symbols was known to the writers of the New Testament, whoever they were. They must have been aware also of the priority of the Egyptian esotericism, since they have adopted several such symbols that typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs—in their outward and inward meaning—and which are not to be found in the Jewish Canon. One of such is the water-lily in the hands of the Archangel in the early representations of his appearance to the Virgin Mary; and these symbolical images are preserved to this day in the iconography of the Greek and Roman Churches. Thus water, fire, the Cross, as well as the Dove, the Lamb, and other sacred animals, with all their combinations, yield esoterically an identical meaning, and must have been accepted as an improvement upon Judaism pure and simple.

For the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin are purely Aryan, though they became common property during the branching-off of the fifth race. Let us give an example. Letters, as much as numbers, were all mystic, whether in combination or each taken separately. The most sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or androgyne, and is made to symbolize water, the great deep, in its origin. It is mystic in all the languages, Eastern and Western, and stands as a glyph for the waves, thus: . In the Aryan Esotericism, as in the Semitic, this letter has always stood for the waters; e.g., in Sanskrit makara—the tenth sign of the Zodiac—means a crocodile, or rather an aquatic monster associated always with water. The letter MA is equivalent to and corresponds with number 5—composed of a binary, the symbol of the two sexes separated, and of the ternary, symbol of the third life, the progeny of the binary. This, again, is often symbolised by a Pentagon, the latter being a sacred sign, a divine Monogram. Maitreya is the secret name of the Fifth Buddha, and the Kalki Avatar of the Brahmins—the last Messiah who will come at the culmination of the Great Cycle. It is also the initial letter of the Greek Metis or Divine Wisdom; of Mimra, the “word” or Logos; and of Mithras (the Mihr), the Monad, Mystery. All these are born in, and from, the great Deep, and are the Sons of Maya—the Mother; in Egypt, Mouth, in Greece Minerva (divine wisdom), Mary, or Miriam, Myrrha, etc.; of the Mother of the Christian Logos, and of Maya, the mother of Buddha. Madhava and Madhavi are the titles of the most important gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon. Finally, Mandala is in

385 THE EGYPTIAN LOTUS.

Sanskrit “a circle,” or an orb (the ten divisions of the Rig Veda). The most sacred names in India begin with this letter generally—from Mahat, the first manifested intellect, and Mandara, the great mountain used by the gods to churn the Ocean, down to Mandakin, the heavenly Ganga (Ganges), Manu, etc., etc.

Shall this be called a coincidence? A strange one it is then, indeed, when we find even Moses—found in the water of the Nile—having the symbolical consonant in his name. And Pharaoh’s daughter “called his name Moses . . . because,” she said, “I drew him out of Water” (Exod. ii., 10.)⁴¹¹ Besides which the Hebrew sacred name of God applied to this letter M is Meborach, the “Holy” or the “Blessed,” and the name for the water of the Flood is M’bul. A reminder of the “three Maries” at the Crucifixion and their connection with Mar, the Sea, or Water, may close this example. This is why in Judaism and Christianity the Messiah is always connected with Water, Baptism, the Fishes (the sign of the Zodiac called Meenam in Sanskrit), and even with the Matsya (fish) Avatar, and the Lotus—the symbol of the womb, or the water-lily, which is the same.

In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive symbols and emblems of the objects exhumed, the oftener are the lotus flowers and the water found in connection with the Solar Gods. The god Khnoom—the moist power—water, as Thales taught it, being the principle of all things, sits on a throne enshrined in a lotus (Saitic epoch, Serapeum). The god Bes stands on a lotus, ready to devour his progeny. (Ibid, Abydos.) Thot, the god of mystery and Wisdom, the sacred Scribe of Amenti, wearing the Solar disc as head gear, sits with a bull’s head (the sacred bull of Mendes being a form of Thot) and a human body, on a full blown lotus. (IVth Dynasty.) Finally it is the goddess Hiquet, under her shape of a frog, who rests on the lotus, thus showing her connection with water. And it is this frog-symbol, undeniably the most ancient of their Egyptian deities, from whose unpoetical shape the Egyptologists have been vainly trying to unravel her mystery and functions. Its adoption in the Church by the early Christians shows that they knew it better than our modern Orientalists. The “frog or toad goddess” was one of the chief cosmic deities connected with creation, on account of her amphibious nature, and chiefly because of her apparent resurrection, after long ages of solitary life enshrined in old walls, in rocks, etc. She not only participated in the organization of the world, together with Khnoom, but was also connected with the

 

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386‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dogma of resurrection.⁴¹² There must have been some very profound and sacred meaning attached to this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoolatry, the early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad enshrined in a lotus flower, or simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the Church lamps, on which were engraved the words “I am the resurrection” “᾽Εγώ εἰμι ἀνάστασις.”⁴¹³ These frog goddesses are also found on all the mummies.

———

§ IX. THE MOON, DEUS LUNUS, PHŒBE.

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

. . . . “Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles
That wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame,
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms, but not illumines.” . . . .

stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the giver of life to the whole planetary system; the Moon is the giver of life to our globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen and she is the King, and was King Soma before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is pre-eminently the deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since the

 

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387 A GLANCE AT THE LUNAR MYTH.

last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the pagan temples. For the “Fathers”—such as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus—the Moon was Jehovah’s living symbol: the giver of Life and the giver of Death, the disposer of being—in our World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and life: with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the goddess of Death, who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this: as the personified moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana-Hecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps—three heads on one neck,⁴¹⁴ like Brahmâ-Vishnu-Siva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in its seventh (Sabbath) day, came to the Jews from Antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the moon.

It is worth the trouble of presenting in this work a bird’s-eye view of the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact science, rejecting as it does tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Aryan Hindu religious philosophy is the more ancient—and the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter—does not much matter in this instance, as the lunar and solar “worship” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world, with some openly, with others—e.g., in Christian symbolics—secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, herself the Moon in one sense, as Osiris was the Sun. The cat is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubaste, which went into deep mourning after the death of every sacred cat, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in this city of mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I. of “Symbolism,” and no one has better described it than Mr. G. Massey, in his Lectures and in “The Natural Genesis.” The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in its growth and decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding under the shape of a cat in the Moon, when, in company with other deities, she was seeking to

 

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388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

escape the pursuit of Typhon (Vide the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The moon in Egypt was both the “Eye of Horus” and the “Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.

The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolise the sun and moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, as of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, “as,” say the Alchemists, “Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, as without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can accomplish anything in the great work.” Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the Caduceus, the Crescent, or the Lotus, is a glyph of the “philosophical” Mercury; but when seen with a reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanuman filled the same office with Rama.

Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsis, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindu mythology and history based upon and interblended with these two worships, but so is also the Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. The difference, indeed, between the Aryan Hindu and the Aryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindus are proud of calling themselves Suryas and Chandravansas (of the Solar and Lunar dynasties). The Christians pretend to regard it as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon the solar and lunar worships. It is useless and vain for the Protestants to exclaim against the Roman Catholics for their “Mariolatry,” based on the ancient cult of lunar goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah, pre-eminently a lunar god, and when both Churches have accepted in their theologies the “Sun” -Christ and the lunar trinity.

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

In the unpublished MSS. on the Art Speech, already mentioned, giving a key to the formation of the ancient (symbolical) language, a logical raison d’être is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, becomes forcibly a proven fact in the history of religious

389 A KEY-NOTE TO THE MOON.

evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient Symbology. Thus, he says:

“One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity, would be the perception of time periods,⁴¹⁵ marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or night, or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there was a longest and shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the period of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be marked with the greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the constellations, subject to that retrograde movement thereof, which in time would require a correction by intercalation, as was the case in the description of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years, during which confusion of landmarks had increased. . . . This would naturally come to pass . . . . with all races in all time; and such knowledge must be taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the historic period. . . . .”

On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that “the connection between the two kinds of phenomena . . . became fixed in popular usage.” He finds it “(a) in the feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or “4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days, which is the solar week year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of the fœtus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c) That period which is called “the period of viability” is one of 210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (d) The period of parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing inscrutable mystery and miracle . . . Thus the observed periods of time marking the workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical calculation . . . We may almost affirm . . . that this was the mode of reckoning among all nations, either independently, or intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they calculate the calendar by means of the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as to which this is the proof:

 

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390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself;⁴¹⁶ and that man was his image, man including woman . . . The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,⁴¹⁷ who were represented, respectively, by a man having a bull’s head, and a woman having the head of a cow, which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire and of life-giving force, while Isis was the Moon, the bed of the river Nile, or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity, the lunar year of 354—364 days, the time-maker of the periods of gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon.” . . . .

“But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the women of the Hebrews was not intended as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in the teaching intended, and merely as a substitution of a symbol of common import, which was this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the woman was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of four weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value of this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent moon.⁴¹⁸ . . . These parturient and natural periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They were thus used by the Hindus, and are found to be most plainly set forth by the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross; and manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of Yucatan, the Hindus, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols . . . would be either the phallus or the phallus and yoni, . . . or male and female. Indeed, the words translated by the generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are . . . sacr and n’cabrah, or literally, phallus and yoni,⁴¹⁹ while the representation of the phallic emblems would barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when their functions and the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them was considered; then would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and, through lunar, of solar time.” . . .

This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. The key that opens the mystery of theogony, or the evolution of the Manvantaric gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. All is mystical and divine there. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a generative god, preferred to ignore the higher hierarchies, and have made of some of them (zodiacal constellations and planetary gods) their Patriarchs, thus euhemerizing the

 

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391 THE TIME PERIODS.

purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. (See section “Holy of Holies” in the “Symbolism” of Book II.) The MSS. from which the above is extracted explains very clearly to what hierarchy of gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was; for it shows in clear language that which the writer has always insisted upon—namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret god of the Kabalists, Ain-Soph, as grand as Parabrahmam in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical conceptions. But it is not the Kabala of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Simeon-Ben-Iochai, as metaphysical and philosophical as any. And how many are there among the students of the Kabala who knew anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations. Let us glance at the idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the ever Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.

“If to these organs (phallus and yoni) as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of . . . . time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that post designated as the Holy of Holies, or the most High Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative Cause.”

“With the ancient wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol, of a First Cause.⁴²⁰ With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term of negation of comprehension—viz., Ain-Soph, or the Without Bounds. But the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation, was the conception of a circle with its diameter line. . . . . (See the Proem of Book I., Part I.) to carry at once a geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea . . . . for the one takes its birth from the nought or the Circle, without which it could not be, and from one, or primal one, spring the nine digits, and, geometrically, all plane shapes. So in the Kabala this Circle, with its diameter line, is the picture of the ten Sephiroth or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, the Archetypal Man, the creative origin of all things. . . . . This idea of connecting the circle and its diameter line, that is, number ten, with the signification of the reproductive organs, and the Most Holy Place, was carried out constructively in the King’s Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon. . . . . It is the picture of a double-womb, for in Hebrew the letter hé ה is at the same time the number 5 and symbol of the womb, and twice 5 is 10, or the phallic number.”

This “double womb” also shows the duality of the idea carried from

 

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392 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the highest, spiritual, down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and by the Jews limited to the latter. With them, therefore the number 7 has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty rituals; as their Sabbath, for instance, the seventh day sacred to their deity, the moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. While with other nations the number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of cycles, cosmic planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a boundless whole, whose first upper triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man—while other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this member solely in the moon, and based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MSS. just quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews that: “If 20,612 be multiplied by 4/3 the product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon, and if this product be again multiplied by 4/3, this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the mean solar year, . . . this form . . . becoming, for the finding of astronomical periods of time, of very great service.” This double number (male and female) is symbolized also in some well-known idols: e.g., “Ardanari-Iswara, the Isis of the Hindus, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the Hebrew Jordan, or source of descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf flowing on the water. But the signification is, that it is androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Jod י, the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the minutes of the same circle of 360 degrees.”

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

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

Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud,

393 COPIES AND ORIGINALS.

and loudly confess to it. In a Mémoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says:

“It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Ra should be his mother’s husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the spouse of that son she conceives. . . . We (Christians) can understand now why Neithis throws radiance on the sun, while remaining the Moon, since the Virgin, who is the Queen of Heaven, as Neith was, clothes herself in her radiance, and clothes in his turn the Christ-Sun. “Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit.” . . .

is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service, and he adds:

“We (Christians) understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Sais should have stated that ‘none has ever lifted my peplum (veil),’ considering that this sentence, literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the day of the immaculate conception.” (J. E. de Mirville, “Chapitre VIII: Des Bons Esprits Depuis le Déluge où Premier Catholicisme,” §II Archéologie de la Vierge-Mère [Archæology of the Virgin Mother], Des Esprits, Vol. 3, 1863, p. 117.)

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

“The man in the moon (Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar twins) is often charged with bad conduct. . . . In the lunar phenomena the moon was one as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character—as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his own mother! It could not be helped if there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own father! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet, in its latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms—as child and consort of the mother moon. The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental.”

“In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the New, as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God.”

A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything ever did the true character of Jehovah or YHVH in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of I’bn Gebirol’s Kabbalah, translated by Isaac Myer. “In the introduction written by Rabbī Ḥizqīyāh, which is very old,” says our author, “and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zōhar (1:5b) is an account of a journey taken by Rabbī ʾElʿāzār, son of Rabbī Šimʿōn ben Yōḥay, and Rabbī ʾAbbā.” They met a man with a heavy burden and asked his name; but he refused to give it and proceeded to explain to them Thorah

394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(Law). “They asked: “Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?’ He answered: ‘The letter י, (Yod, which=10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy name יהוה YHVH) . . . . They said to him: ‘If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy feet.’ He replied: ‘As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and was a fish therein’ (like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes), ‘which (first) destroyed the great sea’ . . . . . and he was great and mighty and ‘Ancient of Days,’ until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea . . . Rabbī ʾElʿāzār listened and said to him: ‘Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son of Rab Ham—’nun-ah Sabah [the old: the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun (noon)] thou art the Son of the Light of the Thorah,” (Dharma) etc. Then the author explains that the feminine Sephiroth, Binah, is termed by the Kabalist the great sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the female power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian theology to be the serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal (Heh, and Eve). This Yah-hovah then or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son,—on the material plane and in the purely physical World. Demon and Deus at one and the same time; the sun and moon, good and evil, God and Demon. Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if, astronomically, she is one of the seven planets of the ancient world, in theogony she is one of the regents thereof; with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the former referring to her under the name of one of their archangels, and the latter under that of one of their gods.

Therefore the meaning of the “fairy tale” translated by Chwolson from an old Chaldean MSS. translated into Arabic, about Qû-tâmy being instructed by the idol of the moon, is easily understood (vide Book III.) Seldenus tells us the secret as well as Maimonides (More Nevochim, Book III., ch. xxx). The worshippers of the Teraphim (the Jewish Oracles) “carved images and claimed that the light of the principal stars (planets) permeating these through and through, the angelic Virtues (or the regents of the stars and planets) conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky and called ἀλεξητῆροι, or the tutelary gods. Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματιχοὶ, or the diviners by the στοιχεῖα. (De Diis Syriis, Teraph, II. Synt. p. 31) vide infra, the Teraphim.

It is such sentences, however, in the “Nabathean agriculture,” that

395 SOLAR-LUNAR WORSHIP IN THE CHURCH.

have frightened the men of science and made them proclaim the work “either an apocrypha or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants tore it metaphorically to pieces; the former because “it described the worship of demons,” the latter because it is “ungodly.” They are all wrong, once more. It is not a fairy tale; and as far as regards pious Churchmen, the same worship may be shown in the Scriptures, however disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship, as well as that of the Stars and Elements, are traced, and figure in the Christian theology; defended by Papists, they are stoutly denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.

Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements, “Spiritus elementorum, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων” (1. I., 21).

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

No symbol—the sun included—was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male, e.g., the Hindu “King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous goddesses Diana-Luna, I’lythia, Lucina. In Tauris, human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar goddess; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Koloé: ᾽Αρτέμιδι ᾽Ανάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphos was the first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolitus wrote: Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθενῶν. (See Pausanias viii., 35, 8.) This Artemis-Lochia, the goddess that presided at conception and child-birth (Iliad, Pausanias, etc., etc.), is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The goddess Τρίμορφος was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics (Cornut. De Nat, D. 34, 1), while the Orpheans explained the epithet (Τρίμορφος) by the three kingdoms of nature over which she reigned. Jealous, blood-thirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the “jealous God” of the Hebrew prophets.

396 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The whole riddle of the solar and lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the “Queen of Night,” that lie latent for modern science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the moon was represented by the ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic mysteries were the ancients than are now our modern astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the lunar gods and goddesses, Nephtys or Neith, Proserpina, Melytta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysius, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles—those of “Sons” and “Husbands” of their mothers—their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system the gods were made to merge their functions as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the goddesses were identified as “Wife, Mother, and Sister” of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the “Sun, the giver of Life,” the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maïa, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maïa, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, “mother,” from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all those goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.⁴²¹ Its primitive meaning, however, was Maya, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as “inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “unreachable,” in the sense of illusion and unreality; as being the source and cause of spells, the personification of Illusion.

In religious rites the moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Aryans, Khaldii, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-lunus and Thot-lunus,⁴²² were the occult potencies of the moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her seven phases (original, esoteric division) are divided into three astronomical phenomena and four

 

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397 THE MOON, BISEXUAL.

purely psychic phases. That the moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the moon-god (the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance) was allegorized by the moon standing for the genius of evil that triumphs for the time over the light and life-giving god (the sun), and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic was required to turn this triumph into a defeat.

It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, to whom the male-moon became sacred, when after the “Fall” so-called, the sexes had become separated. “Deus Lunus” then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to serve finally, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power, to the Fourth Root-race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth (our own) the lunar-solar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described æons later in the Mahabhâratan War, which to the Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindus and Occultists the historical, strife between the Suryavansas and the Indovansas. Originating in the dual aspect of the moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct solar and lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the sun was for a very long time feminine and the moon masculine—the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The moon was called “the Lord of the sun,” Bel-Shemesh,⁴²³ before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol-worship. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called “God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved those systems of nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts

 

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398 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of physiology (quite a modern science with us), psychology, sacred mathematics, geometry and metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but glyphs, recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short, upon a most minute and profound knowledge of nature. Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and kills it. Soma embodies the triple power of the Trimurti, though it passes unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes Soma, the moon, produced by the churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the gods in another Manvantara (i.e., in the pregenetic day of our planetary system), and that other allegory, which shows “the Rishis milking the earth, whose calf was Soma, the moon,” has a deep cosmographical meaning; for it is neither our earth which is milked, nor was the moon, which we know, the calf.⁴²⁴ Had our wise men of science known as much of the mysteries of nature as the ancient Aryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in theogony, the Son becoming his own father and the mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply “the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture!”—as Renouf gravely observes in a Hibbert lecture.

The ancients taught the, so to speak, auto-generation of the Gods: the one divine essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a second-self, manifested, which second-self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth in an immaculate way to everything macro- and micro-cosmical in this universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred 10, a few pages back.

But our Orientalists, their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous element in nature notwithstanding, will not see it; cramped in their researches by such ignorance, they—the Aryanists and Egyptologists—are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-râ saying to King Amenophes (supposed to be Memnon), “Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee”; and as he

 

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399 THE DIGNITY OF SAÏS.

finds the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim that “for this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form.” Precisely. But why throw the explanation on an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the earlier?

That doctrine was universal, and it was not the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the Indian avatars are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come “to realize clearer”⁴²⁵ what “the Divine Father and Son” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails to account for, and perceive what were the functions attributed to the feminine principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in the goddess Neith, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple: “I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neith, the great (female) producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth,” and hence is the fruit of an immaculate mother.

How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical is the real distinction—for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it—made between the immaculate virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful mother nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the sun and moon, generates and brings forth her “mind-born” son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the earth, the microcosmical mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, “the first-born” (primogenitus) is indeed generated, i.e., begotten, “genitum, non factum,” and positively conceived and brought forth—“Virgo pariet,” explains the Latin Church. Thus, she drags down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “of the earth earthy,” degrades that ideal to the lowest of the anthropomorphic goddesses of the rabble.

Truly, Neith, Isis, Diana, etc., etc., were each of them “a demiurgical goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping to the generation of species” —the moon, in short. Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the moon becomes with

 

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400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,⁴²⁶ and both of these goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh Thotmes, who stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac; and the same goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne: “The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven”; also “the Morning Star,” and the “Light of the Sea” (Stella matutina and Lux maris). All the lunar goddesses had a dual aspect—one divine, the other infernal. All were the virgin mothers of an immaculately born Son—the Sun. Raoul Rochette shows the moon-goddess of the Athenians—Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana—holding her child-son on the lap, invoked in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, “the one Mother of God,” sitting on a lion, and surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist recognises the twelve great gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the apostles, or rather the Grecian pagan prophecy thereof.

They are both right, for the immaculate goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older pagan goddesses; the number (twelve) of the apostles is that of the twelve tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great gods, and of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Every detail almost in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the heathens. Semele, the wife of Jupiter and mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also “carried,” or made to ascend to heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the Queen of the World, or the universe, πανβασιλεία; “at the names of which, as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal goddesses,” “tremble all the demons.”⁴²⁷

“Σεμελῆν τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone that was found by somebody, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us (113, Archæologie de la Vierge mère), informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent plagiarism, perpetrated by the Demon, of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church. Whether so, or vice versâ, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity between the archaic copy and the modern original.

Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury’s remark that “the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and

 

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401 ANTE-HISTORICAL CATHOLICISM.

Venus, and that the pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in honour of those goddesses, were in a good measure transferred to the mother of Christ,” the advocate of Rome answers:

“That such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be and quite natural. As the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly posterior to the Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a first ante-historical (Roman) Catholicism of which our own is but the faithful continuation. . . . But while the former was the culmination, the summum of the impudence of demons and Goetic necromancy . . . . the latter is divine. If in our (Christian) Revelation (l’Apocalypse), Mary, clothed with the Sun and having the moon under her feet, has nothing more in common with the humble servant of Nazareth (sic.), it is because she has now become the greatest of theological and cosmological powers in our universe.”—(Archæol. de la Vierge, pp. 116 and 119, and by the Marquis de Mirville).

Verily so, since Pindar’s Hymns to Minerva (p. 19) . . . “who sits at the right hand of her Father Jupiter, and who is more powerful than all the other (angels or) gods,” are likewise applied to the Virgin. It is St. Bernard, who, quoted by Cornelius a Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise:

“The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him.” (Sermon on the Holy Virgin.) . . . .

Again the Virgin is admitted to be the moon by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, that is in childbirth, the verse of Virgil—“Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo” —is applied to her. “Like the moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent saint; (Cornelius à Lapide, “Commentaria in Apocalypsin S. Joannis, Cap. XII.,” Comentaria in scripturam sacram, Tome XXI., p. 237). This settles the question. The more similarity, according to such writers as De Mirville, there exists between the pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The unbelieving scientists and the academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to ask. But then “they believe in nothing and reject even the ‘Nabathean Agriculture’ as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “In their perverted opinion Qû-tâ-my’s ‘idol of the moon’ and the statue of the Madonna are one!” A noble Marquis wrote twenty years ago six huge volumes, or, as he calls them “Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of showing Roman Catholicism an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire ancient world, ever since

402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the deluge, had been, with the help of the devil, systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future Holy Church to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co-religionist—M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum—declaring, in one of his learned lectures, that “neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt?”⁴²⁸

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

The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun and Moon—identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “Sun worship” of the Zoroastrians—is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as the water, fire, sun, moon and stars, and a good many other things, is simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus Odin got his wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline waters of which increased his knowledge daily. Mimir “drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the world was born of water; hence primeval wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element” (“Asgard and the Gods,” 86). The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “the Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things; his other eye being the moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean.” (Ibid.) But it is something more, besides this. Loki, the fire-god, is said to have hidden in the water, as well as in the moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein; and this belief that the fire finds refuge in the water was not limited to the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally taken up by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as fire”—the breath of the Father-Sun. This “Fire” descends also into the Water or the Sea: Mar, Mary. The dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations, it was sacred to Venus, the goddess born from the

 

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403 IDENTITY OF TYPOLOGY.‌

sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or the Holy Spirit.

One of the most occult chapters in the “Book of the Dead” is ch. lxxx., entitled: “To make the transformation into the god giving light to the path of Darkness,” wherein “Woman-light of the Shadow” serves Thot in his retreat in the moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested logos of its light side, the concealed deity or “Dark Wisdom” when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the moon calls herself repeatedly: “The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “Woman-Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother goddesses. As the wicked “evil” spirits warred against the moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without being able to prevail, however, against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the moon. Hence also the moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy; the Virgin, or Madonna, standing on the mythical Satan under that form, crushed and made powerless, under her feet. This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which represent in Eastern astronomy to this day the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the babe in his virgin mother’s arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection: “All such symbols figured their own facts from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally different order. The Iconography (and dogmas, too) had survived in Rome from a period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor interpolation of types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its meaning.”

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§ X. TREE, SERPENT, AND CROCODILE WORSHIP.

“Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an implacable hatred, or prostrate themselves before its genius. Lie calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in its heart, and Eloquence on its caduceus. In hell it arms the whip of the Furies; in heaven Eternity makes of it its symbol.” De Chateaubriand.

The Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of genii, from god to man; that the relative superiority of these was ruled by the degree

404 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the serpent had to be constantly called upon and to be thanked for the signal service it had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his being immensely by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric reason given.

It is easy to see whence the primal idea of this dual, Janus-like character of the Serpent: the good and the bad. This symbol is one of the most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the mammal. Thence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes who think that the souls of their ancestors live under this form, and the general association of the Serpent with the tree. The legends about the various things it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are allegorical, they have now passed into the class of fables based on ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when Philostratus narrates that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of serpents in order to learn the language of all the animals, the serpent being credited with that faculty, he certainly never meant his words to be accepted literally. (See De Vitâ Apollonii, lib. 1, c. xiv.) As will be found more than once as we proceed, the “Serpent” and “Dragon” were the names given to the “Wise Ones,” the initiated adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have roasted the heart of Fafnir, the Dragon, whom he had slain, becoming thereby the wisest of men, it meant the same thing. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and magical charms; he had received the “word” from an initiate of that name, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as many do, after “passing the word.” Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics while trying to expose their heresies. The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for honouring the Serpent: it was because he taught the primeval men the Mysteries (Adv. Hæres. 37). Verily so; but they did not have Adam and Eve in the garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is stated above. The Nâgas of the Hindu and Tibetan adepts were human Nâgas (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the Serpent has ever been the type of consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of Immortality and Time.

The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and facts about Serpent worship, given in “The Natural Genesis,” are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far from covering the whole of the meanings implied. They divulge only the astronomical and physiological mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality the Serpent was, no doubt,

405 THE DEGRADATION OF THE SYMBOL.

“the great mystery in the mysteries,” and was, very likely, “adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal.” It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries concerning terrestrial animal life, for as symbol of “reclothing and rebirth in the (universal) mysteries” its “final phase”⁴²⁹—or shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases—they were not of this plane. They were generated in the pure realm of ideal light, and having accomplished the round of the whole cycle of adaptations and symbolism, the “mysteries” returned from whence they had come—into the essence of immaterial causality. They belonged to the highest gnosis. And surely this could have never obtained its name and fame solely on account of its penetration into physiological and especially feminine functions!

As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the Tree itself; the “Tree of Life,” with which it was emblematically and almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a metaphysical or a physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the breaking of idols, not for truth’s sake, but to glorify the more gross matter. The revelations and interpretations in “The Rivers of Life” would have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian wisdom; and even the early Saivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of the author of the said work. “The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that the cross or Tau is simply a copy of the male organs in a triadic form is radically false,” writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says. But this is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern interpretations of ancient symbols. “The Natural Genesis,” a monumental work of research and thought, the most complete on that subject that has ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining much more than all the symbologists who have hitherto written, does not yet go beyond the “psycho-theistic” stage of ancient thought. Nor were Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to see that their interpretations of the “Tree of Life,” as the cross and phallus, fitted the symbol, and approximated it, only on the lowest and last stage of the evolutionary development of the idea of the Giver of Life. It was the last and the grossest physical transformation of nature, in animal, insect, bird, and even plant; for biune, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction of the contraries, or sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the modern symbologists and Orientalists—from first to last—

 

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406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

being ignorant of the real mysteries revealed by occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If told that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in common on this earth, is but a passing phase, a physical means of furnishing the conditions to, and producing the phenomena of life which will alter with this, and disappear with the next Root-Race—they would laugh at such a superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned Occultists assert this because they know it. The universe of living beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness to the various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human species and races; and the naturalist ought to sense this truth intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate it. And how could he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the archaic history of the past are few and scarce, and those that men of science come across are mistaken for finger-posts of our little era. Even so-called “universal” (?) history embraces but a tiny field in the almost boundless space of the unexplored regions of our latest, fifth Root-Race. Hence, every fresh sign-post, every new glyph of the hoary Past that is discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on the same lines of pre-existing conceptions, and without any reference to the special cycle of thought which that particular glyph may belong to. How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!

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

It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the garden of Eden, of our Adamic race, that this Tree got soiled by the contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of

407 THE SEVEN-HEADED DRAGONS.

Eternity—the heaven-born Logos—was finally degraded. In days of old—of the divine Dynasties on Earth—the now dreaded Reptile was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss of divine Mystery. Various were the forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols adapted to it, as it crossed æons of Time: as from Infinite Time itself—Kala—it fell into the space and time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were Cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Hindu-Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never swallows the Sun during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was sprinkled by the waters of life; the great Dragon, ever divine, so long as it was kept within the precincts of the sidereal fields. But the tree grew and its lower boughs touched at last the infernal regions—our Earth. Then the great serpent Nidhögg—he who devours the corpses of the evil-doers in the “Hall of Misery” (human life), so soon as they are plunged into “Hwergelmir,” the roaring cauldron (of human passions)—gnawed the World-tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy and mighty roots, and are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk; while the Midgard-snake coiled at the bottom of the Seas, encircles the Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend herself.

They are all seven-headed, the dragons and serpents of antiquity—“one head for each race, and every head with seven hairs on it,” as the allegory has it. Aye, from Ananta, the Serpent of Eternity which carries Vishnu through the Manvantara, from the original primordial Sesha, whose seven heads become “one thousand heads” in the Purânic fancy, down to the seven-headed Akkadian Serpent. This typifies the Seven principles throughout nature and man; the highest or middle head being the seventh. It is not of the Mosaic, Jewish Sabbath that Philo speaks in his Creation of the World, when saying that the world was completed “according to the perfect nature of number 6.” For, “when that reason (nous) which is holy in accordance with the number seven, has entered the soul (rather the living body), the number six is thus arrested, and all the mortal things which that number makes.” And again: “Number 7 is the festival day of all the earth, the birthday of the world. I know not whether any one would be able to celebrate the number 7 in adequate terms.” . . . (Par. pp. 30 and 419). The author of The Natural Genesis thinks that “the Septenary of Stars seen in the great bear (the Septarshis) and seven-headed Dragon furnished a visible origin for the symbolic seven of time above. The goddess of the seven stars,” he adds—

408 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Was the mother of time, as Kep; whence Kepti and Sebti for the two times and number seven. So this is the star of the Seven by name. Sevekt (Kronus), the Son of the goddess, has the name of the seven or seventh. So has Sefekh Abu who builds the house on high, as Wisdom (Sophia) built hers with seven pillars. . . The primary Kronotypes were seven, and thus the beginning of time in heaven is based on the number and the name of seven, on account of the starry demonstrators. The seven stars as they turned round annually kept pointing, as it were, with the forefinger of the right hand, and describing a circle in the upper and lower heaven.⁴³⁰ The number seven naturally suggested a measure by seven, that led to what may be termed Sevening, and to the marking and mapping out of the circle in seven corresponding divisions which were assigned to the seven great constellations; and thus was formed the celestial heptanomis of Egypt in the heavens. . . . When the stellar heptanomis was broken up and divided into four quarters, it was multiplied by four, and the twenty-eight signs took the place of the primary seven constellations, the lunar zodiac of twenty-eight days being the registered result.⁴³¹ . . . In the Chinese arrangement the four sevens are given to four genii that preside over the four cardinal points. . . .” (In Chinese Buddhism and Esotericism the genii are represented by four Dragons—the “Maharajahs” of the Stanzas.) “The seven Northern constellations make up the Black Warrior; the seven Eastern (Chinese autumn) constitute the White Tiger; the seven Southern are the Vermilion Bird; and the seven Western (called Vernal) are the Azure Dragon. Each of these four Spirits presides over its heptanomis during one lunar week. The genetive of the first heptanomis (Typhon of the Seven Stars) now took a lunar character; . . . in this phase we find the goddess Sefekh, whose name signifies number 7, is the feminine word, or logos in place of the mother of Time, who was the earlier Word, as goddess of the Seven Stars” (“Typology of Time,” Vol. II. p. 313, Nat. Gen.).

The author shows that it was the goddess of the Great Bear and mother of Time who was in Egypt from the earliest times the “Living Word,” and that “Sevekh-Kronus, whose type was the Crocodile-Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word-Logos” (p. 321, Vol. I.).

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

The above quotations are no digressions. They are brought forward as showing (a) the reason why a full Initiate was called a “Dragon,” a “Snake” a “Nâga”; and (b) that our septenary division was used by the priests of the earliest dynasties in Egypt, for the same reason and on the same basis as by us. This needs further elucidation, however. As already stated, that which Mr. G. Massey calls the four genii of the four cardinal points; and the Chinese, the Black Warrior, White Tiger, Ver-

 

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409 DRAGON AND CROCODILE.

milion Bird, and Azure Dragon, is called in the Secret Books,—the “Four Hidden Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Celestial Nâgas.” Now, as shown, the seven-headed or septenary Dragon-Logos had been in course of time split up, so to speak, into four heptanomic parts or twenty-eight portions. Each lunar week has a distinct occult character in the lunar month; each day of the twenty-eight has its special characteristics; as each of the twelve constellations, whether separately or in combination with other signs, has an occult influence either for good or for evil. This represents the sum of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth; yet few are those who acquire it, and still fewer are the wise men who get to the root of knowledge symbolized by the great Root Dragon, the spiritual logos of these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of “Dragons,” and they are the “Arhats of the Four Truths of the 28 Faculties,” or attributes, and have always been so called.

The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or Magi, one had to master the science or knowledge of the periods of the Seven Rectors of the world, in whom is all wisdom. In “Proclus in Timæus,” b. 1, Jamblichus is credited with another version, which does not however, alter, the meaning. He says that “the Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.” The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents. They are “charmers.” They hypnotise the bird with their eye, and man himself, very often, does not feel above their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.

The crocodile is the Egyptian dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the sun in a ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a crocodile “to show the motion of the Sun in the moyst (Space)”; (Prepar. Evang., 1, 3, c. 3). The crocodile was moreover, the symbol of Egypt herself—the lower, as being the more swampy of the two countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the sun in the ship on the Ether of Space meant that the hermetic matter is the principle, or basis, of gold, or again the philosophical sun; the water, within which the crocodile is swimming, is that water or matter made liquid; the ship herself, finally, representing the vessel of nature, in which the sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot: because it is the sun

410 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

which conducts the work by his action upon the moist or mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.

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

“On the first is seen Anubis . . . holding out a scroll; at his feet are two female busts; below all are two serpents entwined . . . a corpse swathed up like a mummy. In the second scroll . . . is Anubis, holding out a cross, the “Sign of Life.” Under his feet lies the corpse encircled in the numerous folds of a huge serpent, the Agathodæmon, guardian of the deceased. . . . . In the third scroll, Anubis bears on his arm . . . . . the outline of . . . a complete Latin cross . . . At the god’s foot is a rhomboid, the Egyptian ‘Egg of the World,’ towards which crawls a serpent coiled into a circle . . . . Under the busts is the letter ω repeated seven times in a line, reminding one of the ‘names’ . . . Very remarkable also is the line of characters, apparently Palmyrene, upon the legs of the first Anubis. As for the figure of the serpent, supposing these talismans to emanate not from the Isiac but the newer Ophite creed, it may well stand for that “True and perfect Serpent,” who leads forth the souls of all that put their trust in him out of the Egypt of the body, and through the Red Sea of Death into the Land of Promise, saving them on their way from the Serpents of the Wilderness, that is, from the Rulers of the Stars.” (King’s “Gnostics,” p. 366.)

And this “True and Perfect Serpent” is the seven-lettered God who is now credited with being Jehovah, and Jesus One with him. To this Seven-vowelled god the candidate for initiation is sent by Christos, in the Pistis Sophia, a work earlier than St. John’s Revelation, and evidently of the same school. “The (Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered

411 THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVEN THUNDERS.‌

these seven vowels,” but “Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not,” says Revelation. “Do ye seek after these mysteries?” inquiries Jesus in Pistis Sophia. “No mystery is more excellent than they (the seven vowels): for they shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights”—i.e., true Wisdom. “Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the Seven Vowels and their Forty and nine Powers, and the numbers thereof.”

In India, it was the mystery of the Seven Fires and their forty-nine fires or aspects, or “the members thereof,” just the same.

These seven vowels are represented by the Swastika signs on the crowns of the seven heads of the Serpent of Eternity, in India, among esoteric Buddhists, in Egypt, in Chaldea, etc. etc., and among the Initiates of every other country. It is on the Seven zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic writings, that the “mortal” leaves, on each, one of his “Souls” (or Principles); until arrived on the plane above all zones he remains as the great Formless Serpent of absolute wisdom—or the Deity itself. The seven-headed serpent has more than one signification in the Arcane teachings. It is the seven-headed Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and pre-eminently, the Serpent of Darkness (i.e., inconceivable and incomprehensible) whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first manifested Light—the universal Logos.

———

§ XI. DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS.

This symbolical sentence, in its many-sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions—or rather theologies—and especially so in the light of Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan. As an “adversary,” the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony of things in Nature—like Shadow to throw off still brighter the Light, like Night to bring into greater relief the Day, and like cold to make one appreciate the more the comfort of heat—Satan has ever existed. Homogeneity is one and indivisible. But if the homogeneous One and Absolute is no mere figure of speech, and if heterogeneity in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring—its bifurcous shadow or reflection—then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of

412 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

both good and evil. If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its universe, whence comes Evil or D’Evil if not from the same “Golden Womb” of the absolute? Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and Kakodæmon as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!

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

Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator, ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly: “Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God: and defects, in order to show that she is only his image,” he says.

The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric

413 DEATH IS LIFE.

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

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

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

Dragons and other fallen angels being described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the much-slandered Satan will be sufficient. That which the student will do well to remember is that, with every people except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite aspect in the dual nature of the so-called Creator. This is only natural. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from evil. As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to absoluteness. The ancients understood this so well that their philosophers—now followed by the Kabalists—defined evil as the lining of God or Good: Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed, evil is but an antagonizing blind force in nature; it is reaction, opposition, and contrast,—evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se: only the shadow of light, without which light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If evil disappeared, good would disappear along with it from Earth. The “Old Dragon” was pure spirit before he became matter, passive before he became active. In the Syro-Chaldean magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac, at the sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio. Before its fall on earth the “Serpent” was Ophis-Christos, and after its fall it became Ophiomorphos-Chrestos. Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise. There would be no life possible (in the Mayavic sense) without Death, nor regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will and aspirations

414 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

after that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light. Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other. Few are those theists and believers in a personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to that idol asking its help and protection for the exercise and impunity of their evil and cruel deeds. “Lead us not into Temptation” is addressed daily to “our Father, which art in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by millions of human Christian hearts. They do so, repeating the very words put in the mouth of their Saviour, and do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James “the brother of the Lord.” “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.”—(The Gen. Ep. of James, i, 13). Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us on the authority of Christ that it is God who does so? Open any pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological sense, and forthwith you find two definitions: (1) “Those afflictions and troubles whereby God tries his people”; (2) Those means and enticements which the Devil makes use of to ensnare and allure mankind. (St. James i., 2, 12, and Mat. vi., 13.) If accepted literally, the two teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the occult meaning is rejected?

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

Once that the key to Genesis is in our hands, it is the scientific and symbolical Kabala which unveils the secret. The great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the “Lord God” are identical, and so are Jehovah and Cain one—that Cain who is referred to in theology as the “murderer” and the liar to God! Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts him to do the same in another place. Jehovah turns into the fiery serpents to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah informs the brazen serpent that heals them. These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the Old Testament (contradictory because the two Powers are separated instead of being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing) are the

415 THEOLOGICAL ETYMOLOGIES.

echoes—distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology—of the universal and philosophical dogmas in nature, so well understood by the primitive Sages. We find the same groundwork in several personifications in the Purânas, only far more ample and philosophically suggestive.

Thus Pulâstya, a “Son of God”—one of the first progeny—is made the progenitor of Demons, the Râkshasas, the tempters and the Devourers of men. Pisâcha (female Demon) is a daughter of Daksha, a “Son of God” too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pisâchas (Padma Purâna). The Demons, so called in the Purânas, are very extraordinary devils when judged from the standpoint of European and orthodox views about these creatures, since all of them—Dânavas, Daityas, Pisâchas, and the Râkshasas—are represented as extremely pious, following the precepts of the Vedas, some of them even being great Yogis. But they oppose the clergy and Ritualism, sacrifices and forms—just what the full-blown Yogins do to this day in India—and are no less respected for it, though they are allowed to follow neither caste nor ritual; hence all those Purânic giants and Titans are called Devils. The Missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, the Hindu traditions no better than a refl of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulâstya with Cain, and of the Râkshasas with the Cainites, “the accursed,” the cause of the Noachian Deluge. (See the work of Abbé Gorresio, who “etymologises” Pulâstya’s name as meaning the “rejected,” hence Cain, if you please). Pulâstya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a “dug-up place,” a mine, and Cain is shown in tradition and the Bible as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!

While it is very probable that the Gibborim (the giants) of the Bible are the Râkshasas of the Hindus, it is still more certain that both are Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be, no Satan could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his hatred, than the Christian theologians are in cursing him as the father of every evil. Compare their vituperations and opinions given about the Devil with the philosophical views of the Purânic sages and their Christ-like mansuetude. When Parâsara, whose father was devoured by a Râkshasa, was preparing himself to destroy (magically) the whole race, his grandsire, Vasishta, says a few extremely suggestive words to him. He shows the irate Sage, on his own confession, that there is Evil and Karma, but no “evil spirits.” “Let thy wrath be appeased,” he says. “The Râkshasas are not culpable; thy father’s death was the work of Karma. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of

416 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

all that man obtains . . . and prevents the attainment of emancipation. The sages shun wrath. Be not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let not those unoff spirits of darkness be consumed; let thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is the might of the righteous” (Vishnu Purâna, Book i., ch. i.). Thus, every such “sacrifice” or prayer to God for help is no better than an act of black magic. That which Pârasara prayed for, was the destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is called a Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him as such, to eternal hell. Yet, in what respect is the prayer of sovereigns and generals, who pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any better? Such a prayer is in every case black magic of the worst kind, concealed like a demon “Mr. Hyde” under a sanctimonious “Dr. Jekyll.”

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

Since the personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its triple aspect—in the Old Testament, Christian theology and the ancient Gentile attitude of thought—those who would learn more of it are referred to Vol. II. of Isis Unveiled, chap. x. See also several sections in Book II., Part II. of this work. The present subject is touched upon and fresh explanations attempted for a very good reason. Before we can approach the evolution of physical and divine man, we have first to master the idea of cyclic evolution, to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the four races which preceded our present race, to learn what were the ideas of those Titans and giants—giants, verily, mentally as well as physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy which teaches the involution of spirit into matter, the progressive, downward cyclic descent, or active, self-conscious evolution. The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently divulged the secret of initiations, and their records are full of “the sliding down of Æons” in their double qualification of Angelic Beings and Periods: the one the natural evolution of the other. On the other hand, Oriental traditions on both sides of the “black water”—the oceans that separate the two Easts—are as full of allegories about the downfall of Pleroma, of that of the gods and Devas. One and all, they allegorized and explained the Fall as the

417 THE ANGELS SLANDERED.

desire to learn and acquire knowledge—to know. This is the natural sequence of mental evolution, the spiritual becoming transmuted into the material or physical. The same law of descent into materiality and re-ascent into spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reaction having stopped only just now, in our own special sub-race.

That which, perhaps ten millenniums ago, was allegorized in Pymander in a triune character of interpretation, meant as a record of an astronomical, anthropological, and even alchemical fact, namely, the allegory of the seven rectors breaking through the seven circles of fire, was dwarfed into one material and anthropomorphic interpretation—the rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The multivocal, profoundly philosophical narrative, under its poetical form of the “Marriage of Heaven with Earth,” the love of nature for Divine form and the “Heavenly man,” enraptured with his own beauty mirrored in nature—i.e., Spirit attracted into matter—has now become, under theological handling: “the seven Rectors disobeying Jehovah, self admiration generating Satanic Pride, followed by their Fall, Jehovah permitting no worship to be lost save upon himself.” In short, the beautiful Planet-Angels, the glorious cyclic æons of the ancients, became henceforward synthesized in their most orthodox shape in Samael, the chief of the Demons in the Talmud, “That great serpent with twelve wings that draws down after himself, in his Fall, the solar system, or the Titans.” But Schemal, the alter ego and the Sabean type of Samael, meant, in his philosophical and esoteric aspect, the “year” in its astrological evil aspect, its twelve months or wings of unavoidable evils, in nature; and in esoteric theogony (see Chwolson in Nabathean Agriculture, Vol. II., p. 217), both Schemal and Samael represented a particular divinity. With the Kabalists they are “the Spirit of the Earth,” the personal god that governs it, identical de facto with Jehovah. For the Talmudists admit themselves that Samael is a god-name of one of the seven Elohim. The Kabalists, moreover, show the two, Schemal and Samael, as a symbolical form of Saturn, Chronos, the twelve wings standing for the 12 months, and the symbol in its collectivity representing a racial cycle. Jehovah and Saturn are also glyphically identical.

This leads in its turn to a very curious deduction from a Roman Catholic dogma. Many renowned writers belonging to the Latin Church admit that a difference exists, and should be made, between the Uranian Titans, the antediluvian giants (also Titans), and those post-diluvian giants in whom they (the Roman Catholics) will see the descendants of the mythical Ham. In clearer words, there is a difference to be made between the Cosmic, primordial opposing Forces—guided by cyclic law—the Atlantean human giants, and the post-diluvian great adepts, whether

418 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the right or the left hand. At the same time they show that Michäel, “the generalissimus of the fighting Celestial Host, the bodyguard of Jehovah,” as it would seem (see de Mirville) is also a Titan, only with the adjective of “divine” before the cognomen. Thus those “Uranides” who are called everywhere “divine Titans,” and who, having rebelled against Kronos (Saturn), are therefore also shown to be the enemies of Samäel (an Elohim, also and synonymous with Jehovah in his collectivity), are identical with Michäel and his host. In short, the rôles are reversed, all the combatants are confused, and no student is able to distinguish clearly which is which. Esoteric explanation may, however, bring some order into this confusion, in which Jehovah becomes Saturn, and Michäel and his army, Satan and the rebellious angels, owing to the indiscreet endeavours of the too faithful zealots to see in every pagan god a devil. The true meaning is far more philosophical, and the legend of the first “Fall” (of the angels) assumes a scientific colouring when correctly understood.

Kronos stands for endless (hence immovable) Duration, without beginning, without an end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space. Those “Angels,” genii, or Devas, who were born to act in space and time, i.e., to break through the seven circles of the superspiritual planes into the phenomenal, or circumscribed, super-terrestrial regions, are said allegorically to have rebelled against Kronos and fought the (then) one living and highest God. In his turn, when Kronos is represented as mutilating Uranus, his father, the meaning of this mutilation is very simple: Absolute Time is made to become the finite and the conditioned; a portion is robbed from the whole, thus showing that Saturn, the father of the gods, has been transformed from Eternal Duration into a limited Period. Chronos cuts down with his scythe even the longest and (to us) seemingly endless cycles, yet, for all that, limited in Eternity, and puts down with the same scythe the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time! Praise the god or gods, or flout, one or both, and that scythe will not be made to tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course,

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

419 THE WAR OF THE GODS.

The first war happened in the night of time, between the gods the (A)-suras, and lasted for the period of one “divine year.”⁴³² On this occasion the deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership of Hrada. After that, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the conquered gods applied for help, the latter defeated the Asuras. In the Vishnu Purâna no interval is found between the two wars. In the Esoteric Doctrine, one war takes place before the building of the Solar system; another, on earth, at the “creation” of man; and a third “war” is mentioned as taking place at the close of the 4th Race, between its adepts and those of the 5th Race, i.e., between the Initiates of the “Sacred Island” and the Sorcerers of Atlantis. We shall notice the first contest, as recounted by Parâsara, while trying to separate the two accounts, purposely blended together. It is there stated that as the Daityas and Asuras were engaged in the duties of their respective orders (Varna) and followed the paths prescribed by holy writ, practising also religious penance (a queer employment for demons if they are identical with our devils, as it is claimed)—it was impossible for the gods to destroy them. The prayers addressed by the gods to Vishnu are curious as showing the ideas involved in an anthropomorphic deity. Having, after their defeat, “fled to the Northern shore of the Milky Ocean (Atlantic Ocean),⁴³³ the discomfited gods address many supplications “to the first

 

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420 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of beings, the divine Vishnu,” and among others this one: “Glory to thee, who art one with the Saints, whose perfect nature is ever blessed. . . . Glory to thee, who art one with the Serpent-race, double-tongued, impetuous, cruel, insatiate of enjoyment and abounding with wealth. . . . Glory to thee, . . . . O Lord, who hast neither colour nor extension, nor size (ghana), nor any predicable qualities, and whose essence (rupa), purest of the pure is appreciable only by holy Paramarshi (greatest of sages or Rishis). We bow to thee, in the nature of Brahma uncreated, undecaying (avyaya), who art in our bodies and in all other bodies, and in all living creatures, and beside whom nothing exists. We glorify that Vasudeva, the lord of all, who is without soil, the seed of all things, exempt from dissolution, unborn, eternal; being in essence Paramapadâtmavat (beyond the condition of spirit) and in essence and substance (rupa), the whole of this (Universe).” (Book III., ch. xvii., Vish. Purâna.)

The above is quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the Purânas to adverse and erroneous criticism, by every European bigot who forms an estimate of an alien religion on mere external evidence. Any man accustomed to subject what he reads to thoughtful analysis, will see at a glance the incongruity of addressing the accepted “Unknowable,” the formless, and attributeless Absolute, such as the Vedantins define Brahma, as being “one with the serpent-race, double-tongued, cruel and insatiable,” thus associating the abstract with the concrete, and bestowing adjectives on that which is freed from any limitations, and conditionless. Even Dr. Wilson, who, after living surrounded by Brahmins and Pundits in India for so many years, ought to have known better—even that scholar lost no opportunity to criticize the Hindu Scriptures on this account. Thus, he exclaims:⁴³⁴ “The Purânas constantly teach incompatible doctrines! According to this passage, the Supreme being is not the inert cause of creation only, but exercises the functions of an active providence. The Commentator quotes a text of the Veda in support of this view: ‘Universal Soul entering into men, governs their conduct.’ Incongruities, however, are as frequent in the Vedas as in the Purânas. . . . .”

Less frequent, in sober truth, than in the Mosaic Bible. But prejudice is great in the hearts of our Orientalists—especially in those of “reverend” scholars. Universal Soul is not the inert Cause of Creation or (Para) Brahma, but simply that which we call the sixth principle of intellectual Kosmos, on the manifested plane of being. It is Mahat, or Mahabuddhi, the great Soul, the vehicle of Spirit, the first primeval reflection of the formless Cause, and that which is even beyond Spirit.

 

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421 THE DECEPTION OF THE GODS.

So much for Professor Wilson’s uncalled-for fling. As for the apparently incongruous appeal to Vishnu by the defeated gods, the explanation is there, in the text of Vishnu Purâna, if Orientalists would only notice it.⁴³⁵ There is Vishnu, as Brahmâ, and Vishnu in his two aspects, philosophy teaches. There is but one Brahma, “essentially prakriti and Spirit,” etc.

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

In the Vishnu Purana this is made as plain as can be. For it is said there, that “at the conclusion of their prayers (stotra) the gods beheld the Sovereign Deity Hari (Vishnu) armed with the conch, the discus, and the mace, riding on Garuda. .” Now “Garuda” is the manvantaric cycle, as will be shown in its place. Vishnu, therefore, is the deity in space and time; the peculiar God of the Vaishnavas (a tribal or racial God, as they are called in esoteric philosophy): i.e., one of the many Dhyanis or Gods, or Elohim, one of whom was generally chosen for some special reasons by a nation or a tribe, and thus became gradually a “God above all Gods” (2 Chronicles ii. 5,) the “highest God” as Jehovah, Osiris, Bel, or any other of the Seven Regents.

“The tree is known by its fruit,”—the nature of a God by his actions. The latter, we have either to judge by the dead-letter narratives, or to accept allegorically. If we compare the two—Vishnu, as the defender and champion of the defeated gods; and Jehovah, the defender and champion of the “chosen” people, so called by antiphrasis, no doubt, as it is the Jews who had chosen that “jealous” God—we shall find that both use deceit and cunning. They do so on the principle of “the end justifying the means,” in order to have the best of their

 

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422 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

respective opponents and foes—the demons. Thus while (according to the Kabalists) Jehovah assumes the shape of the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden; sends Satan with a special mission to tempt Job; and harasses and wearies Pharaoh with Saraï, Abraham’s wife, and “hardens” his heart against Moses, lest there should be no opportunity for plaguing his victims “with great plagues” (Genesis xii., Exodus)—Vishnu is made in his Purâna to resort to a trick no less unworthy of any respectable god.

“Have compassion upon us, O Lord, and protect us, who have come to thee for succour from the Daityas (demons)!” pray the defeated Gods. “They have seized upon the three worlds, and appropriated the offerings which are our portion, taking care not to transgress the precepts of the Veda. Although we, as well as they, are parts of thee.⁴³⁶ . . . . engaged as they are in the paths prescribed by the holy writ . . . . it is impossible for us to destroy them. Do thou, whose wisdom is immeasurable (Ameyâtman) instruct us in some device by which we may be able to exterminate the enemies of the gods!”

“When the mighty Vishnu heard their request, he emitted from his body an illusory form (Mâyâmoha, “the deluder by illusion”) which he gave to the Gods and thus spake: “This Mâyâmoha shall wholly beguile the Daityas, so that being led astray from the path of the Vedas, they may be put to death. . . . Go then and fear not. Let this delusive vision precede you. It shall this day be of great service unto you, O Gods!”

“After this, the great Delusion, Mâyâmoha, descending to earth, beheld the Daityas engaged in ascetic penances, and approaching them, in the semblance of a Digambara (naked mendicant) with his head shaven . . . he thus addressed them, in gentle accents: “Ho, lords of the Daitya race, wherefore is it that you practise these acts of penances?” etc., etc. (Book II., xviii.).

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

“The great Deceiver, practising illusion, next beguiled other Daityas, by means of many other sorts of heresy. In a very short time, these Asuras (-Daityas) deluded by the Deceiver (who was Vishnu) abandoned the entire system founded on the ordinances of the triple Veda. Some reviled the Vedas, others the Gods, others the ceremonial of sacrifice, and others the Brahmans. This, they exclaimed, is a doctrine which will not bear discussion. The slaughter of animals in sacrifice is not conducive to religious merit. To say that oblations of butter consumed in the fire produce any future reward, is the assertion of a child. . . . If it be a fact that a beast slain in sacrifice is exalted to heaven, why does not the worshipper slaughter his own father? . . . . Infallible utterances do not, great Asuras, fall from the skies; it is only assertions founded on reasoning that are accepted by me and by other intelligent persons like yourselves! Thus by numerous methods the Daityas were unsettled by the great Deceiver (Reason). . . . When

 

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423 THE DECEPTION, AN ALLEGORY.

they had entered on the path of error, the gods mustered all their energies and approached to battle. Then followed a combat between the gods and the Asuras; and the latter, who had abandoned the right road, were smitten by the former. In previous times they had been defended by the armour of righteousness which they bore, but when that had been destroyed they, also, perished.” (Journal of the Royal Asiat. Society, Vol. XIX., p. 302.)

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

The Vishnu Purâna,⁴³⁷ like all other works of this kind, has passed at a later period into the hands of the temple-Brahmins, and the old MSS. have, no doubt, been once more tampered with by sectarians. But there was a time when the Purânas were esoteric works, and so they are still for the Initiates who can read them with the key that is in their possession.

Whether the Brahmin Initiates will ever give out the full meaning of these allegories, is a question with which the writer is not concerned. The present object is to show that, while honouring the creative Powers in their multiple forms, no philosopher could, or ever has, accepted the allegory for the true Spirit, except, perhaps, some philosophers belonging to the present “superior and civilized” Christian races. For, as shown, Jehovah is not one whit the superior of Vishnu on the plane of ethics. This is why the Occultists and even some Kabalists, whether they regard or not those creative Forces as living and conscious Entities—and one does not see why they should not be so accepted—will never confuse the Cause with the effect, and accept the Spirit of the Earth for Parabrahm or Ain-Soph. At all events they know well the true nature of what was called Father-Æther by the Greeks, Jupiter-Titan, etc., etc. They know that the soul of the Astral Light is divine, and

 

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424‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

its body (the light-waves on the lower planes) infernal. This Light is symbolized by the “Magic Head” in the Zohar, the double Face on the double Pyramid: the black pyramid rising against a pure white ground, with a white head and face within its black triangle; the white pyramid, inverted—the reflection of the first in the dark waters, showing the black refl of the white face. . . . .

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

———

§ XII. THE THEOGONY OF THE CREATIVE GODS.

To thoroughly comprehend the idea underlying every ancient cosmology necessitates the study, in a comparative analysis, of all the great religions of antiquity; as it is only by this method that the root idea will be made plain. Exact science—could the latter soar so high, while tracing the operations of nature to their ultimate and original sources—would call this idea the hierarchy of Forces. The original, transcendental and philosophical conception was one. But as systems began to reflect with every age more and more the idiosyncracies of nations; and as the latter, after separating, settled into distinct groups, each evolving along its own national or tribal groove, the main idea gradually became veiled with the overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the Forces, or rather the intelligent Powers of nature, received divine honours they were hardly entitled to, in others—as now in Europe and the civilized lands—the very thought of any such Force being endowed with intelligence seems absurd, and is proclaimed unscientific. Therefore one finds relief in such statements as are found in the Introduction to “Asgard and the Gods: Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors,” by W. S. W. Anson. The author remarks, on p. 3: “Although in Central Asia, or on the banks of the Indus, in the land of the Pyramids, and in the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and even in the North, whither Kelts, Teutons and Slavs wandered, the religious conceptions of the people have taken different forms, yet their common origin is still perceptible. We point out this connection between the stories of the gods, and the deep thought contained in them, and their importance, in order that the reader may see that it is not a magic world of erratic fancy which opens out before him, but that . . . Life and nature formed the basis of the existence and action of these divinities.” And though it is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern Esotericism to concur in the strange idea that “the religious con-

425 MYTH IS ORAL TRADITION.

ceptions of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the beginnings of civilization amongst the Germanic races,” he is yet glad to find such truths expressed as that: “These fairy tales are not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our forefathers . . .”

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

As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and those nations more or less lost sight of the highest and One principle of all things, and began to transfer the abstract attributes of the “causeless cause” to the caused effects—become in their turn causative—the creative Powers of the Universe: the great nations, out of the fear of profaning the idea, the smaller, because they either failed to grasp it or lacked the power of philosophic conception needed to preserve it in all its immaculate purity. But one and all, with the exception of the latest Aryans, now become Europeans and Christians, show this veneration in their Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor,⁴³⁸ the most intuitional of all the translators of Greek Fragments, shows, no nation has ever conceived the One principle as the immediate creator of the visible Universe, for no sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built the edifice he admires with his own hands. On the testimony of Damascius (Περὶ ᾽αρχῶν) they referred to it as “the Unknown Darkness.” The Babylonians passed over this principle in silence: “To that god,” says Porphyry, in Περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψυχῶν, “who is above all things, neither external speech ought to be addressed, nor yet that which is inward. . . . .” Hesiod begins his theogony with: “Chaos of all things was the first produced,”⁴³⁹ thus allowing the inference that its cause or producer must be passed over in reverential silence. Homer in his poems ascends no higher than Night, whom he represents Zeus as reverencing. According to all the ancient theologists, and to the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, Zeus, or the

 

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426 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

immediate artificer of the universe, is not the highest god; any more than Sir Christopher Wren in his physical, human aspect is the Mind in him which produced his great works of art. Homer, therefore, is not only silent with respect to the first principle, but likewise with respect to those two principles immediately posterior to the first, the Æther and Chaos of Orpheus and Hesiod, and the bound and infinity of Pythagoras and Plato.⁴⁴⁰ . . . . Proclus says of this highest principle that it is. . . . “the Unity of Unities, and beyond the first adyta. . . . . more ineffable than all silence, and more occult than all Essence. . . . . concealed amidst the intelligible gods.” (Ibid.)

To what was written by Thomas Taylor in 1797—namely, that the “Jews appear to have ascended no higher. . . . than the immediate artificer of the universe”; as “Moses introduces a darkness on the face of the deep, without even insinuating that there was any cause of its existence,”⁴⁴¹ one might add something more. Never have the Jews in their Bible (a purely esoteric, symbolical work) degraded so profoundly their metaphorical deity as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet personal God.

This first, or rather one, principle was called “the circle of Heaven,” symbolized by the hierogram of a point within a circle or equilateral triangle, the point being the Logos. Thus, in the Rig Veda, wherein Brahmâ is not even named, Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagharba, “the Golden Egg,” and Prajâpati (Brahmâ later on), from whom emanate all the hierarchies of “Creators.” The Monad, or point, is the original and is the unit from which follows the entire numeral system. This Point is the First Cause, but that from which it emanates, or of which, rather, it is the expression, the Logos, is passed over in silence. In its turn, the universal symbol, the point within the circle, was not yet the Architect, but the cause of that Architect; and the latter stood to it in precisely the same relation as the point itself stood to the circumference of the Circle, which cannot be defined, according to Hermes Trismegistus. Porphyry shows that the Monad and the Duad of Pythagoras are identical with Plato’s infinite and finite in “Philebus”—or what Plato calls the ἄπειρον and πέρας. It is the latter only (the mother) which is substantial, the former being the “cause of all unity and measure of all things” (Vit. Pyth. p. 47); the Duad (Mulaprakriti, the Veil) being thus shown to be the mother of the Logos and, at the same time, his daughter—i.e., the object of his perception—the produced

 

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427 THE CREATIVE LOGOÏ, ANDROGYNOUS.

producer and the secondary cause of it. With Pythagoras, the Monad returns into silence and Darkness as soon as it has evolved the triad, from which emanate the remaining seven numbers of the 10 (ten) numbers which are at the base of the manifested universe.

In the Norse cosmogony it is again the same. “In the beginning was a great abyss (Chaos), neither day nor night existed; the abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without beginning, without end. All Father, the Uncreated, the Unseen, dwelt in the depth of the ‘Abyss’ (Space) and willed, and what was willed came into being.” (See “Asgard and the Gods.”) As in the Hindu cosmogony, the evolution of the universe is divided into two acts: called in India the Prakriti and Padma Creations. Before the warm rays pouring from the “Home of Brightness” awake life in the Great Waters of Space, the Elements of the first creation come into view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir (also Orgelmir)—primordial matter differentiated from Chaos (literally seething clay). Then comes the cow Audumla, the nourisher,⁴⁴² from whom is born Buri (the Producer) who, by Bestla, the daughter of the “Frost-Giants” (the sons of Ymir) had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or “Spirit,” “Will,” and “Holiness.” (Compare the Genesis of the Primordial Races, in this work.) This was when Darkness still reigned throughout Space, when the Ases, the creative Powers (Dhyan Chohans) were not yet evolved, and the Yggdrasil, the tree of the universe of Time and of Life, had not yet grown, and there was, as yet, no Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The Scandinavian legends of creation, of our earth and world, begin with time and human life. All that precedes it is for them “Darkness,” wherein All-Father, the cause of all, dwells. As observed by the editor of “Asgard and the Gods,” though these legends have in them the idea of that All-Father, the original cause of all, “he is scarcely more than mentioned in the poems,” not because, as he thinks, before the preaching of the gospel, the idea “could not rise to distinct conceptions of the Eternal,” but on account of its great esoteric character. Therefore, all the creative gods, or personal Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic evolution. Zeus is born in, and out of Kronos—Time. So is Brahmâ the production and emanation of Kala, “eternity and time,” Kala being one of the names of Vishnu. Hence we find Odin, the father of the gods and of the Ases, as Brahmâ is the father of the gods and of the Asuras, and hence also the androgyne character of all the chief creative gods, from the second Monad of the Greeks down to the Sephiroth Adam Kadmon, the Brahmâ or Prajâpati-Vâch of the Vedas, and the androgyne of Plato, which is but another version of the Indian symbol.

 

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428 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The best metaphysical definition of primeval theogony in the spirit of the Vedantins may be found in the “Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita,” by Mr. T. Subba Row. (See “Theosophist” for February, 1887.) Parabrahmam, the unknown and the incognisable, as the lecturer tells his audience:

“. . . . . Is not Ego, it is not non-ego, nor is it consciousness . . . . . it is not even Atma” . . . . . “but though not itself an object of knowledge, it is yet capable of supporting and giving rise to every kind of object and every kind of existence which becomes an object of knowledge. It is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy . . . . .” which he calls Logos.

This Logos is the Sabda Brahmam of the Hindus, which he will not even call Eswara (the “lord” God), lest the term should create confusion in the people’s minds. But it is the Avalokiteswara of the Hindus, the Verbum of the Christians in its real esoteric meaning, not in the theological disfigurement.

“It is,” he says, “the Gnatha or the Ego in the Kosmos, and every other Ego . . . . . . is but its reflection and manifestation. . . . . . It exists in a latent condition in the bosom of Parabrahmam at the time of Pralaya. . . .” (During Manvantara) “it has a consciousness and an individuality of its own . . . . .” (It is a centre of energy, but) “. . . . . such centres of energy are almost innumerable in the bosom of Parabrahmam . . . . .” “It must not be supposed, that even the logos is the Creator, or that it is but a single centre of energy . . . . . . their number is almost infinite.” “This Ego,” he adds, “is the first that appears in Kosmos, and is the end of all evolution. It is the abstract Ego” . . . . . “this is the first manifestation (or aspect) of Parabrahmam.” “When once it starts into conscious being . . . . . . from its objective standpoint, Parabrahmam appears to it as Mulaprakriti.” “Please bear this in mind,” observes the lecturer, “for here is the root of the whole difficulty about Purusha and Prakriti felt by the various writers on Vedantic philosophy. This Mulaprakriti is material to it (the Logos), as any material object is material to us. This Mulaprakriti is no more Parabrahmam than the bundle of attributes of a pillar is the pillar itself; Parabrahmam is an unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mulaprakriti is a sort of veil thrown over it. Parabrahmam by itself cannot be seen as it is. It is seen by the Logos with a veil thrown over it, and that veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic matter. . . .” “Parabrahmam, after having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on the other as Mulaprakriti, acts as the one energy through the Logos.”

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

The Hebrew Kabalists give it in a shape which esoterically is

429 THE ONE IS KNOWN BY THE MANY.

identical with the Vedantic. Ain-Soph, they taught, could not be comprehended, could not be located, nor named, though the causeless cause of all. Hence its name—Ain-Soph—is a term of negation, “the inscrutable, the incognizable, and the unnameable.” They made of it, therefore, a boundless circle, a sphere, of which human intellect, with the utmost stretch, could only perceive the vault. In the words of one who has unriddled much in the Kabalistical system, in one of its meanings thoroughly, in its numerical and geometrical esotericism: “Close your eyes, and from your own consciousness of perception try and think outward to the extremest limits in every direction. You will find that equal lines or rays of perception extend out evenly in all directions, so that the utmost effort of perception will terminate in the vault of a sphere. The limitation of this sphere will, of necessity, be a great Circle, and the direct rays of thought in any and every direction must be right line radii of the circle. This, then, must be, humanly speaking, the extremest all-embracing conception of the Ain-Soph manifest, which formulates itself as a geometrical figure, viz., of a circle, with its elements of curved circumference and right line diameter divided into radii. Hence, a geometrical shape is the first recognisable means of connection between the Ain-Soph and the intelligence of man.”⁴⁴³

This great circle (which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the point within the Boundless Circle) is the Avalôkitêswara, the Logos or Verbum of which Mr. Subba Row speaks. But this circle or manifested God is as unknown to us, except through its manifested universe, as the one, though easier, or rather more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahmam during Pralaya, as our “Ego is latent (in us) at the time of sushupti, sleep”; which cannot cognize Parabrahmam otherwise than as Mulaprakriti—the latter being a cosmic veil which is “the mighty expanse of cosmic matter”—is thus only an organ in cosmic creation, through which radiate the energy and wisdom of Parabrahmam, unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves. Moreover, as the Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahmam is unknown in reality to the Logos, both Eastern Esotericism and the Kabala—in order to bring the Logos within the range of our conceptions—have resolved the abstract synthesis into concrete images; viz., into the reflections or multiplied aspects of that Logos or Avalôkitêswara, Brahmâ, Ormazd, Osiris, Adam-Kadmon, call it by any of these names—which aspects or Manvantaric emanations are the Dhyan Chohans, the Elohim, the Devas, the Amshaspends, etc., etc. Metaphysicians explain the root and germ of the latter, according to Mr. Subba Row, as the first manifestation of Parabrahmam, “the highest trinity that we

 

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430 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

are capable of understanding,” which is Mulaprakriti (the veil), the Logos, and the conscious energy “of the latter,” or its power and light⁴⁴⁴; or—“matter, force and the Ego, or the one root of self, of which every other kind of self is but a manifestation or a reflection.” It is then only in this “light” (of consciousness) of mental and physical perception, that practical Occultism can throw this into visibility by geometrical figures; which, when closely studied, will yield not only a scientific explanation of the real, objective, existence⁴⁴⁵ of the “Seven sons of the divine Sophia,” which is this light of the Logos, but show by means of other yet undiscovered keys that, with regard to Humanity, these “Seven Sons” and their numberless emanations, centres of energy personified, are an absolute necessity. Make away with them, and the mystery of Being and Mankind will never be unriddled, not even closely approached.

It is through this light that everything is created. This root of mental self is also the root of physical Self, for this light is the permutation, in our manifested world, of Mulaprakriti, called Aditi in the Vedas. In its third aspect it becomes Vâch,⁴⁴⁶ the daughter and the mother of the Logos, as Isis is the daughter and the mother of Osiris, who is Horus; and Mout, the daughter, wife, and mother of Ammon, in the Egyptian Moon-glyph. In the Kabala, Sephira is the same as Shekinah, and is, in another synthesis, the wife, daughter, and mother of the “Heavenly man,” Adam Kadmon, and is even identical with him, just as Vâch is identical with Brahmâ, and is called the female Logos. In the Rig-Veda, Vâch is “mystic speech,” by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vâch is said to have “entered the Rishis.” She is “generated by the gods”; she is the divine Vâch—the “Queen of gods”; and she is associated—like Sephira with the Sephiroth—with the Prajâpati in their work of creation. Moreover, she is called “the mother of the Vedas,” “since it is through her power (as mystic speech) that Brahmâ revealed them, and also owing to her power that he produced the universe”—i.e., through speech, and words (synthesized by the “word”) and numbers.⁴⁴⁷

But Vâch being also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha—“the god who lives in all the Kalpas”—her Mayavic character is thereby shown:

 

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431 THE FEMALE LOGOÏ.

during the pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the one, all-devouring Ray.

But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all those personations of the female Power in nature, or nature—the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his “Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita”; the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the “Great Deep” or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable veil between the incognisable and the Logos of Creation. “Connecting himself through his mind with Vâch, Brahmâ (the Logos) created the primordial waters.” In the Kathaka Upanishad it is stated still more clearly: “Prajâpati was this Universe. Vâch was a second to him. He associated with her . . . she produced these creatures and again re-entered Prajâpati.”⁴⁴⁸

And here we may incidentally point out one of the many unjust slurs thrown by the pious and good missionaries in India on the religion of the land. This allegory—in the “Satapatha Brâhmana”—namely, that Brahmâ, as the father of men, performed the work of procreation by incestuous intercourse with his own daughter Vâch, also called Sandhya (twilight), and Satarupa (the hundred formed), is incessantly thrown into the teeth of the Brahmins, as condemning their “detestable, false religion.” Besides the fact, conveniently forgotten by the Europeans, that the Patriarch Lot is shown guilty of the same crime under the human form, whereas Brahmâ, or rather Prajâpati, accomplished the incest under the form of a buck with his daughter, who had that of a hind (rohit), the esoteric reading of Genesis (ch. iii.) shows the same. Moreover, there is certainly a cosmic, not a physiological meaning attached to the Indian allegory, since Vâch is a permutation of Aditi and Mulaprakriti (Chaos), and Brahmâ a permutation of Naràyana, the Spirit of God entering into, and fructifying nature; therefore, there is nothing phallic in the conception at all.

As already stated, Aditi-Vâch is the female Logos, or the “word,” Verbum; and Sephira in the Kabala is the same. These feminine Logoi are all correlations, in their noumenal aspect, of Light, and Sound, and Ether, showing how well-informed were the ancients both in

 

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432 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

physical science (as now known to the moderns), and as to the birth of that science in the Spiritual and Astral spheres.

“Our old writers said that Vâch is of four kinds . . . . para, pasyanti, madhyama, vaikhari (a statement found in the Rig-Veda and the Upanishads) . . . . Vaikhari Vâch is what we utter.” It is sound, speech, that again which becomes comprehensive and objective to one of our physical senses and may be brought under the laws of perception. Hence: “Every kind of Vaikhari-Vâch exists in its Madhyama . . . . Pasyanti and ultimately in its Para form. . . . . The reason why this Pranava⁴⁴⁹ is called Vâch is this, that these four principles of the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vâch. . . . . The whole Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikhari Vâch; the light of the Logos is the madhyama form; and the Logos itself the pasyanti form; while Parabrahmam is the para (beyond the noumenon of all Noumena) aspect of that Vâch.” (Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita).

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

Now the Kabala gives the definition thus: “There are three kinds of light, and that (fourth) which interpenetrates the others; (1) the clear and the penetrating, the objective light, (2) the reflected light, and (3) the abstract light. The ten Sephiroth, the three and the Seven, are called in the Kabala the 10 words, d-brim (Dabarim), the numbers and the Emanations of the heavenly light, which is both Adam Kadmon and Sephira, or (Brahmâ) Prajâpati-Vâch. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors of creation in the Kabala. Parabrahmam cannot be known except through the luminous Point (the Logos), which knows not Parabrahmam but only Mulaprakriti. Similarly Adam Kadmon knew only Shekinah, though he was the vehicle of Ain-Soph. And, as Adam Kadmon, he is in the esoteric interpretation the total of the number ten, the Sephiroth (himself a trinity, or the three attributes of the

 

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433 THE PYTHAGOREAN IDEA.

incognisable Deity in One).⁴⁵⁰ “When the Heavenly man (or Logos) first assumed the form of the Crown⁴⁵¹ (Kether) and identified himself with Sephira, he caused seven splendid lights to emanate from it (the Crown),” which made in their totality ten; so the Brahmâ-Prajâpati, once he became separated from, yet identical with Vâch, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajâpatis to issue from that crown. In Exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephiroth or Prajâpati; in Esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10. Only when divided in the manifested sphere into 3 and 7, they form , the androgyne, and , or the figure X manifested and differentiated.

This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the Deity (the Logos) to be the centre of unity and “Source of Harmony.” We say this Deity was the Logos, not the monad that dwelleth in Solitude and Silence, because Pythagoras taught that unity being indivisible is no number. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who applied for admittance into his school, that he should have already studied as a preliminary step, the Sciences of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Music, held as the four divisions of Mathematics.⁴⁵² Again, this explains why the Pythagoreans asserted that the doctrine of Numbers—the chief of all in Esotericism—had been revealed to man by the celestial deities; that the world had been called forth out of Chaos by Sound or Harmony, and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion; that the seven planets which rule the destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion “and intervals corresponding to musical diastemes, rendering various sounds, so perfectly consonant, that they produce the sweetest melody, which is inaudible to us, only by reason of the greatness of the sound, which our ears are incapable of receiving.” (Censorinus.)

In the Pythagorean Theogony the hierarchies of the heavenly Host and Gods were numbered and expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils saying “The monad (the manifested one) is the principle of all things. From the Monad and the indeterminate duad (Chaos), numbers; from

 

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434 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

numbers, Points; from points, Lines; from lines, Superficies; from superficies, Solids; from these, solid Bodies, whose elements are four—Fire, Water, Air, Earth; of all which transmuted (correlated), and totally changed, the world consists.”—(Diogenes Laertius in Vit. Pythag.)

And this may also, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, at any rate lift a corner of the veil off those wondrous allegories that have been thrown upon Vâch, the most mysterious of all the Brahmanical goddesses, she who is termed “the melodious cow who milked forth sustenance and water” (the Earth with all her mystic powers); and again she “who yields us nourishment and sustenance” (physical Earth). Isis is also mystic Nature and also Earth; and her cow’s horns identify her with Vâch. The latter, after having been recognised in her highest form as para, becomes at the lower or material end of creation—Vaikhari. Hence she is mystic, though physical, Nature, with all her magic ways and properties.

Again, as goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi—she is Chaos, in one sense. At any rate, she is the “Mother of the gods,” and it is from Brahmâ (Iswara, or the Logos) and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested theogony has to start. Beyond, all is darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyan Chohans, or the gods, the Seers, the Prophets and the adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether as Aditi, or the divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of the seven sons: the “Angels of the Face,” of the “Deep,” or the “Great Green One” of the “Book of the Dead.” Says the Book of Dzyan (Knowledge through meditation)—

“The great mother lay with △, and the , and the , the second  and the ⛤⁴⁵³ in her bosom, ready to bring them forth, the valiant sons of the △ (or 4,320,000, the Cycle) whose two elders are the  and the  (Point).”

At the beginning of every cycle of 4,320,000, the Seven (or, as some nations had it, eight) great gods, descended to establish the new order of things and give the impetus to the new cycle. That eighth god was the unifying Circle or Logos, separated and made distinct from its host, in exoteric dogma, just as the three divine hypostases of the ancient Greeks are now considered in the Churches as three distinct personæ. “The Mighty Ones perform their great works, and leave behind them everlasting monuments to commemorate their visit, every time they penetrate within our mayavic veil (atmosphere),” says a

 

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435 ANTIQUITY OF THE PYRAMIDS.

Commentary.⁴⁵⁴ Thus we are taught that the great Pyramids were built under their direct supervision, “when Dhruva (the then Pole-star) was at his lowest culmination, and the Krittika (Pleiades) looked over his head (were on the same meridian but above) to watch the work of the giants.” Thus, as the first Pyramids were built at the beginning of a Sidereal year, under Dhruva (Alpha Polaris), it must have been over 31,000 years (31,105) ago. Bunsen was right in admitting for Egypt an antiquity of over 21,000 years, but this concession hardly exhausts truth and fact in this question. “The stories told by Egyptian priests and others of time-keeping in Egypt, are now beginning to look less like lies in the sight of all who have escaped from biblical bondage,” writes the author of “The Natural Genesis.” “Inscriptions have lately been found at Sakkarah, making mention of two Sothiac cycles . . . registered at that time, now some 6,000 years ago. Thus when Herodotus was in Egypt, the Egyptians had—as now known—observed at least five different Sothiac cycles of 1,461 years. The priests informed the Greek inquirer that time had been reckoned by them for so long that the sun had twice risen where it then set, and twice set where it then arose. This . . . can only be realized as a fact in nature by means of two cycles of Precession, or a period of 51,736 years,” (vol. ii, p. 318. But see in our Book II., “Chronology of the Brahmins.”)

Mor Isaac (See Kircher’s Œdipus, vol. ii., p. 425) shows the ancient Syrians defining their world of the “Rulers” and “active gods” in the same way as the Chaldeans. The lowest world was the Sublunary—our own—watched by the “Angels” of the first or lower order; the one that came next in rank, was Mercury, ruled by the “Archangels”; then came Venus, whose gods were the Principalities; the fourth was that of the Sun, the domain and region of the highest and mightiest gods of our system, the solar gods of all nations; the fifth was Mars, ruled by the “Virtues”; the sixth—that of Bel or Jupiter—was governed by the Dominions; the seventh—the world of Saturn—by the Thrones. These are the worlds of form. Above come the four higher ones, making seven again, since the three highest are “unmentionable and unpronounceable.” The eighth, composed of 1,122 stars, is the domain of the Cherubs; the ninth, belonging to the walking and numberless stars on account of their distance, has the seraphs; as to the tenth—Kircher, quoting Mor Isaac, says that it is composed “of invisible stars that could be taken, they said, for clouds—so massed are they in the zone that we call Via Straminis, the

 

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436 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Milky Way”; and he hastens to explain that “these are the stars of Lucifer, engulfed with him in his terrible shipwreck.” That which comes after and beyond the tenth world (our Quaternary, or the Arupa world), the Syrians could not tell. “All they knew was that it is there that begins the vast and incomprehensible ocean of the infinite, the abode of the true divinity without boundary or end.”

Champollion shows the same belief among the Egyptians. Hermes having spoken of the Father-Mother and Son, whose spirit (collectively the divine fiat) shapes the Universe, says:“Seven Agents (mediums) were also formed, to contain the material (or manifested) worlds, within their respective circles and the action of these agents was named destiny.” He further enumerates seven and ten and twelve orders, which would take too long to detail here.

As the “Rig Vidhana” together with the “Brahmanda Purâna” and all such works, whether describing the magic efficacy of the Rig-Vedic Mantras or the future Kalpas, are declared by Dr. Weber and others to be modern compilations “belonging probably only to the time of the Purânas,” it is useless to refer the reader to their mystic explanations; and one may as well quote simply from the archaic books utterly unknown to the Orientalists. These works explain that which so puzzles the scholars, namely that the Saptarshi, the “mind-born sons” of Brahmâ, are referred to in the Satapatha Brâhmana under one set of names; in the Mahabhârata under another set; and that the Vayu Purâna makes even nine instead of seven Rishis, by adding the names of Bhrigu and Daksha to the list. But the same occurs in every exoteric Scripture. The secret doctrine gives a long genealogy of Rishis, but separates them into many classes. Like the Gods of the Egyptians, who were divided into seven, and even twelve, classes, so are the Indian Rishis in their Hierarchies. The first three groups are the Divine, the Cosmical and the Sub-lunary. Then come the Solar Gods of our system, the Planetary, the Sub-Mundane, and the purely human—the heroes and the Manoushi.

At present, however, we are only concerned with the pre-cosmic, divine gods, the Prajâpati or the “Seven Builders.” This group is found unmistakably in every Cosmogony. Owing to the loss of Egyptian archaic documents—since, according to M. Maspero, “the materials and historical data on hand to study the history of the religious evolution in Egypt are neither complete nor very often intelligible”—in order to have the statements brought forward from the Secret Doctrine corroborated partially and indirectly, the ancient hymns and inscriptions on the tombs must be appealed to. One such, at any rate, shows that Osiris was, like Brahmâ-Prajâpati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many other Logoi, the chief and synthesis of the

437 COSMIC GODS.

group of “Creators” or Builders. Before Osiris became the “One” and the highest god of Egypt he was worshipped at Abydos as the head or leader of the Heavenly Host of the Builders belonging to the higher of the three orders. The hymn engraved on the votive stela of a tomb from Abydos (3rd register) addresses Osiris thus: “Salutations to thee, Osiris, elder son of Sib; thou the greatest over the six gods issued from the goddess Noo (primordial Water), thou the great favourite of thy father Ra; father of fathers, King of Duration, master in the eternity . . . who, as soon as these issued from thy mother’s bosom, gathered all the crowns and attached the Uræus (serpent or naja)⁴⁵⁵ on thy head; multiform god, whose name is unknown and who has many names in towns and provinces. . .” Coming out from the primordial water crowned with the uræus, which is the serpent emblem of Cosmic fire, and himself the seventh over the six primary gods issued from Father-Mother, Nou and Nout (the sky), who can Osiris be, but the chief Prajâpati, the chief Sephiroth, the chief Amshaspend-Ormazd! That this latter solar and cosmic god stood, in the beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the archangel “whose name was secret,” is certain. This Archangel was the representative on earth of the Hidden Jewish God, Michael, in short: it is his “Face” that is said to have gone before the Jews like a “Pillar of Fire.” Burnouf says, “The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our archangels, designate also the personifications of the divine Virtues.” (Comment on the Yaçna, p. 174.) And these archangels, therefore, are as “certainly” the Saptarishi of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to class each with its pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris, they have all so “many names in towns and provinces.” Some of the most important, however, will be shown in their order.

One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more one studies their Hierarchies and finds out their identity, the more proofs one acquires that there is not one of the past and present personal gods, known to us from the earliest days of History, that does not belong to the third stage of Cosmic manifestation. In every religion we find the concealed deity forming the ground work; then the ray therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic matter (first manifestation); then the androgyne result, the dual Male and Female abstract Force, personified (second stage); this separates itself finally, in the third, into seven Forces, called the creative Powers by all the ancient Religions, and the

 

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438 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Virtues of God” by the Christians. The later explanation and metaphysical abstract qualifications have never prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from worshipping these “Virtues” under the personifications and distinct names of the seven Archangels. In the Book of Druschim (p. 59, 1st Treatise) in the Talmud, a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct Kabalistical explanation. It says:

“There are three groups (or orders) of Sephiroth. 1st. The Sephiroth called “the divine attributes” (abstract). 2nd. The physical or sidereal Sephiroth (personal)—one group of seven, the other of ten. 3rd. The metaphysical Sephiroth, or periphrasis of Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth (Kether, Chochma and Binah), the rest of the seven being the (personal) seven spirits of the Presence” (also of the planets).

The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary evolution of gods in every theogony, if one wishes to translate the meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely metaphysical personifications of the abstract attributes of Deity, with their reflection—the sidereal gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction: living Entities and the models formed on that divine prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth or “the periphrasis of Jehovah” are not Jehovah; it is the latter himself with the additional titles of Adonai, Elohim, Sabbaoth, and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the Šadday, שַׁדַּי, the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too abundant figure of Jewish rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its many flaps, and adopted as a substitute: one name of an individual Sephiroth being as good as another name, for those who had the secret. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the sidereal “Sum Total,” was invented for no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and generation.⁴⁵⁶ The real secret and unpronounceable name—“the word that is no word”—has to be sought in the seven names of the first seven emanations, or the “Sons of the Fire,”

 

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439 INCREDIBLE, BUT TRUE.

in the secret Scriptures of all the great nations, and even in the Zohar, the Kabalistic lore of that smallest of all, the Jewish. This word, composed of seven letters in each tongue, is found embodied in the architectural remains of every grand building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on Easter Island (part of a continent buried under the seas nearer four million years ago⁴⁵⁷ than 20,000) down to the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

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

For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of what was asserted at the beginning of this Monograph, namely, that no Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of the Christian, has ever attributed to the One Highest cause, the universal Deific Principle, the immediate creation of our Earth, man, or anything connected with these. This statement holds as good for the Hebrew or Chaldean Kabala as it does for Genesis, had the latter been ever thoroughly understood, and—what is still more important—correctly translated.⁴⁵⁸ Everywhere there is either a logos—a “Light shining

 

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440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in Darkness,” truly—or the Architect of the Worlds is esoterically a plural number. The Latin Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to Jehovah alone, adopts a whole Kyriel of names for the working forces of the latter, those names betraying the secret. For if the said Forces had nought to do with “Creation” so-called, why call them Elohim (Alhim) in plural; “divine workmen” and Energies (᾽Ενεργεία), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti cœlorum), and especially, “supporters of the World” (Κοσμοκράτορες), governors or rulers of the World (rectores mundi), the “Wheels” of the World (Rotæ), Ophanim, Flames and Powers, “Sons of God” (B’ne Alhim), “Vigilant counsellors,” etc., etc.

It was often premised (and as unjustly as usual) that China, nearly as old a country as India, had no cosmogony. “It was unknown to Confucius, and the Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without introducing a personal God,”⁴⁵⁹ it is complained. The Yi-King, “the very essence of ancient thought and the combined work of the most venerated sages, fails to show a distinct cosmogony.” Nevertheless, there is one, and a very distinct one. Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life⁴⁶⁰ and the Chinese Buddhists reject the idea of One Creator, accepting one cause and its numberless effects, they are misunderstood by the believers in a personal God. The “great Extreme” as the commencement “of changes” (transmigrations) is the shortest and perhaps the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies, for those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its own sake, and try to do good unselfishly without perpetually looking to reward and profit. The “great Extreme” of Confucius produces “two figures.” These “two” produce in their turn “the four images”; these again “the eight symbols.” It is complained that though the Confucianists see in them “Heaven, Earth and man in miniature,” . . . we can see in them anything we like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially in those of the latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals, see in these “figures” the symbol, however rude, of a harmonious progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its beings, both the Heavenly and the Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the primeval cosmogony of Pythagoras (a contemporary of Confucius) can never fail to find in his Triad, Tetractis and

 

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441 THE SAME IDEA IN CONFUCIANISM.

Decade emerging from the one and solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his Christian biographer for “talking of divination” before and after this passage, and is represented as saying: “The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead to great deeds. There are no imitable images greater than heaven and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons (meaning North, South, East and West, et seq.). There are no suspended images brighter than the sun and moon. In preparing things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In determining good and ill-luck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise.”⁴⁶¹

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

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

Confucius, one of the greatest sages of the ancient world, believed in ancient magic, and practised it himself “if we take for granted the statements of Kin-yu” . . . . and “he praised it to the skies in Yi-kin,” we are told by his reverend critic. Nevertheless, even in his age—i.e., 600 b.c., Confucius and his school taught the sphericity of the Earth and even the heliocentric system; while, at about thrice 600 years after the Chinese philosopher, the Popes of Rome threatened and even burnt “heretics” for asserting the same. He is laughed at for speaking of the “Sacred Tortoise.” No unprejudiced person can see any great difference between a tortoise and a lamb as candidates for sacredness, as both are symbols and no more. The Ox, the Eagle,⁴⁶² the Lion, and occasionally

 

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442 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Dove, are “the sacred animals” of the Western Bible, the first three being found grouped round the Evangelists; and the fourth (the human face) is a Seraph, i.e., a fiery serpent, the Gnostic Agathodæmon probably.⁴⁶³ As explained, the “sacred animals” and the Flames or “Sparks” within the “Holy Four” refer to the prototypes of all that is found in the Universe in the Divine Thought, in the Root, which is the perfect cube, or the foundation of the Kosmos collectively and individually. They have all an occult reference to primordial Cosmic forms and its first concretions, work, and evolution.

In the earliest Hindu exoteric cosmogonies, it is not even the Demiurge who creates. For it is said in one of the Purânas that: “The great Architect of the World gives the first impulse to the rotatory motion of our planetary system by stepping in turn over each planet and body.” It is this action “that causes each sphere to turn around itself, and all around the Sun.” After which action, “it is the Brahmandica, the Solar and Lunar Pitris (the Dhyani-Chohans)” who take charge of their respective spheres (earths and planets), to the end of the Kalpa.” The Creators are the Rishis; most of whom are credited with the authorship of the mantras or Hymns of the Rig Veda. They are sometimes seven, sometimes ten, when they become prajâpati, the “Lord of Beings”; then they rebecome the seven and the fourteen Manus, as the representatives of the seven and fourteen cycles of Existence (“Days of Brahmâ”); thus answering to the seven Æons, when at the end of the first stage of Evolution they are transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarishis; while their human doubles appear as heroes, Kings and Sages on this earth.

 

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443 THE MYSTERY OF BLACKNESS.

The Esoteric doctrine of the East having thus furnished and struck the key-note—which is as scientific as it is philosophical and poetical, as may be seen, under its allegorical garb—every nation has followed its lead. It is from the exoteric religions that we have to dig out the root-idea before we turn to esoteric truths, lest the latter should be rejected. Furthermore, every symbol—in every national religion—may be read esoterically, and the proof furnished for its being correctly read by transliterating it into its corresponding numerals and geometrical forms—by the extraordinary agreement of all—however much the glyphs and symbols may vary among themselves. For in the origin those symbols were all identical. Take, for instance, the opening sentences in various cosmogonies: in every case it is either a circle, an egg, or a head. Darkness is always associated with this first symbol and surrounds it,—as shown in the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Chaldeo-Hebrew and even the Scandinavian systems—hence black ravens, black doves, black waters and even black flames; the seventh tongue of Agni, the fire-god being called “Kali,” “the black,” as it was a black flickering flame. Two black doves flew from Egypt and settling on the oaks of Dodona, gave their names to the Grecian gods. Noah lets out a black raven after the deluge, which is a symbol for the Cosmic pralaya, after which began the real creation or evolution of our earth and humanity. Odin’s black ravens fluttered around the Goddess Saga and “whispered to her of the past and of the future.” What is the real meaning of all those black birds? They are all connected with the primeval wisdom, which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of all, symbolised by the Head, the Circle, the Egg; and they all have an identical meaning and relate to the primordial Archetypal man (Adam Kadmon) the creative origin of all things, which is composed of the Host of Cosmic Powers—the Creative Dhyan-Chohans, beyond which all is darkness.

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

“The term Raven is used but once, and taken as ʾeṯ-hāʿōrēḇ, את-הערב, = 678, or 113 x 6; while the Dove is mentioned five times. Its value is 71, and 71 x 5 = 355. Six diameters, or the raven, crossing, would divide the circumference of a circle of 355 into 12 parts or compartments; and 355 subdivided for each unit by 6, would equal 213-0, or the head (“beginning”) in the first verse of Genesis. This divided or subdivided, after the same fashion, by 2, or the 355 by 12, would give 213-2, or the word Bərōš, ב-ראש, or the first word of Genesis, with its prepositional prefix, signifying the same concreted general form

444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

astronomically, with the one here intended.” Now the secret reading of the first verse of Genesis being: “In Rōš (Bərōš) or head, developed gods, the Heavens and the Earth”—it is easy to comprehend the esoteric meaning of the raven, once that the like meaning of the Flood (or Noah’s Deluge) is ascertained. Whatever the many other meanings of this emblematical allegory may be, its chief meaning is that of a new cycle and a new Round (our Fourth Round.)⁴⁶⁴ The “Raven,” or the ʾEṯ-HāʿŌrēḇ, yields the same numerical value as the “Head,” and returned not to the ark, while the dove returned, carrying the olive-branch, when Noah, the new man of the new Race (whose prototype is Vaivasvata Manu), prepared to leave the ark, the womb (or Argha) of terrestrial nature, is the symbol of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the first three Races, who vanished from earth for ever. Numerically Jehovah, Adam, Noah, are one in the Kabala: at best, then, it is Deity descending on to Ararat (later on Sinai), to incarnate in man his image, through the natural process, henceforth: the mother’s womb, whose symbols are the ark, the mount (Sinai), etc., in Genesis. The Jewish allegory is at once astronomical, and purely physiological rather than anthropomorphic.

And here lies the abyss between the two systems (Aryan and Semitic), though built on the same foundation. As shown by an expounder of the Kabala, “the basic idea underlying the philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself and that man was his image; man, including woman (as Androgynes)”; and that “geometry and numbers (and measures applicable to astronomy) are contained in the terms man and woman; and the apparent incongruity of such a mode was eliminated by showing the connection of man and woman with a particular system of numbers and measures and geometry, by the parturient time-periods, which furnished the connecting link between the terms and the facts shown, and perfected the mode used.” It is argued that, the primal cause being absolutely incognizable, “the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a circle with its diameter line, so as at once to carry the idea of geometry, phallicism, and astronomy”; and this was finally applied to the “signification of simply human generative organs.”⁴⁶⁵ Hence the whole cycle of events

 

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445 GOD IS OUR HIGHER SELF.‌

from Adam and the Patriarchs down to Noah is made to apply to phallic and astronomical uses, the one regulating the other, as the lunar periods, for instance. Hence, too, their genesis begins after their coming out of the Ark, and the close of the flood—at the Fourth Race. With the Aryan people it is different.

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

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§ XIII. THE SEVEN CREATIONS.

“There was neither day nor night, nor sky nor earth, nor darkness nor light, nor any other thing save only one, unapprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahma and Puṃs (Spirit) and Prâdhâna (crude matter)” (Veda: Viṣṇu Purāṇa Commentary); or literally: “One Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit: that was.” The “Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit” is Mulaprakriti and Parabrahmam.

In Vishnu Purâna, Parâśara says to Maitreya, his pupil: “I have thus explained to you, excellent Muni, six creations. . . . the creation of the Arvâksrotas beings was the seventh, and was that of man.” Then he proceeds to speak of two additional and very mysterious creations, variously interpreted by the commentators.

Origen, commenting upon the books written by Celsus, his opponent—books which were all destroyed by the prudent Church Fathers—evidently answers the objections of his contradictor and reveals his system at the same time. This was evidently septenary. But his theogony, the genesis of the stars or planets, that of sound and colour, all found as an answer satire, and no better. Celsus, you see, “desiring to exhibit his learning,” speaks of a ladder of creation with seven gates, and on the top

446 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of it the eighth—ever closed. The mysteries of the Persian Mithras are explained and “musical reasons, moreover, are added.” . . . . And to these again he strives “to add a second explanation connected also with musical considerations,”⁴⁶⁶—i.e., with the seven notes of the scale, the Seven Spirits of the Stars, etc., etc.

Valentinus expatiates upon the power of the great Seven, who were called to bring forth this universe after Ar(r)hetos, or the Ineffable, whose name is composed of seven letters, had represented the first hebdomad. This name (Ar(r)hetos) is one to indicate the Sevenfold nature of the One (the logos). “The goddess Rhea,” says Proclus in Timæus (p. 121), “is a Monad, Duad, and Heptad,” comprehending in herself all the Titanidæ, “who are seven.”

The Seven Creations are found in almost every Purâna. They are all preceded by what Wilson translates—“the indiscrete Principle,” absolute Spirit independent of any relation with objects of sense. They are—(1) Mahattattwa, the Universal Soul, Infinite Intellect, or Divine Mind; (2) Bhûta or Bhûtasarga, elemental creation, the first differentiation of Universal indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya or Aindriyaka, organic evolution. “These three were the Prâkrita creations, the developments of indiscrete nature preceded by indiscrete principle”; (4) Mukhya, the fundamental creation of perceptible things, was that of inanimate bodies⁴⁶⁷; (5) Tairyagyonya, or Tiryaksrotas, was that of animals; (6) Urdhwasrotas, or that of divinities⁴⁶⁸ (?); (7) Arvaksrotas, was that of man. (See Vishnu Purâna.)

This is the order given in the exoteric texts. According to esoteric teaching there are seven primary, and seven secondary “creations”; the former being the Forces self-evolving from the one causeless force; the latter, showing the manifested Universe emanating from the already differentiated divine elements.

Esoterically, as well as exoterically, all the above enumerated Creations stand for the (7) periods of Evolution, whether after an “Age” or a “Day” of Brahmâ. This is the teaching par excellence of Occult Philosophy, which, however, never uses the term “creation,” nor even that of evolution, “with regard to primary ‘Creation’”: but calls all such forces “the aspects of the Causeless Force.” In the Bible

 

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447 THE ORDER OF THE EVOLUTION.

the seven periods are dwarfed into the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest, and the Westerns adhere to the letter. In the Hindu philosophy, when the active Creator has produced the world of gods, the germs of all the undifferentiated elements and the rudiments of future senses (the world of noumena, in short), the Universe remains unaltered for a “Day of Brahmâ,” a period of 4,320,000,000 years. This is the seventh passive period or the “Sabbath day” of Eastern philosophy, that follows six periods of active evolution. In the Satapatha Brâhmana “Brahma” (neuter), the absolute Cause of all Causes, radiates the gods. Having radiated the gods (through its inherent nature) the work is interrupted. In the 1st Book of Manu it is said, “At the expiration of each night (pralaya) Brahmâ, having been asleep, awakes, and, through the sole energy of the motion, causes to emanate from itself the spirit, which in its essence is, and yet is not.”

In the Sepher Jezirah, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit. “One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be his Name, who liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.” (Sepher Jezireh, chap. 1, Mishna IX.) And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple one emanated the whole Kosmos. First from one emanated number two, or Air, the creative element; and then number three, Water, proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire complete the mystic four, the Arba-il. (Ibid.) In the Eastern doctrine Fire is the first Element—Ether, synthesizing the whole (since it contains all of them).

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

“R. Yehudah began, it is written: ‘Elohim said: Let there be a firmament, in the midst of waters.’ . . . . At the time that the Holy . . . created the world, He (they) created seven heavens Above. He created seven earths Below, seven seas, seven days, seven rivers, seven weeks, seven years, seven times, and 7,000 years that the world has been. . . . . the seventh of all the millennium. So here are seven earths Below, they are all inhabited except those which are above, and those . . . . below. And . . . . between each earth, a heaven (firmament) is spread out between each other. . . . . And there are in them (these earths) creatures who look different from each other . . . . but if you object and say that all the children of the world came out from Adam,

448 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

it is not so. . . . . And the lower earths, where do they come from? They are from the chain of the earth, and from the heaven below,” etc., etc.⁴⁶⁹

Irenæus is our witness (and a very unwilling one, too) that the Gnostics taught the same system, veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning. This “veiling,” however, is identical with that of the Vishnu Purâna and others. Thus Irenæus writes of the Marcosians: “They maintain that first of all the four elements, fire, water, earth and air, were produced after the image of the primary tetrad above, and that then if we add their operations, namely, heat, cold, dryness and moisture, an exact likeness of the ogdoad is presented.” (B. i. ch. xvii.)

Only this “likeness” and the ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the seven creations of the Vishnu Purânas, to which two more are added of which the eighth, termed Anûgraha, “possesses both the qualities of goodness and darkness,” a Sankhyan more than a Purânic idea. For Irenæus says again (b. i. xxx. 6) that “they (the Gnostics) had a like eighth creation which was good and bad, divine and human. They affirm that man was formed on the eighth day. Sometimes they affirm that he was made on the sixth day, and at others on the eighth; unless, perchance, they mean that his earthly part was formed on the sixth day and his fleshly part (?) on the eighth day; these two being distinguished by them.”

They were so “distinguished,” but not as Irenæus gives it. The Gnostics had a superior Hebdomad, and an inferior one, in Heaven; and a third terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. Iao, the mystery god and the Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen’s chart, was the chief of these superior “Seven Heavens,”⁴⁷⁰ hence identical with the chief of the lunar Pitris, that name being given by them to the lunar Dhyan-Chohans. “They affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and speak of them as being angels,” writes the same Irenæus; and adds that on this account they termed Iao Hebdomas, while his mother was called “Ogdoas,” because, as he explains, “she preserved the number of the first begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Pleroma.” (Ibid. b. i, v. 2).

This “first begotten Ogdoad” was (a) in theogony the second Logos (the manifested) because he was born of the Seven-fold first Logos, hence he is the eighth on this manifested plane; and (b) in astrolatry, it was the Sun, Mârttanda—the eighth son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her Seven Sons, the planets. For the ancients have never regarded the Sun as a planet, but as a central and fixed Star. This, then, is the second Hebdomad born of the Seven-rayed one, Agni, the Sun

 

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449 THE SIX STELLAR GODS.

and what not, only not the seven planets, which are Surya’s brothers, not his Sons. These Astral gods, whose chief with the Gnostics was Ildabaoth⁴⁷¹ (from Ilda “child,” and Baoth “the egg”), the son of Sophia Achamoth, the daughter of Sophia (Wisdom), whose region is the Pleroma, were his (Ildabaoth’s) sons. He produces from himself these six stellar spirits: Jove (Jehovah), Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi, Osraios, Astaphaios,⁴⁷² and it is they who are the second, or inferior Hebdomad. As to the third, it is composed of the seven primeval men, the shadows of the lunar gods, projected by the first Hebdomad. In this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the esoteric doctrine except that they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenæus, who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the “Heretics,” with regard to man being created on the sixth day, and man being created on the eighth, this relates to the mysteries of the inner man. It will become comprehensible to the reader only after he has read Book II., and understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric doctrine.

Ildabaoth is a copy of Manu. The latter boasts, “Oh, best of twice-born men! Know that I (Manu) am he, the creator of all this world, whom that male Virâj . . . spontaneously produced” (I., 33). He first creates the ten lords of Being, the Prajâpatis, who, as verse 36 says . . . “produce seven other Manus.” (The Ordinances of Manu.) Ildabaoth does likewise: “I am Father and God, and there is no one above me,” he exclaims. For which his mother coolly puts him down by saying, “Do not lie, Ildabaoth, for the father of all, the first man (Anthropos) is above thee, and so is Anthropos, the Son of Anthropos” (Irenæus, b. i, ch. xxx., 6). This is a good proof that there were three Logoi (besides the Seven born of the First), one of these being the Solar Logos. And, again, who was that “Anthropos” himself, so much higher than Ildabaoth? The Gnostic records alone can solve this riddle. In Pistis Sophia the four-vowelled name Ieov is in each case accompanied by the epithet of “the Primal, or First man.” This shows again that the gnosis was but an echo of our archaic doctrine. The names answering to Parabrahm, to Brahm, and Manu (the first thinking man) are composed of one-vowelled, three-vowelled and seven-vowelled sounds. Marcus, whose philosophy was certainly more Pythagorean than anything else, speaks of a revelation to him of the seven heavens sounding each one vowel as they pronounced the seven names of the seven (angelic) hierarchies.

When spirit has permeated every minutest atom of the seven principles of Kosmos, then the secondary creation, after the above-mentioned period of rest, begins.

 

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450 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“The creators (Elohim) outline in the second ‘hour’ the shape of man,” says Rabbi Simeon (“The Nychthēmeron of the Hebrews”). “There are twelve hours in the day,” says the Mishna, “and it is during these that creation is accomplished.” The “twelve hours of the day” are again the dwarfed copy, the faint, yet faithful, echo of primitive Wisdom. They are like the 12,000 divine years of the gods, a cyclic blind. Every “Day of Brahmâ” has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however, in this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 “Hours.”⁴⁷³ The Nychthēmeron of Apollonius of Tyana is the same thing. “The Dodecahedron lies concealed in the perfect Cube,” say the Kabalists. The mystic meaning of this is, that the twelve great transformations of Spirit into matter (the 12,000 divine years) take place during the four great ages, or the first Mahayuga. Beginning with the metaphysical and the supra-human, it ends in the physical and purely human natures of Kosmos and man. Eastern philosophy can give the number of mortal years that run along the line of spiritual and physical evolutions of the seen and the unseen, if Western science fails to do so.

Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the Secondary—that of Darkness (matter).⁴⁷⁴ Both are found in Genesis, chap. i., v. 2, and at the beginning of chapter ii. The first is the emanation of self-born gods (Elohim); the second of physical nature.

This is why it is said in the Zohar: “Oh, companions, companions, man as emanation was both man and woman; as well on the side of the Father as on the side of the Mother. And this is the sense of the words: And Elohim spoke: ‘Let there be Light and it was Light!’ . . . And this is the ‘two-fold man!’” [Zōhar 1:22b.2] Light, moreover, on our plane, is darkness in the higher spheres.

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

In India these creations were described as follows:

(I.) Mahat-tattwa creation—so-called because it was the primordial self-evolution of that which had to become Mahat—the “divine Mind, conscious and intelligent”; esoterically, “the spirit of the Universal soul.” . . . “Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency (the potency of that cause); every produced cause comes by its proper nature.” (Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 1:4:51.) “Seeing that the potencies of all beings are under-

 

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451 MANY VERSIONS OF THE ONE TRUTH.

stood only through the knowledge of That (Brahma), which is beyond reasoning, creation, and the like, such potencies are referable to Brahma.” That, then, precedes the manifestation. “The first was Mahat,” says Linga Purâna; for the one (the That) is neither first nor last, but all. Exoterically, however, this manifestation is the work of the “Supreme One” (a natural effect, rather, of an Eternal Cause); or, as the Commentator says, it might have been understood to mean that Brahmâ was then created (?), being identified with Mahat, active intelligence or the operating will of the Supreme. Esoteric philosophy renders it “the operating law.”

It is on the right comprehension of this tenet in the Brâhmanas and Purânas that hangs, we believe, the apple of discord between the three Vedantin Sects: the Advaita, Dwaita, and the Visishtadvaitas. The first arguing rightly that Parabrahman, having no relation, as the absolute all, to the manifested world—the Infinite having no connection with the finite—can neither will nor create; that, therefore, Brahmâ, Mahat, Iswara, or whatever name the creative power may be known by, creative gods and all, are simply an illusive aspect of Parabrahmam in the conception of the conceivers; while the other sects identify the impersonal Cause with the Creator, or Iswara.

Mahat (or Maha-Buddhi) is, with the Vaishnavas, however, divine mind in active operation, or, as Anaxagoras has it, “an ordering and disposing mind, which was the cause of all things,”—Νοῦς ὅ διακοσμῶντε και πάντων ἄιτιος.

Wilson saw at a glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the Phœnician Mot, or Mut, who was female with the Egyptians—the Goddess Mout, the “Mother”—“which, like Mahat,” he says, “was the first product of the mixture (?) of Spirit and matter, and the first rudiment of Creation”: “Ex connexione autem ejus spiritus prodidit Mot

. . . . . From whose seed were created all living things”—repeats Brücker (I., 240)—giving it a still more materialistic and anthropomorphic colouring.

Nevertheless, the esoteric sense of the doctrine is seen through every exoteric sentence on the very face of the old Sanscrit texts that treat of primordial Creation. “The Supreme Soul, the all permeant (Sarvaga) Substance of the World, having entered (been drawn) into matter (prakriti) and Spirit (purusha), agitated the mutable and the immutable principles the season of Creation (manvantara) having arrived.”⁴⁷⁵ . . .

 

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452 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Esoteric doctrine teaches that the Dhyan Chohans are the collective aggregate of divine Intelligence or primordial mind, and that the first Manus—the seven “mind-born” Spiritual Intelligences—are identical with the former. Hence the “Kwan-shi-yin”—“the golden Dragon in whom are the seven,” of Stanza III.—is the primordial Logos, or Brahmâ, the first manifested creative Power; and the Dhyani-Energies are the Manus, or Manu-Swayambhûva collectively. The direct connection, moreover, between the “Manus” and “Mahat” is easy to see. Manu is from the root man, “to think”; and thinking proceeds from the mind. It is, in Cosmogony, the pre-nebular period.

(II.) “The second Creation,” “Bhûta,” was of the rudimental principles (Tanmâtras), thence termed the elemental creation (Bhûta-sarga).⁴⁷⁶ It is the period of the first breath of the differentiation of the pre-Cosmic Elements or matter. Bhûtâdi means literally “the origin of the Elements,” and precedes Bhûta-sarga—the “creation” or differentiation of those Elements in primordial “Akâsa” (Chaos or Vacuity).⁴⁷⁷ In the “Vishnu Purâna” it is said to proceed along, and belong to, the triple aspect of Ahankâra, translated Egotism, but meaning rather that untranslateable term the “I-am-ness,” that which first issues from “Mahat,” or divine mind; the first shadowy outline of Self-hood, for “pure” Ahankâra becomes “passionate” and finally “rudimental”

 

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453 THE SEVEN CREATIONS.

(initial); it is “the origin of conscious as of all unconscious being,” though the Esoteric school rejects the idea of anything being “unconscious”—save on this (our) plane of illusion and ignorance. At this stage of the Second Creation, the second hierarchy of the Manus appear, the Dhyan Chohans or Devas, who are the origin of Form (rûpa): the Chitrasikhandina (bright-crested) or the Riksha—those Rishis who have become the informing souls of the seven stars (of the Great Bear).⁴⁷⁸ In astronomical and Cosmogonical language this Creation relates to the first stage of Cosmic-life, the Fire-Mist Period after its Chaotic stage,⁴⁷⁹ when atoms issue from Laya.

(III.) The third (the Indriya) was the modified form of Ahankâra, the conception of “I,” (from “Aham,” “I”) termed the organic Creation, or creation of the senses (Aindriyaka). “These three were the Prâkrita creation, the (discrete) developments of indiscrete nature preceded by the indiscrete principle.” “Preceded by,” ought to be replaced here with “beginning by,” Buddhi; for the latter is neither a discrete nor an indiscrete quantity, but partakes of the nature of both, in man as in Kosmos: a unit—a human monad on the plane of illusion—when once freed from the three forms of Ahankâra and liberated from its terrestrial manas, Buddhi becomes truly a continued quantity, both in duration and extension, because eternal and immortal. Earlier it is stated, that the third Creation “abounding with the quality of goodness, is termed Urdhvasrotas”; and a page or two further the Urdhvasrotas creation is referred to as “the sixth creation . . . that of the divinities” (p. 75). This shows plainly that earlier as well as later manvantaras have been purposely confused, to prevent the pro-

 

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454 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

fane from perceiving the truth. This is called “incongruity” and “contradictions” by the Orientalists.⁴⁸⁰

This “creation” of the immortals, the “Deva-Sarga,” is the last of the first series, and has a universal reference; namely, to Evolutions in general, not specifically to our Manvantara; but the latter begins with the same over and over again, showing that it refers to several distinct Kalpas. For it is said “at the close of the past (Padma) Kalpa the divine Brahmâ awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the universe void.” Then Brahmâ is shown going once more over the “seven creations” in the secondary stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective plane.

(IV.) The Mukhya, the Primary as it begins the series of four. Neither the word “inanimate” bodies nor yet immovable things, as translated by Wilson, gives a correct idea of the Sanskrit terms used. Esoteric philosophy is not the only one to reject the idea of any atom being inorganic, for it is found also in orthodox Hinduism. Moreover, Wilson himself says (in his collected Works, vol. iii., p. 381): “All the Hindu systems consider vegetable bodies as endowed with life . . .” Charâchara, or the synonymous sthâvara and jangama, is, therefore, inaccurately rendered by “animate and inanimate,” “sentient beings,” and “unconscious,” or “conscious and unconscious beings,” etc., etc. “Locomotive and fixed” would be better, since trees are considered to possess souls.” Mukhya is the “creation” or organic evolution of the vegetable kingdom. In this secondary Period, the three degrees of Elemental or Rudimental Kingdoms are evolved in this world, corresponding inversely in order to the three Prakritic creations during the Primary period of Brahmâ’s activity. As in that period, in the words of “Vishnu Purâna”: “The first creation was that of Mahat (Intellect), the second, of Tanmâtras (rudimental principles), and the third, that of the senses (Aindriyaka)”; in this one, the order of the Elemental Forces stands thus: (1) The nascent centres of Force (intellectual and physical);

(2) the rudimental principles—nerve force, so to say; and (3) nascent apperception, which is the Mahat of the lower kingdoms, especially developed in the third order of Elementals; these are succeeded by the

 

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455 CREATIONS CONTINUED.

objective kingdom of minerals, in which latter that apperception is entirely latent, to re-develop only in the plants). The mukhya “Creation,” then, is the middle point between the three lower and the three higher kingdoms, which represent the seven esoteric kingdoms of Kosmos, as of Earth.

(V.) The Tiryaksrotas (or Tairyagyonya) creation,⁴⁸¹ that of the “(sacred) animals,” corresponding only on Earth, to the dumb animal creation. That which is meant by “animals,” in primary Creation, is the germ of awakening consciousness or of apperception, that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive plants on Earth and more distinctly in the protistic monera.⁴⁸² On our globe, during the first round, animal “creation” precedes that of man, while the former (or mammal) evolves from the latter in our fourth round—on the physical plane: in Round I. the animal atoms are drawn into a cohesion of human physical form; while in Round IV. the reverse occurs according to magnetic conditions developed during life. And this is metempsychosis (See “Mineral Monad” in “Five Years of Theosophy,” p. 276). This fifth stage of evolution, called exoterically “Creation,” may be viewed in both the Primary and Secondary periods, one as the Spiritual and Cosmic, the other as the material and terrestrial. It is Archibiosis, or life-origination—“origination,” so far, of course, as the manifestation of life on all the seven planes is concerned. It is at this period of Evolution that the absolutely eternal universal motion, or vibration, that which is called in Esoteric language “the great breath,” differentiates in the primordial, first manifested atom. More and more, as chemical and physical sciences progress, does this occult axiom find its corroboration in the world of knowledge: the scientific hypothesis, that even the simplest elements of matter are identical in nature and differ from each other only owing to the variety of the distributions of atoms in the molecule or speck of substance, or by the modes of its atomic vibration, gains every day more ground.

Thus, as the differentiation of the primordial germ of life has to precede the evolution of the Dhyan Chohan of the third group or hierarchy of Being in Primary Creation, before those “gods” can become rûpa (embodied in their first ethereal form), so animal creation has to precede,

 

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456 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

for that same reason, divine man on earth. And this is why we find in the Purânas: “The fifth, the Tairyagyonya creation, was that of animals, and—

(VI). The Urdhvasrotas creation, or that of divinities (Vishnu Purâna Book I. chap. i.). But these (divinities) are simply the prototypes of the First Race, the fathers of their “mind-born” progeny with the soft bones.⁴⁸³ It is these who became the Evolvers of the “Sweat-born”—an expression explained in Book II. Finally, the sixth “Creation” is followed, and “Creation in general, closed by—

(VII.) The evolution of the “Arvaksrotas beings, which was the seventh, and was that of man” (Vishnu Purâna, Book I.).

The “eighth creation” mentioned is no Creation at all; it is a blind again, for it refers to a purely mental process: the cognition of the “ninth” creation, which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the secondary of that which was a “Creation” in the Primary (Prâkrita) Creation.⁴⁸⁴ The Eighth, then, called Anûgraha (the Pratyayasarga or the intellectual creation of the Sankhyas, explained in Karika, v. 46, p. 146), is “that creation of which we have a perception” —in its esoteric aspect—and “to which we give intellectual assent (Anûgraha) in contradistinction to organic creation.” It is the correct perception of our relations to the whole range of “gods” and especially of those we bear to the Kumâras—the so-called “Ninth Creation”—which is in reality an aspect of or reflection of the sixth in our manvantara (the Vaivasvata). “There is a ninth, the Kumâra Creation, which is both primary and secondary,” says Vishnu Purâna, the oldest of such texts.⁴⁸⁵ “The Kumâras,” explains an esoteric text,

 

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457 WHO THE KUMÂRAS ARE.

“are the Dhyanis, derived immediately from the supreme Principle, who reappear in the Vaivasvata Manu period, for the progress of mankind.”⁴⁸⁶ The commentator of the Vishnu Purâna corroborates it, by remarking that “these sages live as long as Brahmâ; and they are only created by him in the first Kalpa, although their generation is very commonly and inconsistently introduced in the Varaha, or Padma Kalpa” (the secondary). Thus, the Kumâras are, exoterically, “the creation of Rudra or Nilalohita, a form of Siva, by Brahmâ, and of certain other mind-born sons of Brahmâ. But, in the esoteric teaching, they are the progenitors of the true spiritual self in the physical man—the higher Prajâpati, while the Pitris, or lower Prajâpati, are no more than the fathers of the model, or type of his physical form, made “in their image.” Four (and occasionally five) are mentioned freely in the exoteric texts, three Kumâras being secret.⁴⁸⁷ (Compare what is said of “The Fallen Angels” in Book II.).

The Exoteric four are: Sanât-Kumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana; and the esoteric three are: Sana, Kapila, and Sanat-sujâta. Special attention is once more drawn to this class of Dhyan Chohans, for herein lies the mystery of generation and heredity hinted at in Book I. (See the four Orders of Angelic Beings; Comment on Stanza VII.). Book II. explains their position in the divine Hierarchy. Meanwhile, let us see what the exoteric texts say about them.

They do not say much; nothing to him who fails to read between the lines. “We must have recourse, here, to other Purânas for the elucidation of this term,” remarks Wilson, who does not suspect for one moment that he is in the presence of the “Angels of Darkness,” the mythical “great enemy” of his Church. Therefore, he contrives to elucidate no more than that these (divinities) declining to create progeny⁴⁸⁸ (and thus rebelling against Brahmâ), remained, as the name

 

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458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the first implies, ever boys, Kumâras: that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their creation is also called the “Kumâra.” (Book I. chap. v., Vishnu Purâna.) The Purânas, however, may afford a little more light. “Being ever as he was born, he is here called a youth; and hence his name is well known as Sanat-Kumâra” (Linga purâna, prior section LXX. 174.) In the Saiva Purâna, the Kumâras are always described as Yogins. The Kurma Purâna, after enumerating them, says: “These five, O Brahmans, were Yogins, who acquired entire exemption from passion.” They are five, because two of the Kumâras fell.

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

The Kumâras, the “mind-born Sons” of Brahmâ-Rudra (or Siva)

459 THE PATRON-GUIDE OF ISRAEL.

the howling and terrific destroyer of human passions and physical senses, which are ever in the way of the development of the higher spiritual perceptions and the growth of the inner eternal man—mystically,⁴⁸⁹ are the progeny of Siva, the Mahâyogi, the great patron of all the Yogis and mystics of India. They themselves, being the “Virgin-Ascetics,” refuse to create the material being man. Well may they be suspected of a direct connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the “Virgin Combatant” of the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every soul united too loosely to its immortal Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, refused to create just as the Kumâras did. (See Book II., “The Mystic Dragons and their Slayers.”) . . . Does not that patron-Angel of the Jews preside over Saturn (Siva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with his father (Saturn), and called the “Son of Time,” Kronos, or Kâla (time), a form of Brahmâ (Vishnu and Siva)? And is not “Old Time” of the Greeks, with its scythe and sand-glass, identical with the “Ancient of Days” of the Kabalists; the latter “Ancient” being one with the Hindu “Ancient of Days,” Brahmâ (in his triune form), whose name is also “Sanat,” the Ancient? Every Kumâra bears the prefix of Sanat and Sana; and Sanaischara is Saturn, the planet (Sani and Sarra), the King Saturn whose Secretary in Egypt was Thot-Hermes the first. They are thus identified both with the planet and the god (Siva), who are, in their turn, shown the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal, Siva, and Jehovah Sabbaoth, The angel of whose face is Mikael (מִיכָאֵל [mīḵāʾēl] “who is as God”). He is the patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us (v. 21); and, before the Kumâras were degraded, by those who were ignorant of their very name, into demons and fallen angels, the Greek Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of the Roman Catholic Church after its secession and separation from the primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their Ophiomorphos, the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the reverse aspect (symbolically) of Ophis—divine Wisdom or Christos. In the Talmud, Mikael (Michael) is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the seven Spirits, for the same reason that his prototype (among many others) Sanat-Sujâta,

 

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460‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

—the chief of the Kumâras—is called Ambhamsi, “Waters,”—according to the commentary on Vishnu Purâna. Why? Because the “Waters” is another name of the “Great Deep,” the primordial Waters of space or Chaos, and also means “Mother,” Amba, meaning Aditi and Akâsa, the Celestial Virgin-Mother of the visible universe. Furthermore, the “Waters of the flood” are also called “the Great Dragon,” or Ophis, Ophio-Morphos.

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

———

§ XIV. THE FOUR ELEMENTS.

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

The four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.”

461 ON THE ELEMENTS.

Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetishism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits—the Cosmic gods to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, respectful recognition by the wiser. In their turn the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.

In the Theogony of Moschus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the two principles from which Ulom the intelligible (νοήτος) God (the visible universe of matter) is born.⁴⁹⁰

In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal winds impregnate, Wind being “the Spirit of God,” who is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the chaos”—the Divine “Idea.” In the Hindu Kaṭha Upaniṣad [1:3:11], Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World, “Mahā-Ātmā, Brahm, the Spirit of Life”;⁴⁹¹ these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists, being its last and lowest division.”

The στοιχεῖα (Elements) of Plato and Aristotle, were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines those primitive beliefs . . . as a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies,” (Book IX, p. 850). So close, indeed, that the hierarchies of those potencies or Forces have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are Septenary,—not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension—but in their real Cosmic gradation, from their chemical (or physical) to their purely spiritual composition. Gods—with the ignorant masses—gods independent and supreme; dæmons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the Spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the hermetic philosopher they are forces relatively “blind,” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves, in our cultured age, finally degraded into simple chemical elements.

At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants,

 

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462 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ought to show more reverence for the four Elements, if they would show any for Moses. For the Bible manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew temples—according to Clemens Alexandrinus—a gigantic curtain, supported by five pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum (now represented by the altar in Christian churches) wherein the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours the curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses of men can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements. (See Stromata I., v. § 6).

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

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

Whence came the four elements and the malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight-of-hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America, their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Aryan or Semitic, the genius loci, the local god, embraced in its unity all nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The genius loci—a very late after-thought of the last sub-races of the Fifth Root-race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost—was ever the representative in his accumulated titles of all his colleagues. It was the god of fire, symbolised by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the god of water, symbolised by the fluvial bull or some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the god of air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vayu and Indra; and the god or spirit

463 THE COSMIC GODS.

of the earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.

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

As gods of Fire, Air, Water, they were celestial gods; as gods of the lower region, they were infernal deities: the latter adjective applying simply to the Earth. They were “Spirits of the Earth” under their respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the “Lord of the lower kingdom, etc., etc.,” and their tellurial character proves it sufficiently.⁴⁹² The ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kâmaloka, the limbus on this Earth. If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was identified with Aidoneus, the king of the subterranean world, and Dis, or the Roman Pluto and the Dionysius Chthonios, the subterranean, wherein, according to Creuzer (I, vi., ch. 1), oracles were rendered, then it will become the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aidoneus and Dionysius are the bases of Adonaï, or “Jurbo Adonaï,” as Jehovah is called in Codex Nazaræus. “Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is named Adonaï, whose name is also Kadush and El-El” (Codex Nazaræus, Vol. I., p. 47; see also Psalm lxxxix., 18), and also “Lord Bacchus.” Baal-Adonis of the Sods or Mysteries of the pre-Babylonian Jews became the Adonaï by the Massorah, the later-vowelled Jehovah. Hence the Roman Catholics are right. All these Jupiters are of the same family; but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete. Jupiter-Aerios or Pan, the Jupiter Ammon, and the Jupiter-Bel-Moloch, are all correlations and one with Yurbo-Adonaï, because they are all one cosmic nature. It is that nature and power which create the specific terrestrial symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves the Energy manifesting through it as extrinsic.

For primitive religion was something better than simple pre-occupation about physical phenomena, as remarked by Schilling; and principles, more elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, “were hidden under the transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder,

 

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464 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the winds, and rain.” The ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual elements, in the forces of nature.

The four-fold Jupiter, as the four-faced Brahmâ—the aerial, the fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the marine god—the lord and master of the four elements, may stand as a representative for the great Cosmic gods of every nation. While passing power over the fire to Hephaistos-Vulcan, over the sea, to Poseidon-Neptune, and over the Earth, to Pluto-Aidoneus—the aerial Jove was all these; for Æther, from the first, had pre-eminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the elements.

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

When included under the arts and sciences of the fourth race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal manifestation of the four elements, justly attributed by the believers in Cosmic gods to the intelligent interference of the latter, assumed a scientific character. The magic of the ancient priests consisted, in those days, in addressing their gods in their own language. “The speech of the men of the earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective element”—is a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning. “The Book of Rules” cited adds as an explanation of the nature of that Element-language: “It is composed of sounds, not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending Power” (the regent-god of the specific element needed).

Thus this “language” is that of incantations or of Mantras, as they are called in India, sound being the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and the Immortals. He who believes in the words and teachings of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only that he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of cosmic gods and their presence among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution: “creation”—“spiritualem ac mundanum,” as the Roman Church has it—ages before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric phraseology has changed little with respect to divine hierarchies since the most palmy days of Paganism, or “Idolatry.” Names alone have changed,

465 A CONFESSION OF SCIENCE.

along with claims which have now become false pretences. For when Plato put in the mouth of the Highest Principle—“Father Æther” or Jupiter—these words, for instance: “The gods of the gods of whom I am the maker (opifex) as I am the father of all their works (operumque parens)”; he knew the spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as St. Paul did, when saying: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, as there be gods many and lords many,” . . . . etc. (1 Cor. viii. 5.)⁴⁹³ Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put forward in such guarded terms. Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces, “The ancients when they witnessed a natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power. . . . Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently they became invested with a more material character; and the same words πνεῦμα, spirit, etc., were used to signify the soul or a gas; the very word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmutation of a spiritual into a physical conception . . . . . .” (P. 89.) This, the great man of science (in his preface to the fifth edition of “Correlation of Physical Forces”) considers as the only concern of exact science, which has no business to meddle with the causes. “Cause and effect,” he explains, “are therefore, in their abstract relation to these forces, words solely of convenience. We are totally unacquainted with the ultimate generating power of each and all of them, and probably shall ever remain so; we can only ascertain the norma of their actions; we must humbly refer their causation to one omnipresent influence, and content ourselves with studying their effects and developing, by experiment, their mutual relations” (p. xiv.).

This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above-quoted words, namely, the spirituality of the “ultimate generating power,” it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognise this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their com-

 

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466 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

pounds—as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The ancients knew these powers so well, that, while concealing their true nature under various allegories, for the benefit (or to the detriment) of the uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view, while inverting them. They contrived to throw a thick veil over the nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried to preserve the latter as a record for future generations, sufficiently transparent to allow their wise men to discern that truth behind the fabulous form of the glyph or allegory. They are accused of superstition and credulity, those ancient sages; and this by those very nations, which, learned in all the modern arts and sciences, cultured and wise in their generation, accept to this day as their one living and infinite God, the anthropomorphic “Jehovah” of the Jews.

What were some of the alleged “superstitions”? Hesiod believed, for instance, that “the winds were the sons of the giant Typhœus,” who were chained and unchained at will by Æolus, and the polytheistic Greeks accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should not they, since the monotheistic Jews had the same beliefs, with other names for their dramatis personæ, and since Christians believe in the same to this day? The Hesiodic Æolus, Boreas, etc., etc., were named Qāḏīm, Ṣāfōn, Dārōm, and Rūaḥ Hayyām by the “chosen people” of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the Hellenes were taught that Æolus tied and untied the winds, the Jews believed as fervently that their Lord God, “with smoke coming out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, rode upon a cherub and did fly; and was seen upon the wings of the wind” (II. Sam., xxii. 9 and 11). The expressions of the two nations are either both figures of speech, or both superstitions. We think they are neither; but only arise from a keen sense of oneness with nature, and a perception of the mysterious and the intelligent behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no longer possess. Nor was it “superstitious” in the Greek pagans to listen to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes, that oracle advised them to “sacrifice to the Winds,” if the same has to be regarded as Divine Worship in the Israelites, who sacrificed as often to the wind and fire—especially to the latter element. Do they not say that their “God is a consuming fire” (Deut. iv., 24), who appeared generally as Fire and “encompassed by fire”? and did not Elijah seek for him (the Lord) in the “great strong wind, and in the earthquake”? Do not the Christians repeat the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to this day, to the same God of Wind and Water? They do; because special prayers for rain, dry weather, trade-winds and the calming of storms on the seas exist to this hour in the prayer-books of the three Christian churches; and the several hundred sects of the Protestant religion

467 THE FIGHTING GODS.

offer them to their God upon every threat of calamity? The fact that they are no more answered by Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the fact of these prayers being addressed to the Power or Powers supposed to rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being identical in Paganism and Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry and absurd “superstition” only when addressed by a Pagan to his idol, and that the same superstition is suddenly transformed into praiseworthy piety and religion whenever the name of the celestial addressee is changed? But the tree is known by its fruit. And the fruit of the Christian tree being no better than that of the tree of Paganism, why should the former command more reverence than the latter.

Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and the Marquis de Mirville, a Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy, that in Hebrew lightning is a synonym of fury, and is always handled by an evil Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by the Christians œlicius, and denounced as the soul of lightning, its dæmon;⁴⁹⁴ we have either to apply the same explanation and definitions to the “Lord God of Israel,” under the same circumstances, or renounce our right of abusing the gods and creeds of other nations.

The foregoing statements emanating as they do from two ardent and learned Roman Catholics, are, to say the least, dangerous, in the presence of the Bible and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the “chief Dæmon of the Pagan Greeks,” hurled his deadly thunder-bolts and lightnings at those who excited his wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. We find in II. Samuel, that “the Lord thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice, and he sent out arrows (thunder bolts) and scattered them (Saul’s armies) with lightning, and discomforted them.” (Chap. xxii. 14, 15.)

The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Demon” is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious “that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract it by offering contra-sacrifices to Tethys” [Herodotus “Polym.” cxc]. Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet owing to the “prayers” of its enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of

 

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468 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if, during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers. What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one’s own next-of-kin—say of one’s “father”—is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour’s parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.

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

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

“Those unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has comprehension! . . . . They still have faith in their idol Vayu—the god or, rather, Demon of the Wind and Air . . . they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brahmins over the winds and storms. . . . .” (The Missionary Lavoisier, of Cochin, in the Journal des Colonies.) In reply to this, we may quote from Luke viii., 24: “And he (Jesus) arose and rebuked the Wind and the raging of the Water, and they ceased and there was a calm.” And here is another quotation from a prayer book: . . . “Oh, Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves . . .” etc., etc. (prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, copied textually from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin-goddess Astarte.) The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the Missionary is this: The commands of the Brahmins to their element-gods not remaining “ineff,” the power of the Brahmins is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be devils in theological

469 PRAYER IS OFTEN SORCERY.

fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown as immoral and wicked as the pagans ever were, what benefit has humanity derived from its change of gods and idols?

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

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

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces: magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental—every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral—the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upadhi, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in

470‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and recognised as perfectly natural, even by science. Why should man be the only exception in nature, and why cannot even the elements have their vehicles, their “Vahans” in what we call the physical forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?

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§ XV. ON KWAN-SHI-YIN AND KWAN-YIN.

Like Avalokiteshwara, Kwan-shi-yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that “He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Re-absorption (pralaya).” Thus the logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Visvakarma of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilised nations, are the “Word” who was “in the beginning” (or the reawakening of the energising powers of Nature) with the One Absolute. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct elements, It was the “Maker” (fashioner or modeller) of all things; “without him was not anything made that was made”; “in whom was life, and the life was the light of men”; and who finally may be called, as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of manifested Nature. “The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be re-absorbed with him” (Fa-Hwa-King). As this Bodhisatva is said “to assume any form he pleases” from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday (memorial day) is celebrated according to the Kin-kwang-ming-King (“Luminous Sutra of Golden Light”) in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of “Maitreya Buddha” in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatars and Buddhas, in the seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali yug, our present terrifically materialistic age of Darkness, the “Black Age,” that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali yug is

471 DISEASED IMAGINATION.

“l’Age d’Or” (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudo-Occultists. (See “La Mission des Juifs.”)

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

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

It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do the authors of “Confucian Cosmogony” (McClatchie) and Phallicism. The first discovers “the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols—the Khan or Yang, which is the membrum virile, and the Kwan or Yin, the pudendum muliebre.” (See: Hargrave Jennings, Phallicism: Celestial and Terrestrial, 1884, p. 273.) Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan-Shi-Yin (Avalokiteswara) and Kwan-Yin, besides being now the patron deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogis of Thibet, are the gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys Davids’ “Buddhism,” (p. 202): “The name Avalokiteshwara . . . means ‘the Lord who looks down from on high.’” Nor is Kwan-Shi-Yin “the Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but, literally interpreted, it means “the Lord that is seen,” and in one sense, “the divine self perceived by Self” (the human)—the Atman or seventh principle merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, Buddhi, the sixth principle or divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense, Avalokiteshwara=Kwan-Shi-Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal principle, is the Logos

472 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

perceived by the Universal Buddhi—or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate of the Dhyani-Buddhas, and is not the “Spirit of Buddha present in the Church,” but the omnipresent universal Spirit manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of “Yogini,” which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, “is a Sanskrit word, in the dialects pronounced Yogi or Zogee (!), and is equivalent to Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Duti-Ca’—i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Sakti” (p. 60). “The books of morality,” in India, “direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sakti . . . amongst the votaries of a most licentious description.” Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about “Budh,” as being a name “which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ (Round Towers of Ireland; quoted by Mr. Hargrave Jennings in “Phallicism,” p. 264). Max Müller, in his “False Analogies,” says that “the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat,” maintains “that the three syllables I Hi Wei (in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-king) were meant for Je-ho-vah (Science of Religion, p. 332); and again, Father Amyot, who “feels certain that the three persons of the Trinity could be recognised” in the same work. And if Abel Rémusat, why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognise the absurdity of ever seeing in Budh, “the enlightened” and “the awakened,” a “phallic symbol.”

Kwan-shi-yin, then, is “the Son identical with his Father” mystically, or the Logos—the word. He is called the “Dragon of Wisdom” in Stanza III., as all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with, and symbolised by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, “he who unites the doubles,” (astral light re-uniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the divine human to its purely divine Monad, the prototype “in heaven” or Nature) was represented as a serpent on human legs, either with or without arms. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature, as also of Christ with the Ophites, and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him; the serpent being an emblem of Christ with the Templars also, (see the Templar degree in Masonry). The symbol of Knouph (Khoum also), or the soul of the world, says Champollion (Pantheon, text 3), “is represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the good genius and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded.” The sacred animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. This serpent appears with various heads (human and animal), but its gems

473 SNOBS, OR DRAGONS?

are always found inscribed with the name χνουβις (Chnoubis). This symbol is identical with one which, according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called “the first of the celestial gods”; the god Hermes, or Mercury with the Greeks, to which god Hermes Trismegistos attributes the invention of, and the first initiation of men into, magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or “Re-awakening” into the divine Science.

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

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475

BOOK I., PART III.
ADDENDA.

SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.

“The knowledge of this nether world—
Say, friend, what is it, false or true?
The false, what mortal cares to know?
The true, what mortal ever knew?”

476

477 MUTUAL POSITION DEFINED.‌

ADDENDA TO BOOK I.

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§ I. REASONS FOR THESE ADDENDA.

Many of the doctrines contained in the foregoing Seven Stanzas and Commentaries having been studied and critically examined by some Western Theosophists, certain of the occult teachings have been found wanting from the ordinary stand-point of modern scientific knowledge. They seemed to encounter insuperable difficulties in the way of their acceptance, and to require reconsideration in view of scientific criticism. Some friends have already been tempted to regret the necessity of so often calling in question the assertions of modern Science. It appeared to them—and I here repeat only their arguments—that “to run counter to the teachings of its most eminent exponents, was to court a premature discomfiture in the eyes of the Western World.”

It is, therefore, desirable to define once and for all the position which the writer, who does not agree in this with her friends, intends to maintain. So far as Science remains what in the words of Prof. Huxley it is, viz., “organized common sense”; so far as its inferences are drawn from accurate premises—its generalizations resting on a purely inductive basis—every Theosophist and Occultist welcomes respectfully and with due admiration its contributions to the domain of cosmological law. There can be no possible conflict between the teachings of occult and so-called exact Science, where the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a substratum of unassailable fact. It is only when its more ardent exponents, over-stepping the limits of observed phenomena in order to penetrate into the arcana of Being, attempt to wrench the formation of Kosmos and its living Forces from Spirit, and attribute all to blind matter, that the Occultists claim the right to dispute and call in question their theories. Science cannot, owing to the very nature of things, unveil the mystery of the universe around us. Science can, it is true, collect, classify, and generalize upon phenomena; but the occultist, arguing from admitted metaphysical data, declares that the daring explorer, who would probe the inmost secrets of Nature, must transcend the narrow limitations of sense, and transfer his consciousness into the region of noumena and the sphere of primal causes. To effect this, he must develop faculties which are absolutely

478 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dormant—save in a few rare and exceptional cases—in the constitution of the off-shoots of our present Fifth Root-race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to base his speculations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?

On the other hand, whatever the writer may do, she will never be able to satisfy both Truth and Science. To offer the reader a systematic and uninterrupted version of the Archaic Stanzas is impossible. A gap of 43 verses or Slokas has to be left between the 7th (already given) and the 51st, which is the subject of Book II., though the latter are made to run from 1 et seq. for easier reading and reference. The appearance of man on Earth alone occupies as many stanzas, which describe minutely his primal evolution from the human Dhyan Chohans; the state of the globe at that time, etc., etc. A great number of names referring to chemical substances and other compounds, which have now ceased to combine together, and are therefore unknown to the later offshoots of our Fifth Race, occupy a considerable space. As they are simply untranslateable, and would remain in every case inexplicable, they are omitted, along with those which cannot be made public. Nevertheless, even the little that is given will irritate any follower and defender of dogmatic materialistic Science who happens to read this.

Before proceeding to other Stanzas, it is proposed, therefore, to defend those already given. They are not in perfect accord or harmony with modern Science—this we all know. Had they been, however, as much in agreement with the views of modern knowledge as a lecture by Sir W. Thomson, they would have been rejected all the same. For they teach belief in conscious Powers and Spiritual Entities; in terrestrial, semi-intelligent, and highly intellectual Forces on other planes⁴⁹⁵; and in Beings that dwell around us in spheres imperceptible, whether through telescope or microscope. Hence the necessity of examining the beliefs of materialistic Science: of comparing its views about the “Elements” with the opinions of the ancients, and of analysing the physical Forces as they exist in modern perception before the Occultists admit themselves to be in the wrong. We shall touch upon the constitution of the Sun and planets, and the occult characteristics of what are called Devas and Genii, and are now termed by Science, Force, or “modes of motion,” and see whether esoteric belief is defensible or not (Vide infra, “Gods, Monads, and Atoms”). Notwithstanding the efforts made to the contrary, an unprejudiced mind will discover

 

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479 DUAL NATURE OF THE SUN.

under Newton’s “agent, material or immaterial” (of his third letter to Bentley), the agent which causes gravity, and, in his personal working God, one finds just as much of the metaphysical devas and genii, as in Kepler’s angelus rector conducting each planet, and the species immateriata by which the celestial bodies were carried along in their courses, according to that astronomer.

We shall have, in Book II., to openly approach dangerous subjects. We must bravely face Science and declare, in the teeth of materialistic learning, of Idealism, Hylo-Idealism, Positivism and all-denying modern Psychology, that the true Occultist believes in “Lords of Light”; that he believes in a Sun, which, far from being simply “a lamp of day” moving in accordance with physical law, and far from being merely one of those Suns, which according to Richter—“. . . . are Sun-flowers of a higher light”—is, like milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a god, and a host of gods.

In this question, of course, it is the Occultists who will be worsted. They will be considered on the primâ facie aspect of the dispute to be ignoramuses, and labelled with more than one of the usual epithets given to those whom the superficially judging public, itself ignorant of the great underlying truths in nature, accuses of believing in mediæval superstitions. Let it be so. Submitting beforehand to every criticism in order to go on with their task, they only claim the privilege of showing that the physicists are as much at loggerheads among themselves in their speculations, as the latter are with the teachings of Occultism.

The Sun is matter, and the Sun is Spirit. Our ancestors—the “heathen,”—along with their modern successors, the Parsis—were, and are, wise enough in their generation to see in it the symbol of Divinity, and at the same time to sense within, concealed by the physical Symbol, the bright God of Spiritual and terrestrial Light. Such belief is now regarded as a superstition only by rank materialism, which denies Deity, Spirit, Soul, and admits no intelligence outside the mind of man. But if too much of wrong superstition bred by “Churchianity”—as Lawrence Oliphant calls it—“renders a man a fool,” too much scepticism makes him mad. We prefer the charge of folly in believing too much, to that of a madness which denies everything, as do Materialism and Idealism. Hence, the Occultists are fully prepared to receive their dues from Materialism, and to meet the adverse criticism which will be poured on this work, not for writing it, but for believing in that which it contains.

Therefore the discoveries, hypotheses, and unavoidable objections which will be brought forward by the scientific critics must be anticipated and disposed of. It has also to be shown how far the

480 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

occult teachings depart from real science, and whether the ancient or the modern theories are the most logically and philosophically correct. The unity and mutual relations of all parts of Kosmos were known to the ancients, before they became evident to modern astronomers and philosophers. And if even the external and visible portions of the Universe and their mutual relations cannot be explained in any other terms than those used by the adherents of the mechanical theory of the Universe in physical science, it follows that no materialist, who denies that the Soul of Kosmos (which appertains to metaphysical philosophy) exists, has the right to trespass upon that metaphysical domain. That physical science is trying to, and actually does, encroach upon it, is only one more proof that “might is right,” and no more.

Another good reason for these Addenda is this. Since only a certain portion of the Secret teachings can be given out in the present age, if they were published without any explanations or commentary, the doctrines would never be understood even by theosophists. Therefore they must be contrasted with the speculations of modern science. Archaic axioms must be placed side by side with modern hypotheses and comparison left to the sagacious reader.

On the question of the “Seven Governors,” as Hermes calls the “Seven Builders,” the Spirits which guide the operations of nature, the animated atoms of which are the shadows, in their world, of their Primaries in the astral realms—this work will, of course, besides the men of Science, have every materialist against it. But this opposition can, at most, be only temporary. People have laughed at everything and scouted every unpopular idea at first, and then ended by accepting it. Materialism and scepticism are evils that must remain in the world as long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the first and second races of this Round. Unless scepticism and our present natural ignorance are equilibrated by intuition and a natural spirituality, every being afflicted with such feelings will see in himself no better than a bundle of flesh, bones, and muscles, with an empty garret inside him which serves the purpose of storing his sensations and feelings. Sir Humphry Davy was a great scientist, as deeply versed in physics as any theorist of our day, yet he loathed materialism. “I heard with disgust,” he says, “in the dissecting-rooms, the plan of the physiologist, of the gradual secretion of matter, and its becoming endued with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by its own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence.” Nevertheless, physiologists are not the most to be blamed for speaking of that only which they can see and estimate on the evidence of their physical senses. Astronomers

481 THE SONS OF LIGHT.

and physicists are, we consider, far more illogical in their materialistic views than even physiologists, and this has to be proved. Milton’s—

. . . . . . . . . . . . “Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,”

has become with the materialists only—

. . . . . . Prime cheerer, light,
Of all material beings, first and best.

For the occultists it is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of motion,” now regarded as “the property of matter” and nothing more, they perceive the radiant noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy (or emanation) is stored in the Sun, the great Life-Giver of the physical world, as the hidden Concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light- and Life-Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms. Bacon was one of the first to strike the key-note of materialism, not only by his inductive method (renovated from ill-digested Aristotle), but by the general tenor of his writings. He inverts the order of mental Evolution when saying that “the first Creation of God was the light of the sense; the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the Spirit.” It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the mystic or occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense. That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “Fiat Lux” is,—when esoterically rendered—“Let there be the ‘Sons of Light,’” or the noumena of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage as referring to Angels, and wrongly as meaning Powers created by an anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and punishing Jehovah.

These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from, and are self-generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other, the matter in which it condenses, crystallizing into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation. Therefore matter, though it is, in one sense, but the illusive dregs of that Light whose limbs are the Creative Forces, yet has in it the full presence of the Soul thereof, of that Principle, which none—not even the “Sons of Light,” evolved from its absolute darkness—will ever know. The idea is as beautifully, as it is truthfully, expressed by Milton, who hails the holy Light, which is the—

“. . . . . Offspring of Heaven, first-born,
And of th’ Eternal co-eternal beam;
. . . . . Since God is light,
And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee
Bright effluence, of bright essence increate.”

482‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ II. MODERN PHYSICISTS ARE PLAYING AT BLIND MAN’S BUFF.

And now Occultism puts to Science the question: “Is light a body, or is it not?” Whatever the answer of the latter, the former is prepared to show that, to this day, the most eminent physicists know neither one way nor the other. To know what is light, and whether it is an actual substance or a mere undulation of the “ethereal medium,” Science has first to learn what are in reality Matter, Atom, Ether, Force. Now, the truth is, that it knows nothing of any of these, and admits it. It has not even agreed what to believe in, as dozens of hypotheses emanating from various and very eminent Scientists on the same subject, are antagonistic to each other and often self-contradictory. Thus their learned speculations may, with a stretch of good-will, be accepted as “working hypotheses” in a secondary sense, as Stallo puts it. But being radically inconsistent with each other, they must finally end by mutually destroying themselves. As declared by the author of “Concepts of Modern Physics”:

“It must not be forgotten that the several departments of Science are simply arbitrary divisions of labour. In these several departments the same physical object may be considered under different aspects. The physicist may study its molecular relations, while the chemist determines its atomic constitution. But when they both deal with the same element or agent, it cannot have one set of properties in physics, and another set contradictory of them, in chemistry. If the physicist and chemist alike assume the existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable in bulk and weight, the atom cannot be a cube or oblate spheroid for physical, and a sphere for chemical purposes. A group of constant atoms cannot be an aggregate of extended and absolutely inert and impenetrable masses in a crucible or retort, and a system of mere centres of force as part of a magnet or of a Clamond battery. The universal Ether cannot be soft and mobile to please the chemist, and rigid-elastic to satisfy the physicist; it cannot be continuous at the command of Sir William Thomson and discontinuous on the suggestion of Cauchy or Fresnel.” ⁴⁹⁶

The eminent physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted saying the same in the 43rd Volume of the Mémoires de l’Academie Royale de Belgique, which we translate from the French, as cited: “When one sees the assurance with which are to-day affirmed doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to expect to find likewise unanimity on the qualities described to this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one feels the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and that of the mathematician . . . . have absolutely nothing in common but the name! The inevitable result is the existing

 

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483 NO AGREEMENT AMONG SCIENTISTS.‌

subdivision of our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon-hole, constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring pigeon-hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them. . . . The chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific distinguishing qualities; for the physicist and the metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on the contrary, always and everywhere the same. What am I saying? There is no agreement even in one and the same science as to the properties of the atom. Each constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned.”⁴⁹⁷

The above is the photographically correct image of modern Science and physics. The “pre-requisite of that incessant play of the ‘scientific imagination,’” which is so often found in Professor Tyndall’s eloquent discourses, is vivid indeed, as shown by Stallo, and for contradictory variety leaves far behind it any “phantasies” of occultism. However it may be, if physical theories are confessedly “mere formal, explanatory, didactic devices,” and if “atomism is only a symbolical graphic system,”⁴⁹⁸ then the occultist can hardly be regarded as assuming too much, when he places alongside of these devices and “symbolical systems” of modern Science, the symbols and devices of Archaic teachings.

———

§ III. “AN LUMEN SIT CORPUS, NEC NON?”

Most decidedly Light is not a body, we are told. Physical Sciences say Light is a Force, a vibration, the undulation of ether. It is the property or quality of matter, or even an affection thereof—never a body!

Just so. For this discovery, the knowledge—whatever it may be worth—that light or caloric is not a motion of material particles, Science is chiefly indebted, if not solely, to Sir W. Grove. It was he who was the first in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, to show that

 

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484 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“light, heat, etc., etc.⁴⁹⁹ are affections of matter itself, and not a distinct ethereal, ‘imponderable,’ fluid, (a state of matter now) permeating it.” (See “Correlation of the Physical Forces,” Preface). Yet, perhaps, for some physicists—as for Oersted, a very eminent Scientist—Force and Forces were tacitly “Spirit (and hence Spirits) in Nature.” What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but themselves the Secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes, for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts?

Sir Isaac Newton held to the Pythagorean corpuscular theory, and was also inclined to admit its consequences; which made the Count de Maistre hope, at one time, that Newton would ultimately lead Science back to the recognition of the fact that Forces and the Celestial bodies were propelled and guided by Intelligences (Soirées, vol. ii.). But de Maistre counted without his host. The innermost thoughts and ideas of Newton were perverted, and of his great mathematical learning only the mere physical husk was turned to account. Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would apply his “gravity,”⁵⁰⁰ that pious and religious man would surely have quietly eaten his apple, and never breathed a word about any mechanical ideas connected with its fall.

Great contempt is shown for metaphysics generally and for onto-

 

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485 THE METAPHYSICS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE.

logical metaphysics especially. But we see, whenever the Occultists are bold enough to raise their diminished heads, that materialistic, physical science is honey-combed with metaphysics;⁵⁰¹ that its most fundamental principles, while inseparably wedded to transcendentalism, are nevertheless, in order to show modern science divorced from such “dreams,” tortured and often ignored in the maze of contradictory theories and hypotheses. A very good corroboration of this charge lies in the fact that Science finds itself absolutely compelled to accept the “hypothetical” Ether and to try to explain it on the materialistic grounds of atomo-mechanical laws. This attempt has led directly to the most fatal discrepancies and radical inconsistencies between the assumed nature of Ether and its physical actions. A second proof is found in the many contradictory statements about the atom—the most metaphysical object in creation.

Now, what does the modern science of physics know of Æther, the first concept of which belongs undeniably to ancient philosophers, the Greeks having borrowed it from the Aryans, and the origin of modern Æther being found in, and disfigured from, Akâsa? This disfigurement

 

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486 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

is claimed to be a modification and refinement of the idea of Lucretius. Let us then examine the modern concept from several scientific volumes containing the admissions of the physicists themselves.

The existence of Ether is accepted by physical astronomy, in ordinary physics, and in chemistry. Astronomers, who first began by regarding it as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility, offering no sensible resistance to the motions of celestial bodies, never gave a thought to its continuity or discontinuity. “Its main function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for hydrodynamical theories of gravitation. In physics this fluid appeared for some time in several rôles in connection with the ‘imponderables’”—so cruelly put to death by Sir W. Grove. Some physicists have even identified the ether of space with those “imponderables.” Then came their Kinetic theories; and from the date of the dynamical theory of heat, it was chosen in optics as a substratum for luminous undulations. Then, in order to explain the dispersion and polarization of light, physicists had to resort once more to their “scientific imagination” and forthwith endowed the Ether with (a) atomic or molecular structure, and (b) with an enormous elasticity, “so that its resistance to deformation far exceeded that of the most rigid elastic bodies” (Stallo). This necessitated the theory of the essential discontinuity of matter, hence of Ether. After having accepted this discontinuity, in order to account for dispersion and polarization, theoretical impossibilities were discovered with regard to such dispersions. Cauchy’s “scientific imagination” saw in atoms “material points without extension,” and he proposed, in order to obviate the most formidable obstacles to the undulatory theory (namely, some well-known mechanical theorems which stood in the way), to assume that the ethereal medium of propagation, instead of being continuous, should consist of particles separated by sensible distances. Fresnel rendered the same service to the phenomena of polarization. E. B. Hunt upset the theories of both (Silliman’s Journal, vol. viii., p. 364 et seq.) There are now men of Science who proclaim them “materially fallacious,” while others—the “atomo-mechanicalists”—cling to to them with desperate tenacity. The supposition of an atomic or molecular constitution of ether is upset, moreover, by thermo-dynamics, for Clerk Maxwell showed that such a medium would be simply gas.⁵⁰² The hypothesis of “finite intervals” is thus proven of no avail as a supplement to the undulatory theory. Besides, eclipses fail to reveal any such variation of colour as supposed by Cauchy (on the assumption that the chromatic rays are propagated with different velocities).

 

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487 SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION.

Astronomy has pointed out more than one phenomenon absolutely at variance with this doctrine.

Thus, while in one department of physics the atomo-molecular constitution of the ether is accepted in order to account for one set of special phenomena, in another department such a constitution is found quite subversive of a number of well-ascertained facts, Hirn’s charges being thus justified (vide supra). Chemistry deemed it impossible to concede enormous elasticity to the ether without depriving it of other properties, upon the assumption of which the construction of its modern theories depended. This ended in a final transformation of ether. The exigencies of the atomo-mechanical theory have led distinguished mathematicians and physicists to attempt to substitute for the traditional atoms of matter, peculiar forms of vortical motion in a “universal homogeneous, incompressible, and continuous material medium,” or Æther. (See Stallo.)

The present writer, claiming no great scientific education, but only a tolerable acquaintance with modern theories, and a better one with Occult Sciences, picks up weapons against the detractors of the esoteric teaching in the very arsenal of modern Science. The glaring contradictions, the mutually-destructive hypotheses of world-renowned Scientists, their mutual accusations, denunciations and disputes, show plainly that, whether accepted or not, the Occult theories have as much right to a hearing as any of the so-called learned and academical hypotheses. Thus whether the followers of the Royal Society choose to accept ether as a continuous or a discontinuous fluid matters little, and is indifferent to the present purpose. It simply points to one certainty: Official Science knows nothing to this day of the constitution of ether. Let Science call it matter, if it likes; only neither as akâsa nor as the one sacred Æther of the Greeks, is it to be found in any of the states of matter known to modern physics. It is matter on quite another plane of perception and being, and it can neither be analyzed by scientific apparatus, appreciated, nor even conceived by “scientific imagination,” unless the possessors thereof study the Occult Sciences. That which follows proves this statement.

It is clearly demonstrated by Stallo as regards the crucial problems of modern physics (as was done by De Quatrefages and several others in those of anthropology, biology, etc., etc.) that, in their efforts to support their individual hypotheses and systems, the majority of the eminent and learned materialists very often utter the greatest fallacies. Let us take the following case. Most of them reject actio in distans (one of the fundamental principles in the question of Æther or Akâsa in Occultism), while, as Stallo justly observes, there is no physical action,

488 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“which, on close examination, does not resolve itself into actio in distans”; and he proves it.

Now, metaphysical arguments, according to Professor Lodge (Nature, vol. xxvii., p. 304), are “unconscious appeals to experience.” And he adds that if such an experience is not conceivable, then it does not exist, etc. In his own words: “. . . If a highly-developed mind or set of minds, find a doctrine about some comparatively simple and fundamental matter absolutely unthinkable, it is an evidence . . . that the unthinkable state of things has no existence, etc.”

And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, Professor Lodge indicates that the explanation of cohesion, as well as of gravity, “is to be looked for in the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson” (Stallo). It is needless to stop to inquire whether it is to this vortex-theory, also, that we have to look for the dropping down on earth of the first life-germ by a passing meteor or comet (Sir W. Thomson’s hypothesis). But Mr. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his lecture in the same “Concepts of Modern Physics.” Noticing the above quoted declaration by the London Professor, the author asks “whether . . . the elements of the vortex-theory are familiar, or even possible, facts of experience? For, if they are not, clearly that theory is obnoxious to the same criticism which is said to invalidate the assumption of actio in distans” (p. xxiv). And then the able critic shows clearly what the Ether is not, nor can ever be, notwithstanding all scientific claims to the contrary. And thus he opens widely, if unconsciously, the entrance door to our occult teachings. For, as he says:

“The medium in which the vortex-movements arise is, according to Professor Lodge’s own express statement (nature, vol. xxvii., p. 305), ‘a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, continuous body, incapable of being resolved into simple elements or atoms: it is, in fact, continuous, not molecular.’ And after making this statement Professor Lodge adds: ‘There is no other body of which we can say this, and hence the properties of the æther must be somewhat different from those of ordinary matter.’ It appears, then, that the whole vortex-atom theory, which is offered to us as a substitute for the ‘metaphysical theory’ of actio in distans, rests upon the hypothesis of the existence of a material medium which is utterly unknown to experience, and which has properties somewhat different⁵⁰³ from those of ordinary matter. Hence this theory, instead of being, as is claimed, a reduction of an unfamiliar fact of experience to a familiar fact, is,

 

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489 THE PHYSICAL “PHANTOM.”

on the contrary, a reduction of a fact which is perfectly familiar, to a fact which is not only unfamiliar, but wholly unknown, unobserved and unobservable. Furthermore, the alleged vortical motion of, or rather in, the assumed ethereal medium is . . . impossible, because “motion in a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, and therefore continuous fluid, is not sensible motion.” . . . . It is manifest, therefore, that wherever the vortex-atom theory may lead us, it certainly does not lead us anywhere in the region of physics, or in the domain of veræ causæ.⁵⁰⁴ And I may add that, inasmuch as the hypothetical undifferentiated⁵⁰⁵ and undifferentiable medium is clearly an involuntary re-ification of the old ontological concept pure being, the theory under discussion has all the attributes of an inapprehensible metaphysical phantom.”

A “phantom” indeed, which can be made apprehensible only by Occultism. From such scientific metaphysics to Occultism there is hardly one step. Those physicists who hold the view that the atomic constitution of matter is consistent with its penetrability, need not go far out of their way to be able to account for the greatest phenomena of Occultism, now so derided by physical scientists and materialists. Cauchy’s “material points without extension” are Leibnitz’s monads, and at the same time the materials out of which the “Gods” and other invisible powers clothe themselves in bodies (vide infra, “Gods, Monads and Atoms”). The disintegration and reintegration of “material” particles without extension as a chief factor in phenomenal manifestations ought to suggest themselves very easily as a clear possibility, at any rate to those few scientific minds which accept M. Cauchy’s views. For, disposing of that property of matter which they call impenetrability by simply regarding the atoms as “material points exerting on each other attractions and repulsions which vary with the distances that separate them”—the French theorist explains that: “From this it follows that, if it pleased the author of nature⁵⁰⁶ simply to modify the laws according to which the atoms attract or repel each other, we might instantly see the hardest bodies penetrating each other, the smallest particles of matter occupying immense spaces, or the largest masses reducing themselves to the smallest volumes, the entire universe concentrating itself, as it were, in a single point.” (Sept leçons de physique Générale, p. 38 et seq., ed. Moigno.) And that “point,” invisible on our plane of perception and matter, is quite visible to the eye of the adept who can follow and see it present on other planes.

 

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490‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ IV. IS GRAVITATION A LAW?

The corpuscular theory has been unceremoniously put aside; but gravitation—the principle that all bodies attract each other with a force proportional directly to their masses, and inversely to the squares of the distances between them—survives to this day and reigns, supreme as ever, in the alleged ethereal waves of Space. As a hypothesis, it had been threatened with death for its inadequacy to embrace all the facts presented to it; as a physical law, it is the King of the late and once all-potent “Imponderables.” “It is little short of blasphemy . . . . an insult to Newton’s grand memory to doubt it, . . . .” is the exclamation of an American reviewer of “Isis Unveiled.” Well; what is finally that invisible and intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who see in gravitation an easy-going solution for many things, and an universal force which allows them to calculate thereby planetary motions, care little about the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all; and then it will follow the corpuscular theory of light and be consigned to rest for many scientific æons in the archives of all exploded speculations. Has not Newton himself expressed grave doubts about the Nature of Force and the corporeality of the “Agents,” as they were then called? So has Cuvier, another scientific light shining in the night of research. He warns his readers, in the Révolution du Globe, about the doubtful nature of the so-called Forces, saying that “it is not so sure whether those agents were not Spiritual Powers after all (des agents spirituels). At the outset of his “Principia,” Sir Isaac Newton took the greatest care to impress upon his school that he did not use the word “attraction” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a physical sense. To him it was, he said, a purely mathematical conception involving no consideration of real and primary physical causes. In one of the passages of his “Principia” (Defin. 8, B. I. Prop. 69, “Scholium”), he tells us plainly that, physically considered, attractions are rather impulses. In section XI. (Introduction) he expresses the opinion that “there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined” (see Mod. Mater., by Rev. W. F. Wilkinson) ; and in his third Letter to Bentley he says: “It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter, without mutual contact, as it must do if gravi-

491 GRAVITY OR WHAT?

tation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. . . . That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.”

At this, even Newton’s contemporaries got frightened—at the apparent return of occult causes into the domain of physics. Leibnitz called his principle of attraction “an incorporeal and inexplicable power.” The supposition of an attractive faculty and a perfect void was characterized by Bernoulli as “revolting,” the principle of actio in distans finding thus no more favour then than it does now. Euler, on the other hand, thought the action of gravity was due to either a Spirit or some subtle medium. And yet Newton knew of, if he did not accept, the Ether of the Ancients. He regarded the intermediate space between the sidereal bodies as vacuum. Therefore he believed in “subtle spirit” and Spirits as we do, guiding the so-called attraction. The above-quoted words of the great man have produced poor results. The “absurdity” has now become a dogma in the case of pure materialism, which repeats, “No matter without force, no force without matter; matter and force are inseparable, eternal and indestructible (true); there can be no independent force, since all force is an inherent and necessary property of matter (false) ; consequently, there is no immaterial creative power.” Oh, poor Sir Isaac!

If, leaving aside all the other eminent men of Science who shared in the same opinion as Euler and Leibnitz, the Occultists claim as their authorities and supporters only Sir Isaac Newton and Cuvier, as above cited, they need fear little from modern Science, and may loudly and proudly proclaim their beliefs. But, the hesitation and doubts of the two before cited authorities, and of many others, too, whom we could name, did not in the least prevent scientific speculation from wool-gathering on the fields of brute matter just as before. First it was matter and an imponderable fluid distinct from it; then came the imponderable fluid so much criticised by Grove; and Æther, which was at first discontinuous and then became continuous; after which came the “mechanical” Forces. These have now settled in life as “modes of motion” and the æther has become more mysterious and problematical than ever. More than one man of Science objects to such crude materialistic views. But then since the days of Plato, who repeatedly asks his readers not to confuse incorporeal Elements with

492 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

their Principles—transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of the great Alchemists, who, like Paracelsus, made a great difference between phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; and Grove, who, though he sees “no reason to divest universally diffused matter of the functions common to all matter,” yet uses the term Forces where his critics, “who do not attach to the word any idea of a specific action,” say Force—from those days to this nothing has proved competent to stem the tide of brutal materialism. Gravitation is the sole cause, the acting God, and matter is its prophet, said the men of science only a few years ago.

They have changed their views several times since then. But do the men of Science understand the innermost thought of Newton, one of the most spiritual-minded and religious men of his day, any better now than they did then? It is certainly to be doubted. Newton is credited with having given the death-blow to the Elemental Vortices of Descartes (the idea of Anaxagoras, resurrected, by-the-bye), though the last modern “vortical atoms” of Sir W. Thomson do not, in truth, differ much from the former. Nevertheless, when his disciple Forbes wrote in the Preface to the chief work of his Master a sentence declaring that “attraction was the cause of the System,” Newton was the first to solemnly protest. That which in the mind of the great mathematician assumed the shadowy, but firmly rooted image of God, as the noumenon of all,⁵⁰⁷ was called more philosophically by the ancient (and modern) philosophers and Occultists—“Gods,” or the creative fashioning Powers. The modes of expression may have been different, and the ideas more or less philosophically enunciated by all sacred and profane Antiquity; but the fundamental thought was the same.⁵⁰⁸ For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods inde-

 

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493 THE TRIPLE SIDEREAL FORCE.

pendent of planets and Matter as we see and know them on Earth, who are the rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Plato represented the planets as moved by an intrinsic Rector, one with his dwelling, like “A boatman in his boat.” As for Aristotle, he called those rulers “immaterial substances”;⁵⁰⁹ though as one who had never been initiated, he rejected the gods as Entities (See Vossius, Vol. II., p. 528). But this did not prevent him from recognising the fact that the stars and planets “were not inanimate masses but acting and living bodies indeed. . . . . . .” As if “sidereal spirits were the divine portion of their phenomena, τὰ θειότερα τῶν φανερῶν” (De Caelo. [Περὶ οὐρανοῦ, “On the Heavens”] I. 9, quoted in de Mirville, Des Esprits, Vol. 4, 1863, p. 141).

If we look for corroboration in more modern and Scientific times, we find Tycho Brahe recognising in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and vital. Kepler, putting together the Pythagorean sentence, “The Sun, guardian of Jupiter,” and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in the Sun,” and “The Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood perfectly how the Pythagoreans could believe that all the globes disseminated through Space were rational Intelligences, facultates ratiocinativæ, circulating around the Sun, “in which resides a pure Spirit of fire; the source of the general harmony” (De Motibus planetarum harmonicis, p. 248).

When an Occultist speaks of Fohat—the energising and guiding intelligence in the Universal Electric or Vital Fluid,—he is laughed at. Withal, as now shown, neither the nature of electricity, nor of Life nor even of Light, are to this day understood. The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special characteristic of its noumenon; which noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical Universe. Now the Occultist does not deny—on the contrary he will support the claim—that light, heat, electricity and so on are affections (not properties or qualities) of matter. To put it more clearly: matter is the condition—the necessary basis or vehicle, a sine quâ non—for the manifestation of these forces, or agents, on this plane.

But in order to gain the point the Occultists have to examine the credentials of the law of gravity, first of all, of “Gravitation, the King

 

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494 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and Ruler of Matter,” under every form. To do so effectually, the hypothesis in its earliest appearance has to be recalled to mind. To begin with, is it Newton who was the first to discover it? The Athenæum of Jan. 26, 1867, has some curious information upon this subject. It says that “positive evidence can be adduced that Newton derived all his knowledge of gravitation and its laws from Bœhme, with whom gravitation or attraction is the first property of Nature.” . . . For with him “his (Bœhme’s) system, shows us the inside of things, while modern physical science is content with looking at the outside.” Then again, “the science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he (Boehme) wrote, is there anticipated (in his writings); and not only does Bœhme describe all the now known phenomena of that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of electricity, itself, etc.”

Thus Newton, whose profound mind read easily between the lines, and fathomed the spiritual thought of the great Seer in its mystic rendering, owes his great discovery to Jacob Bœhme, the nursling of the genii (Nirmânakâyas) who watched over and guided him, of whom the author of the article in question so truly remarks, that “every new scientific discovery goes to prove his profound and intuitive insight into the most secret workings of nature.” And having discovered gravity, Newton, in order to render possible the action of attraction in space, had, so to speak, to annihilate every physical obstacle capable of impeding its free action; ether among others, though he had more than a presentiment of its existence. Advocating the corpuscular theory, he made an absolute vacuum between the heavenly bodies. . . . Whatever may have been his suspicions and inner convictions about Ether; however many friends he may have unbosomed himself to—as in the case of his correspondence with Bentley—his teachings never showed that he had any such belief. If he was “persuaded that the power of attraction could not be exerted by matter across a vacuum,”⁵¹⁰ how is it that so late as 1860, French astronomers (Le Couturier, for instance), combated “the disastrous results of the theory of vacuum established by the great man?”⁵¹¹ Professor Winchell writes, “These passages (letter to Bentley) show what were his views respecting the nature of the interplanetary medium of communication. Though declaring that ‘the heavens are void of sensible matter,’ he elsewhere excepted ‘perhaps

 

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495 NEWTON THEN AND NEWTON NOW.

some very thin vapours, streams, and effluvia, arising from the atmospheres of the earth, planets, and comets, and from such an exceedingly rare ethereal medium as we have elsewhere described.’” (Newton, “Book III., Query 28,” in Opticks, 1730, pp. 339 & 343; quoted in Winchell, World-Life.)

This only shows that even such great men as Newton have not always the courage of their opinions. Dr. T. S. Hunt “called attention to some long-neglected passages in Newton’s works, from which it appears that a belief in such universal, intercosmical medium gradually took root in his mind.” (Ibid.) But such attention was never called to the said passages before Nov. 28, 1881, when Dr. Hunt read his “Celestial Chemistry, from the time of Newton.” “Till then the idea was universal, even among the men of Science, that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached a void,” as Le Couturier says. The passages had been “long neglected,” no doubt because they contradicted and clashed with the preconceived pet theories of the day, till finally the undulatory theory imperiously required the presence of an “ethereal medium” to explain it. This is the whole secret.

Anyhow, it is from that theory of Newton’s of a universal void—taught, if not believed in by himself,—that dates the immense scorn now shown by modern for ancient physics. The old sages had maintained that “Nature abhorred vacuum,” and the greatest mathematicians of the world (read of the Western races) had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it. And now modern science vindicates, however ungracefully, archaic knowledge, having, moreover, to vindicate Newton’s character and powers of observation at this late hour, after having neglected for one century and a half to pay any attention to such very important passages—perchance, because it was wiser not to attract any notice to them. Better late than never.

And now Father Æther is re-welcomed with open arms; and wedded to gravitation; linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both, shall be replaced by something else. Three hundred years ago it was plenum everywhere, then it became one dismal vacuity; later still the sidereal ocean-beds, dried up by science, rolled onward once more their ethereal waves. Recede ut procedes must become the motto of exact Science—“exact,” chiefly, in finding itself inexact every leap-year.

But we will not quarrel with the great men. They had to go back to the earliest “Gods of Pythagoras and old Kanada” for the very backbone and marrow of their correlations and “newest” discoveries, and this may well afford good hope to the Occultists, for their minor gods. For we believe in Le Couturier’s prophecy about gravitation. We know the day is approaching when an absolute reform will be demanded in the present modes of Science by the scientists themselves—as was done by Sir W. Grove, F.R.S. Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation

496 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

were dethroned to-morrow, the day after the Scientists would discover some other new mode of mechanical motion.⁵¹² Rough and up-hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of Spirit. But in the face of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses to explain physical phenomena, there never was yet a better one than that of “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by materialism. As may be found on the first pages of Book I., Occultists have nothing surely against motion⁵¹³ the great breath of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “unknown.” But, believing that everything on Earth is the shadow of something in space—they believe in smaller “Breaths,” which, living, intelligent and independent of all but Law, blow in every direction during Manvantaric periods. These Science will reject. But whatever replaces attraction, alias gravitation, the result will be the same. Science will be as far from the solution of its difficulties as it is now, unless it comes to some compromise with Occultism and even with Alchemy—which supposition will be regarded as an impertinence, but remains a fact, nevertheless. As Faye says: “Il manque quelque chose aux géologues pour faire la géologie de la Lune, c’est d’être astronomes. A la verité il manque aussi quelquechose aux astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette étude, c’est d’être géologues.” But he might have added, with still more pointedness, “Ce qui manque à tous les deux, c’est l’intuition du mystique.”

Let us remember Sir William Grove’s wise “concluding remarks,” on the ultimate structure of matter, or the minutiæ of molecular actions, which, he thought, man will never know.

“Much harm has already been done by attempting hypothetically to dissect matter and to discuss the shapes, sizes, and numbers of atoms, and their atmospheres of heat, ether, or electricity. . . . . Whether the regarding electricity, light, magnetism, etc., as simply motions of ordinary matter, be or be not admissible, certain it is that all past theories have resolved, and all existing theories do resolve, the action of these forces into motion. Whether it be that, on account of our familiarity with motion, we refer other affections to it, as to a language which is most easily construed, and most capable of

 

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497 NEW BOTTLES FOR OLD WINE.

explaining them, or whether it be that it is in reality the only mode in which our minds as contra-distinguished from our senses, are able to conceive material agencies, certain it is that since the period at which the mystic notions of spiritual or preternatural powers were applied to account for physical phenomena, all hypotheses framed to explain them have resolved them into motion.”

And then the learned gentleman states a purely occult tenet:

“The term perpetual motion, which I have not infrequently used in these pages, is itself equivocal. If the doctrines here advanced be well founded, all motion is, in one sense, perpetual. In masses, whose motion is stopped by mutual concussion, heat or motion of the particles is generated; and thus the motion continues, so that if we could venture to extend such thoughts to the universe, we should assume the same amount of motion affecting the same amount of matter for ever.” ⁵¹⁴

Thus, supposing attraction or gravitation should be given up in favour of the Sun being a huge magnet—which is a theory already accepted by some physicists—a magnet that acts on the planets as attraction is now supposed to do, whereto, or how much farther would it lead the astronomers from where they are now? Not an inch farther. Kepler came to this “curious hypothesis” nearly 300 years ago. He had not discovered the theory of attraction and repulsion in Kosmos, for it was known from the days of Empedocles, the two opposite forces being called by him “hate” and “love”—which comes to the same thing. But Kepler gave a pretty fair description of cosmic magnetism. That such magnetism exists in nature, is as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate, in the way in which it is taught by Science, which never took into consideration the different modes in which the dual Force—that Occultism calls attraction and repulsion—may act within our solar system, the earth’s atmosphere, and beyond in the Kosmos.⁵¹⁵ This was proven by Newton himself; for there are many phenomena in our

 

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498 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Solar system, which he confessed his inability to explain by the law of gravitation. “Such were the uniformity in the directions of planetary movements, the nearly circular forms of the orbits, and their remarkable conformity to one plane” (Prof. Winchell). And if there is one single exception, then the law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as an universal law. “These adjustments,” we are told, “Newton, in his general Scholium, pronounces to be ‘the work of an intelligent and all-powerful Being.’” Intelligent that “Being” may be; as to “all-powerful” there would be every reason to doubt the claim. A poor “God” he, who would work upon minor details and leave the most important to secondary forces! The poverty of the argument and logic in this case, is surpassed only by that of Laplace, who, seeking very correctly to substitute motion for Newton’s “all-powerful Being,” and ignorant of the true nature of that eternal motion, saw in it a blind physical law. “Might not those arrangements be an effect of the laws of motion?” he asks, forgetting, as all our modern Scientists do, that this law and this motion are a vicious circle, so long as the nature of both remains unexplained. His famous answer to Napoleon: “Dieu est devenu une hypothèse inutile,” would be correctly stated only by one who adhered to the philosophy of the Vedantins. It becomes a pure fallacy, if we exclude the interference of operating, intelligent, powerful (never “all-powerful”) Beings, who are called “gods.”

But we would ask the critics of the mediæval astronomers why should Kepler be denounced as most unscientific, for offering just the same solution as Newton did—only showing himself more sincere, more consistent and even more logical. Where may be the difference between Newton’s “all-powerful Being” and Kepler’s Rectores, his sidereal and Cosmic Forces, or Angels? Kepler is again criticised for his “curious hypothesis which made use of a vortical movement within the solar system”; for his theories in general, for his favouring Empedocles’ idea of attraction and repulsion, and “Solar magnetism” in particular. Yet several modern men of Science, as will be shown—Hunt (if Metcalfe is to be excluded), Dr. Richardson, etc.—favour the idea very seriously. He is half excused, however, on the plea that “to the time of Kepler no interaction between masses of matter had been distinctly recognized which was generically different from magnetism” (World-Life). Is it distinctly recognised now? Does Prof. Winchell claim for Science any serious knowledge whatever of the natures of either electricity or magnetism—except that both seem to be the effects of some result arising from an undetermined cause.

The ideas of Kepler, weeded from their theological tendencies, are purely occult. He saw that:

499 CHRONIC NEGATION.

(I.) The Sun is a great Magnet.⁵¹⁶ This is what some eminent modern scientists and also the Occultists believe in.

(II.) The Solar substance is immaterial.⁵¹⁷ (See “Isis Unveiled,” Vol. I. pp. 270 to 271.)

(III.) He provided, for the constant motion and restoration of the Sun’s energy and planetary motion, the perpetual care of a spirit, or spirits. The whole of Antiquity believed in this idea. The Occultists do not use the word Spirit, but say Creative Forces, which they endow with intelligence. But we may call them spirits also.

This theory is tabooed a great deal more on account of the “Spirit” that is given room in it, than of anything else. Herschel, the elder, believed in it likewise, and so do several modern scientists also. Nevertheless Professor Winchell declares that “a hypothesis more fanciful, and less in accord with the requirements of physical principles, has not been offered in ancient or modern times.” (World-Life, p. 554. )

The same was said, once upon a time, of the universal Ether, and now it is not only accepted perforce but advocated as the only possible theory to explain away certain mysteries.

Grove’s ideas, when he first enunciated them in London about 1840, were called as unscientific as the above; nevertheless, his views on the correlation of forces are now universally accepted. It would, very likely, require one more conversant with science than is the writer, to combat with any success some of the now prevailing ideas about gravitation and other similar “solutions” of Cosmic Mysteries. But, let us recall a few objections that came from recognized men of Science; from astronomers and physicists of eminence, who rejected the theory of rotation, as well as that of gravitation. Thus one reads in the French Encyclopædia that “Science agrees, in the face of all its representatives, that it is impossible to explain the physical origin of the rotatory motion of the solar system.”

If the question is asked, “what causes rotation?” we are answered: “It is the centrifugal Force.” “And this force, what is it that produces it?” “The force of rotation,” is the grave answer. (Godefroy, Cosmogonie de la Révélation.⁵¹⁸) It will be well, perhaps, to examine both these theories as being directly or indirectly connected.

 

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500‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ V. THE THEORIES OF ROTATION IN SCIENCE.

Considering that “final cause is pronounced a chimera, and the first Great Cause is remanded to the Sphere of the Unknown,” as a reverend gentleman justly complains, the number of hypotheses put forward, a nebula in itself, is most remarkable. The profane student is perplexed, and does not know in which of the theories of exact science he has to believe. Here we have hypotheses enough for every taste and power of brain. They are all extracted from a number of scientific volumes.

Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.

Rotation has originated either—

(a) By the collision of nebular masses wandering aimlessly in space; or by attraction, “in cases where no actual impact takes place.”

(b) “By the tangential action of currents of nebulous matter (in the case of an amorphous nebula) descending from higher to lower levels,⁵¹⁹ or simply by the action of the central gravity of the mass.” ⁵²⁰

“It is a fundamental principle in physics that no rotation could be generated in such a mass by the action of its own parts. As well attempt to change the course of a steamer by pulling at the deck railing,” remarks to this Prof. Winchell in “World-Life.”

Hypotheses of the Origin of the Seven Planets and Comets.

(a) We owe the birth of the Planets (1) to an explosion of the Sun—a parturition of its central mass;⁵²¹ or (2) to some kind of disruption of the nebular rings.

(b) “The Comets are strangers to our planetary system” (La Place). “The Comets are undeniably generated in our Solar system” (Faye).

(c) The “fixed stars are motionless” says one authority. . . . “All the stars are actually in motion” answers another authority. . . “Undoubtedly every star is in motion” (Wolf).

(d) “For over 350,000,000 years, the slow and majestic movement of the Sun around its axis has never for a moment ceased” (Panorama des Mondes, Le Couturier.)

 

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501 CONTRADICTORY HYPOTHESES.

(e) And “the sun having Alcyone in the Pleiades for the centre of its orbit, consumes 180,000,000 of years in completing its revolution” (Maedler). And also,

(f) That, “the Sun has existed no more than 15,000,000 of years, and will emit heat for no longer than 10,000,000 years more” (Sir W. Thomson’s lecture on “the latent dynamical theory regarding the probable origin, total amount of heat, and duration of the Sun,” 1887).

A few years ago this eminent Scientist was telling the world that the time required for the earth to cool from incipient incrustation to its present state, could not exceed 80,000,000 years;⁵²² (Thomson and Tait, Natural Philosophy.) If the encrusted age of the world is only 40 millions, or the half of the duration once allowed, and the Sun’s age only 15 millions, have we to understand that the earth was at one time independent of the Sun?

Since the ages of the Sun, planets, and the Earth, as stated in the many scientific hypotheses of the astronomers and physicists, are given elsewhere (infra), we have said enough to show the disagreement between the ministers of modern Science. Whether we accept the fifteen million years of Sir W. Thomson or the thousand millions of Mr. Huxley, for the rotational evolution of our solar system, it will always come to this; by accepting self-generated rotation for the heavenly bodies composed of inert matter and yet moved by their own internal motion, for millions of years, this teaching of Science amounts to—

(a) An evident denial of that fundamental physical law, which states that “a body in motion tends constantly to inertia, (i.e., to continue in the same state of motion or rest), unless it is stimulated into further action by a superior active force.”

(b) To an original impulse, which culminates in an unalterable motion, within a resisting ether that Newton had declared incompatible with that motion.

(c) Universal gravity, which, we are taught, always tends to a centre in rectilinear descent—alone the cause of the revolution of the whole solar system, which is performing an eternal double gyration, each body around its axis and orbit. Another occasional version is:

(d) A magnet in the Sun; or, the said revolution due to a magnetic force, which acts, just as gravitation does, in a straight line—varying inversely as the square of the distance. (Coulomb’s Law.)

(e) The whole acting under invariable and changeless laws, which are, nevertheless, often shown variable, as during some well-known freaks

 

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502 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of planets and other bodies, as also when the Comets approach to or recede from the Sun.

(f) A Motor Force always proportionate to the mass it is acting upon; but independent of the specific nature of that mass, to which it is proportionate; which amounts to saying, as Le Couturier does, that, “without that Force independent from and of quite another nature than the said mass, the latter, were it as huge as Saturn, or as tiny as Ceres, would always fall with the same rapidity” (Musée des Sciences, 15 August, 1857). A mass, furthermore, which derives its weight from the body on which it weighs.

Thus neither Laplace’s perceptions of a solar atmospheric fluid, which would extend beyond the orbits of the planets, nor Le Couturier’s electricity, nor Foucault’s heat (Panorama des Mondes, p. 55), nor this, nor the other, can ever help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of rotation to escape from this squirrel’s wheel, any more than the theory of gravity itself. This mystery is the Procrustean bed of physical Science. If matter is, as now taught, passive, the simplest movement cannot be said to be an essential property of matter—if the latter is simply an inert mass. How, then, can such a complicated movement, compound and multiple, harmonious and equilibrated, lasting in the eternities for millions and millions of years, be attributed simply to its own inherent Force, unless the latter is an intelligence? A physical will is something new—a conception that the ancients would have never entertained, indeed!⁵²³

“We talk of the weight of the heavenly bodies,” says an astronomer; “but since it is recognised that weight decreases in proportion to the distance from the centre, it becomes evident that, at a certain distance, that weight must be forcibly reduced to Zero? Were there any attraction there would be equilibrium . . . . And since the modern school recognizes neither a beneath nor an above in universal space, it is not clear what should cause the Earth to fall, were there even no gravitation, nor attraction.” (Cosmographie.)

Methinks the Count de Maistre was right in solving the question in his own theological way. He cuts the Gordian knot by saying: “The

 

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503 SCIENTIFIC ABERRATIONS.

planets rotate because they are made to rotate . . . . . and the modern physical system of the universe is a physical impossibility.” (Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, 1821, Tome 2, p. 362-63.) For did not J. Herschel say the same thing when he remarked that there is a will needed to impart a circular motion, and another will to restrain it? (Discours, 165.) This shows and explains how a retarded planet is cunning enough to calculate so well its time as to hit off its arrival at the fixed minute. For, if Science sometimes succeeds with its great ingenuity in explaining some of such stoppages, retrograde motions, angles outside the orbits, etc., etc., by appearances resulting from the inequality of their progress and ours in the course of our mutual and respective orbits, we still know that there are others, and “very real and considerable deviations,” according to J. Herschel, “which cannot be explained except by the mutual and irregular action of those planets and by the perturbing influence of the Sun.”

We understand, however, that there are, besides those little and accidental perturbations, continuous perturbations called “secular”—because of the extreme slowness with which the irregularity increases and affects the relations of the elliptic movement—and that these perturbations can be corrected. From Newton, who found that this world needed repairing very often, down to Reynaud, all say the same. In his Ciel et Terre (p. 28), the latter speaks of—

“. . . . . The orbits described by the planets as being very far from immutable; “on the contrary, subject to a perpetual mutation in their position and form,”—all prove gravitation and the peripatetic laws to be as negligent as they are quick to repair their mistakes. The charge as it stands seems to be that “they (the orbits) are alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates at the same time from right to left around the Sun, the plane itself, in which they are situated, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor. . . .”

To this, De Mirville, who believes in intelligent “workmen” ruling invisibly the solar system—as we do—observes very wittily⁵²⁴ . . . . . “Voilà certes, a voyage which has little in it of mechanical rigour; at the utmost, one could compare it to a steamer, pulled to and fro and tossed on the waves, retarded or accelerated, all and each of which impediments might put off its arrival indefinitely, were there not the intelligences of a pilot and engineers to catch up the time lost, and to repair the damages. . . . .”

The law of gravity, however, seems to be becoming an obsolete law in starry heaven. At any rate those long-haired sidereal radicals, called comets, appear to be very poor respecters of the majesty of that law,

 

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504 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and to beard it quite impudently. Nevertheless, and though presenting in nearly every respect “phenomena not yet fully understood,” comets and meteors are credited by the believers in modern Science with obeying the same laws and consisting of the same matter, “as the Suns, stars and nebulæ,” and even “the earth and its inhabitants.” (Laing’s “Modern Science and Modern Thought.”)

This is what one might call taking things on trust, aye, even to blind faith. But exact Science is not to be questioned, and he who rejects the hypotheses imagined by her students—gravitation, for instance—would be regarded as an ignorant fool for it; yet we are told by the just cited author a queer legend from the scientific annals. “The comet of 1811 had a tail 120 millions of miles in length and 25 millions of miles in diameter at the widest part, while the diameter of the nucleus was about 127,000 miles, more than ten times that of the earth.” He tells us, “in order that bodies of this magnitude, passing near the earth, should not aff its motion or change the length of the year by even a single second, their actual substance must be inconceivably rare. . . .” It must be so indeed, yet:

“. . . . . The extreme tenuity of a comet’s mass is also proved by the phenomenon of the tail, which, as the comet approaches the sun, is thrown out sometimes to a length of 90 millions of miles in a few hours. And what is remarkable, this tail is thrown out against the force of gravity by some repulsive force, probably electrical, so that it always points away from the Sun (!!!) And yet, thin as the matter of comets must be, IT OBEYS THE COMMON LAW OF GRAVITY (!?), and whether the comet revolves in an orbit within that of the outer planets, or shoots off into the abysses of Space, and returns only after hundreds of years, its path is, at each instant, regulated by the same force as that which causes an apple to fall to the ground.” (Ibid, p. 17.)

Science is like Cæsar’s wife, and must not be suspected—this is evident. But it can be respectfully criticised, nevertheless. At all events, it may be reminded that “the apple” is a dangerous fruit. For the second time in the history of mankind, it may become the cause of the FALL—this time, of “exact” Science. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in the Sun’s face can hardly be credited with obeying that law.

In a series of scientific works on Astronomy and the nebular theory, written between 1865 and 1866, the present writer, a poor tyro in Science, has counted in a few hours, no less than thirty-nine contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations for the self-generated, primitive rotatory motion of the heavenly bodies. The writer is no astronomer, no mathematician, no scientist; but was obliged to examine these errors in defence of Occultism, in general, and what is still more

505 THE PARADOXES OF SCIENCE.

important, in order to support the occult teachings concerning astronomy and Cosmology. Occultists were threatened with terrible penalties for questioning scientific truths. But now they feel braver; Science is less secure in its “impregnable” position than they were led to expect, and many of its strongholds are built on very shifting sands.

Thus, even this poor and unscientific examination of it was useful, and it was certainly very instructive. We have learned a good many things, in fact, having studied with particular care especially those astronomical data that would be the most likely to clash with our heterodox and “superstitious” beliefs.

So, for instance, we have found there, concerning gravitation, the axial and orbital motions, that synchronous movement having been once overcome, in the early stage—it was enough to originate a rotatory motion till the end of Manvantara. We have also come to know in all the aforesaid combinations of possibilities with regard to incipient rotation—most complicated in every case,—some of the causes to which it may have been due, as well as some others to which it ought and should have been due, but, in some way or other, was not. Among other things, we were informed that incipient rotation may be provoked with equal ease in a mass in igneous fusion, and in one that is characterised by glacial opacity (“Heaven and Earth”). That gravitation is a law which nothing can overcome, but which, nevertheless, is overcome in and out of season by the most ordinary celestial or terrestrial bodies—the tails of impudent comets, for instance. That we owe the universe to the holy creative Trinity, called Inert Matter, Senseless Force and Blind Chance. Of the real essence and nature of any of these three, Science knows nothing, but this is a trifling detail. Ergo, we are told that, when a mass of cosmic or nebular matter—whose nature is unknown (entirely so), and which may be in a state of fusion (Laplace), or dark and cold (Thomson), for “this intervention of heat is itself a pure hypothesis” (Faye)—decides to exhibit its mechanical energy under the form of rotation, it acts in this wise. It (the mass) either bursts into spontaneous conflagration, or it remains inert, tenebrous, and frigid, both states being equally capable of sending it, without any adequate cause, spinning through space for millions of years. Its movements may be retrograde and they may be direct, about a hundred various reasons being offered for both motions, in about as many hypotheses. Anyhow, joining the maze of stars, whose origin belongs to the same miraculous and spontaneous order—for “the nebular theory does not profess to discover the origin of things, but only a stadium in material history” (Winchell: World-Life)—those millions of suns, planets, and satellites, composed of inert matter, will whirl on in most impressive and majestic symmetry around the firmament, moved

506‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and guided only, their inertia notwithstanding, “by their own internal motion.”

Shall we wonder after this if learned mystics, pious Roman Catholics, and even such learned astronomers as were Chaubard and Godefroy,⁵²⁵ have preferred the Kabala and the ancient systems to the modern dreary and contradictory exposition of the Universe? The Zohar makes a distinction, at any rate, between “the ʾōr yāšar (“the light Forces”), the ʾōr ḥōzēr (“Reflected Lights”), and the simple phenomenal exteriority of their spiritual types.” (See Kabala Denudata, ii, 67.)

The question of “gravity” may now be dismissed, and other hypotheses examined. That physical Science knows nothing of “Forces” is clear. We may close the argument, however, by calling to our help one more man of Science—Professor Jaumes, Member of the Academy of Medicine at Montpellier. Says this learned man, speaking of Forces: “A cause is that which is essentially acting in the genealogy of phenomena, in every production as in every modification. I said that activity (or Force) was invisible. . . . To suppose it corporeal and residing in the properties of matter would be a gratuitous hypothesis. . . To reduce all the causes to God. . . . would amount to embarrassing oneself with a hypothesis hostile to many verities. But to speak of a plurality of forces proceeding from the Deity and possessing inherent powers of their own, is not unreasonable. . . . and I am disposed to admit phenomena produced by intermediate agents called Forces or Secondary Agents. The distinction of Forces is the principle of the division of Sciences; so many real and separate forces, so many mother-Sciences. . . . No: Forces are not suppositions and abstractions, but realities, and the only acting realities whose attributes can be determined with the help of direct observation and induction.” (“Sur la distinction des Forces,” published in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences de Montpellier, Vol. II., fasc. I., 1854.)

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§ VI. THE MASKS OF SCIENCE.

PHYSICS OR METAPHYSICS?

If there is anything on earth like progress, Science will some day have to give up, nolens volens, such monstrous ideas as her physical, self-guiding laws—void of soul and Spirit,—and then turn to the occult teachings.

 

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507 ACADEMICAL MISNOMERS.

It has done so already, however altered are the title-page and revised editions of the Scientific Catechism. It is now over half a century since, in comparing modern with ancient thought, it has been found that, however different our philosophy may appear from that of our ancestors, it is, nevertheless, composed only of additions and subtractions taken from the old philosophy and transmitted drop by drop through the filter of antecedents.

This fact was well known to Faraday, and other eminent men of Science. Atoms, Ether, evolution itself—all comes to modern Science from ancient notions, all is based on the conceptions of the archaic nations. “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations to the elect, which truths have been partially divulged through Greek writers and have descended to us. This does not mean that Occultism has ever had the same views on matter, atoms and ether as found in the exotericism of the classical Greek writers. Yet, if we believe Mr. Tyndall, even Faraday was an Aristotelean, and an Agnostic more than a materialist. In his “Faraday, as a Discoverer” (p. 123) the author shows the great physicist using “old reflections of Aristotle” which are “concisely found in some of his works.” Faraday, Boscovitch, and all others, however, who see, in the atoms and molecules, “centres of force,” and in the corresponding element force, an entity by itself, are far nearer the truth, perchance, than those, who, denouncing them, denounce at the same time the “old corpuscular Pythagorean theory” (one, by the way, which has never passed to posterity as the great philosopher really taught it), on the ground of its “delusion that the conceptual elements of matter can be grasped as separate and real entities.”

The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing as inorganic, or dead matter, in nature. Is anything dead or inorganic capable of transformation or change? Occultism asks. And is there anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?

This fallacy is nowhere better illustrated than in the scientific work of a German savant, Professor Philip Spiller (Der Weltæther als Kosmische Kraft). In this cosmological treatise, the author attempts to prove that “no material constituent of a body, no atom, is in itself originally endowed with force, but that every such atom is absolutely dead,⁵²⁶ and without any power to act at a distance” (p. 4).

 

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508 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

This statement, however, does not prevent Spiller from enunciating an occult doctrine and principle. He asserts the independent substantiality of force, and shows it as an “incorporeal stuff” (unkoerperlicher stoff) or substance. Now substance is not matter in metaphysics, and for argument’s sake it may be granted that it is a wrong expression to use. But this is due to the poverty of European languages, and especially to that of scientific terms. Then this “stuff” is identified and connected by Spiller with the æther. Expressed in occult language it might be said with more correctness that this “force-substance” is the ever-active phenomenal positive æther—prakriti; while the omnipresent all pervading ether is the noumenon of the former, the substratum of all, or Akâsa. Nevertheless, Stallo falls foul of Spiller, as he does of the materialists. He is accused of “utter disregard of the fundamental correlation of force and matter” (of neither of which Science knows anything certain). For this “hypostasized half-concept” is, in the view of all other physicists, not only imponderable, but destitute of cohesive, chemical, thermal, electric, and magnetic forces—of all of which forces—according to occultism—æther is the source and cause.

Therefore Spiller, with all his mistakes, exhibits more intuition than any other modern Scientist, with the exception of Dr. Richardson, perhaps, the theorist on the “nerve force,” or Nervous Ether, also on “Sun Force and Earth Force.”⁵²⁷ For Æther, in Esotericism, is the very quintessence of all possible energy, and it is certainly to this universal agent (composed of many agents) that all the manifestations of energy in the material, psychic and spiritual worlds are due.

What are Electricity and Light, in fact? How can Science know that one is a fluid and the other a “mode of motion”? Why is it not made clear why a difference should be made between them, since both are considered force-correlations. Electricity is a fluid, we are told, immaterial and non-molecular (though Helmholtz thinks otherwise), and the proof of it is that we can bottle it up, accumulate and store it away. Then, it must be simply matter, and no peculiar “fluid.” Nor is it only “a mode of motion,” for motion could hardly be stored in a Leyden jar. As for light, it is a still more extraordinary “mode of motion”; since, “marvellous as it may appear, light (also) can actually be stored up for use,” as demonstrated by Professor Grove nearly half a century ago.

“Take an engraving which has been kept for some days in the dark, expose it to full sunshine—that is, insulate it for 15 minutes; lay it on

 

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509 THE FIXING OF LIGHT.

sensitive paper in a dark place, and at the end of 24 hours it will have left an impression of itself on the sensitive paper, the whites coming out as blacks. . . . There seems to be no limit for the reproduction of engravings, etc., etc. . . . .”

What is it that remains fixed, nailed, so to say, on the paper? It is a Force certainly, that fixed the thing, but what is that thing, the residue of which remains on the paper?

Our learned men will get out of this through some scientific technicality; but what is it that is intercepted, so as to imprison a certain quantity of it on glass, paper, or wood? Is it “Motion” or is it “Force”? Or shall we be told that what remains behind is the effect only of the force or Motion? Then what is this Force? Force or energy is a quality; but every quality must belong to a something, or a somebody. In Physics, Force is defined as “that which changes or tends to change any physical relation between bodies, whether mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, magnetic, etc.” But it is not that “Force” or that “Motion” which remains behind on the paper, when the Force or Motion has ceased to act; and yet something, which our physical senses cannot perceive, has been left there to become a cause in its turn and produce effects. What is it? It is not matter, as defined by Science—i.e., matter in any of its known states. An Alchemist would say it was a spiritual secretion—and would be laughed at. But yet, when the physicist said that Electricity, stored up, was a fluid, or that light fixed on paper is still Sunlight—this is Science.⁵²⁸ In the opinion of an experienced Occultist, one who has verified the whole series of Nidanas, of causes and effects that finally project their last effect on to this our plane of manifestations; one who has traced matter back to its noumenon, the explanation of the physicist is like calling anger, or its effects—the exclamation provoked by it—a secretion or a fluid, and man, the cause of it—its material conductor. But, as Grove prophetically remarked, that day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the “forces” we know of are but the phenomenal manifestations of realities we know nothing about,—but which were known to the ancients and—by them worshipped.

He made one still more suggestive remark, however, which ought to have become the motto of Science, but has not. Sir W. Grove said that “Science should have neither desires nor prejudices. Truth should be her sole aim.”

Meanwhile, in our days, Scientists are more self-opinionated and bigoted than even the clergy. For they minister to, if they do not actually worship,

 

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510 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Force-Matter,” which is their Unknown God. And how unknown it is may be inferred from the many confessions of the most eminent physicists and biologists, with Faraday at their head. Not only, he said, could he never presume to pronounce whether Force was a property or function of Matter, but he actually did not know what was meant by the word matter.

There was a time, he added, when he believed he knew something of matter. But the more he lived, and the more carefully he studied it, the more he became convinced of his utter ignorance of the nature of matter [electricity].⁵²⁹ (See F. C. Bakewell, Electric Science, 1853, p. 99fn.)

The Occultists are often misunderstood because, for lack of better terms, they apply to the essence of Force under certain aspects the descriptive epithet of substance. Now the names for the varieties of “substance” on different planes of perception and being are legion. Eastern Occultism has a special appellation for each kind; but Science—like England, in the recollection of a witty Frenchman, blessed with thirty-six religions and only one fish-sauce—has but one name for all, namely, “Substance.” Moreover, neither the orthodox physicists nor their critics seem to be very certain of their premises, and are as apt to confuse the effects as they do the causes. It is incorrect, for instance, to say, as Stallo does, that “matter can no more be realized or conceived as mere spacial presence than as a concretion of forces,” or that “force is nothing without mass, and mass is nothing without force”—for one is the noumenon and the other the phenomenon. Again; Schelling, when saying that “It is a mere delusion of the phantasy that something, we know not what, remains after we have denuded an object of all the predicates belonging to it”⁵³⁰—could never have applied the remark to the realm of transcendental metaphysics. It is true that pure force is nothing in the world of physics; it is all in the domain of Spirit. Says Stallo: “If we reduce the mass upon which a given force, however small, acts to its limit zero—or, mathematically expressed, until it becomes infinitely small—the consequence is that the velocity of the resulting motion is infinitely great, and that the ‘thing’ . . . is at any given moment neither here nor there, but everywhere—that there is no

 

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511 WHAT IS FORCE?

real presence; it is impossible, therefore, to construct matter by a synthesis of forces” (p. 161).

This may be true in the phenomenal world, inasmuch as the illusive reflection of the one reality of the supersensual world may appear true to the dwarfed conceptions of a materialist. It is absolutely incorrect when the argument is applied to things, in what the Kabalists call the super-mundane spheres. Inertia, so called, “is force” according to Newton (Princ. Def. iii.), and for the student of Esoteric Sciences the greatest of the occult forces. A body may be considered divorced from its relations with other bodies—which, according to physical and mechanical sciences, give rise to its attributes—only conceptually, only on this plane of illusion. In fact, it can never be so detached: death itself being unable to detach it from its relation with the Universal forces, of which the one Force or Life is the synthesis: but simply continues such inter-relation on another plane. But what, if Stallo is right, can Dr. James Croll mean when, in speaking “On the Transformation of Gravity” (Philosophical Magazine, Vol. II., p. 252), he brings forward the views advocated by Faraday, Waterston, and others? For he says very plainly that gravity—

“. . . . . is a force pervading Space external to bodies, and that, on the mutual approach of the bodies, the force is not increased, as is generally supposed, but the bodies merely pass into a place where the force exists with greater intensity. . . . .”

No one will deny that a force (whether gravity, electricity, or any other force) which exists outside of the bodies and in open space—be it ether or vacuum—must be something, and not a pure nothing, when conceived apart from a mass? Otherwise it could hardly exist in one place with a greater and in another with reduced “intensity.” G. A. Hirn declares the same in his Théorie Mécanique de l’Univers. He tries to demonstrate that the atom of the chemists is not an entity of pure convention, or simply an explicative device, but that it exists really, that its volume is unalterable, and that consequently it is not elastic (!!). “Force,” therefore, “is not in the atom; it is in the space which separates the atoms from each other.”

The above-cited views, expressed by two men of Science of great eminence in their respective countries, show that it is not in the least unscientific to speak of the substantiality of the so-called Forces. Subject to some future specific name, this force is substance of some kind, and can be nothing else; and perhaps one day Science will be the first to re-adopt the derided name of phlogiston. Whatever may be the future name given to it, to maintain that force does not reside in the atoms, but only in “space between them,” may be scientific enough; nevertheless it is not true. To the mind of an Occultist it is like saying

512 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

that water does not reside in the drops of which the ocean is composed, but only in the space between those drops!

The objection made that there are two distinct schools of physicists, by one of which “the force is assumed to be an independent substantial entity, which is not a property of matter nor is it essentially related to matter,”⁵³¹ is hardly likely to help the profane to any clearer understanding. It is, on the contrary, still more calculated to throw the question into greater confusion than ever. For Force is, then, neither this nor the other. By viewing it as “an independent substantial entity,” the theory extends the right hand of fellowship to Occultism, while the strange contradictory idea that “it is not related to matter otherwise than by its power to act upon it,”⁵³² leads physical science to the most absurd contradictory hypotheses. Whether “force” or “motion,” (Occultism, seeing no difference between the two, never attempts to separate them) it cannot act for the adherents of the atomo-mechanical theory one way, and for those of the rival school in another way. Nor can the atoms be, in one case, absolutely uniform in size and weight, and in another, vary in their weight (Avogadro’s law). For, in the words of the same able critic,

. . . “While the absolute equality of the primordial units of mass is thus an essential part of the very foundations of the mechanical theory, the whole modern Science of chemistry is based upon a principle directly subversive of it—a principle of which it has recently been said that ‘it holds the same place in chemistry that the law of gravitation does in astronomy.’⁵³³ This principle is known as the law of Avogadro or Ampère.”⁵³⁴

This shows that either modern chemistry or modern physics is entirely wrong in its respective fundamental principles. For if the assumption of atoms of different specific gravities on the basis of the atomic theory in physics is deemed absurd, and chemistry meets, nevertheless, on its opposite basis (in the question of the formation and transformation of chemical compounds) with “unfailing experimental verification,”

 

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513 THEY AGREE TO DISAGREE.

then it becomes apparent that it is the atomo-mechanical theory which is untenable. The explanations of the latter, that “the differences of weight are only differences of density, and differences of density are differences of distance between the particles contained in a given space,” are not really valid, because, before a physicist can argue in his defence that, “as in the atom there is no multiplicity of particles and no void space: hence differences of density or weight are impossible in the case of atoms,” he must first know what an atom is, in reality, and that he cannot know. He must bring it under the observation of at least one of his physical senses—and that he cannot do: for the simple reason that no one has ever seen, smelt, heard, touched or tasted an “atom.” The atom belongs wholly to the domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction—at any rate for physical Science—and has nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The mechanical conception, therefore, becomes a jumble of the most conflicting theories and dilemmas, in the minds of the many Scientists who disagree on this, as on other subjects; the evolution of which the Eastern Occultist, who follows this scientific strife, beholds in the greatest bewilderment.

To conclude on the question of gravity. How can Science presume to know anything certain of it? How can it maintain its position and its hypotheses against those of the Occultists, who see in gravity only sympathy and antipathy, or attraction and repulsion, caused by physical polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes outside of its influence? How can they disagree with the Occultists before they agree among themselves? Indeed one hears of the conservation of energy, and in the same breath of the perfect hardness and inelasticity of the atoms; of the Kinetic theory of gases being identical with “potential energy,” so called; and, at the same time, of the elementary units of mass being absolutely hard and inelastic! An Occultist opens a scientific work and reads as follows:

“Physical atomism derives all the qualitative properties of matter from the forms of atomic motion. The atoms themselves remain as elements utterly devoid of property.” (Wundt, “Die Theorie der Materie,” p. 381.)

And further:

“Chemistry in its ultimate form must be atomic mechanics.” (Nazesmann, “Thermochemie,” p. 150.)

And a moment after he is told that:

“Gases consist of atoms which behave like solid, perfectly elastic spheres.” (Krœnig, Clausius, Maxwell, etc., Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XIX., p. 18.)

Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:

“We are forbidden by the modern theory of the conservation of

514 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

energy to assume inelasticity, or anything short of perfect elasticity of the ultimate molecules whether of ultra mundane or mundane matter.” (!!!) (“Philosophical Magazine,” p. 321, loc. cit.)

But what do the men of true Science say to all this? By the “men of true Science” we mean those who care too much for truth and too little for their personal vanity to dogmatise on anything, as the majority do. There are several among them—perhaps more than dare publish openly their secret conclusions for fear of the cry “Stone him to death!”—men, whose intuitions have made them span the abyss that lies between the terrestrial aspect of matter, and the—to us, on our plane of illusion—subjective, i.e., transcendentally objective substance, and led them to proclaim the existence of the latter. Matter, to the Occultist, it must be remembered, is that totality of existences in the Kosmos, which falls within any of the planes of possible perception. We are but too well aware that the orthodox theories of sound, heat and light, are against the occult doctrines. But, it is not enough for the men of Science, or their defenders, to say that they do not deny dynamic power to light and heat; and urge as a proof the fact that Mr. Crookes’ radiometer has unsettled no views. If they would fathom the ultimate nature of these Forces, they have first to admit their substantial nature, however supersensuous. Neither do the Occultists deny the correctness of the vibratory theory.⁵³⁵ Only they limit its functions to our Earth—declaring its inadequacy on other planes than ours, since “Masters” in the Occult Sciences perceive the causes that produce ethereal vibrations. Were all these only the fictions of the alchemists, or dreams of the Mystics, such men as Paracelsus, Philalethes, Van Helmont, and so many others, would have to be regarded as worse than visionaries: they would become impostors and deliberate mystificators.

The Occultists are taken to task for calling the Cause of light, heat, sound, cohesion, magnetism, etc., etc., a substance.⁵³⁶ Mr. Clerk Maxwell has stated that the pressure of strong sunlight on a square mile is about 3 1/4 lbs. It is, they are told, “the energy of the myriad ether waves”; and when they call it a “substance” impinging on that area, their explanation is proclaimed unscientific.

There is no justification for such an accusation. In no way—as stated

 

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515 THE MYSTIC RAYS.

more than once before now—do the Occultists dispute the explanations of Science, as affording a solution of the immediate objective agencies at work. Science only errs in believing that, because it has detected in vibratory waves the proximate cause of these phenomena, it has, therefore, revealed all that lies beyond the threshold of Sense. It merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. And the latter maintains that those etheric tremors, are not, as asserted by Science, set up by the vibrations of the molecules of known bodies—the matter of our terrestrial objective consciousness,—but that we must seek for the ultimate causes of light, heat, etc., etc., in MATTER existing in super-sensuous states—states, however, as fully objective to the spiritual eye of man, as a horse or a tree is to the ordinary mortal. Light and heat are the ghost or shadow of matter in motion. Such states can be perceived by the seer or the Adept during the hours of trance, under the Sushumna ray—the first of the Seven Mystic rays of the Sun.⁵³⁷

Thus, we put forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a supersubstantial and supersensible essence of that Akâsa (not ether, which is only an aspect of the latter), the nature of which cannot be inferred from its remoter manifestations—its merely phenomenal phalanx of effects—on this terrene plane. Science, on the contrary, informs us that heat can never be regarded as matter in any conceivable state.⁵³⁸ We are also told that the two great obstacles to the fluid (?) theory of heat undoubtedly are:

 

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516 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(1.) The production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motions.

(2.) The conversion of heat into mechanical motion.

The answer given is: There are fluids of various kinds. Electricity is called a fluid, and so was heat quite recently, but it was on the supposition that heat was some imponderable substance. This was during the supreme and autocratic reign of matter. When the latter was dethroned, and motion was proclaimed the sole sovereign ruler of the Universe, heat became “a mode of motion.” We need not despair: it may become something else to-morrow. Like the Universe itself, Science is ever becoming, and can never say, “I am that I am.” On the other hand, Occult Science has its changeless traditions from pre-historic times. It may err in particulars; it can never become guilty of a mistake in questions of Universal laws, simply because that Science, justly referred to by philosophy as the “divine,” was born on higher planes, and was brought on Earth by beings who were wiser than man will be, even in the seventh Race of his Seventh Round. And that Science maintains that Forces are not what modern learning would have them; e.g., Magnetism is not a “mode of motion”; and, in this particular case, at least, exact “modern Science” is sure to come to grief some day. Nothing, at the first blush, can appear more ridiculous, more outrageously absurd than to say, for instance: “the Hindu initiated Yogi knows really ten times more than the greatest European physicist of the ultimate nature and constitution of light—both solar and lunar.” Yet why is the Sushumna ray believed to be that ray which furnishes the moon with its borrowed light? Why is it “the ray cherished by the initiated Yogi?” Why is the moon held as the deity of the mind, by those Yogis? We say, because light, or rather all its occult properties, every combination and correlation of it with other forces, mental, psychic, and spiritual, were perfectly known to the old adepts.

Therefore, although, in its knowledge of the ultimate constitution of matter, or in the so-called ultimate analysis as opposed to the proximate in chemistry, occult science may be less well-informed as to the behaviour of compound elements in various cases of physical correlations: still, it is immeasurably higher in its knowledge of the ultimate occult states of matter, and of the true nature of matter, than all the physicists and chemists of our modern day put together.

Now, if we state the truth openly and in full sincerity, namely, that the ancient Initiates had a far wider knowledge of physics—as a Science of Nature—than our Academies of Science, all taken together, possess, the statement will be characterized as an impertinence and an absurdity; for physical sciences are considered to have been carried in our age to the apex of perfection. Hence, the twitting query—“Can

517 THE CAUSES AND THE EFFECTS.

the Occultists meet successfully the two points, namely (a) the production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motions; and (b) the conversion of heat into mechanical force, if they hold to the old ‘exploded’ theory of heat being a substance or a fluid?”

To answer the question, it must first be observed that the Occult Sciences do not regard either electricity or any of the forces supposed to be generated by it, as matter, in any of the states known to physical Science; to put it more clearly, none of these “forces,” so-called, are either solids, gases, or fluids. If it did not look pedantic, an Occultist would even object to electricity being called a fluid—as it is an effect and not a cause. But its noumenon, he would say, is a conscious cause. The same in the cases of “Force” and the “Atom.” Let us see what an eminent Academician, Butlerof, the chemist, had to say about these two abstractions.

———

“What is Force?” argues this great man of Science, “what is it from a strictly scientific stand-point, and as warranted by the law of conservation of energy? Conceptions of Force are resumed by our conceptions of this, that, or another mode of motion.” Force is thus simply the passage of one state of motion into another state of the same: of electricity, into heat and light, of heat into sound or some mechanical function, and so on.⁵³⁹ The first time electric fluid was produced by man on earth it must have been by friction; hence, as well-known, it is heat that produces it by disturbing its laya state,⁵⁴⁰ and electricity exists no more on earth per se than heat or light, or any other force. They are all correlations, as science says. “When a given quantity of heat, assisted by a steam engine, is transformed into mechanical work, we speak of steam power (or force). When a falling body strikes an obstacle in its way, thereby generating heat and sound—we call it the power of collision. When electricity decomposes water or heats a platinum wire, we speak of the force of the electric fluid. When the rays of the sun are intercepted by the thermometer bulb and its quicksilver expands, we speak of the calorific energy of the sun. In short, when one state of a determined quantity of motion ceases, another state of motion equivalent to the preceding takes its place, and the result of such a transformation or correlation is—force. In all cases where such a transformation, or the passage of one state of motion into another, is entirely absent, there no force is possible. Let us admit for a moment an absolutely homogeneous state of the Universe, and our conception of force falls down to nought.”

 

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518 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“Therefore it becomes evident that the force, which materialism considers as the cause of the diversity that surrounds us, is in sober reality only an effect, a result of that diversity. From such point of view force is not the cause of motion, but a result, while the cause of that force, or forces, is not the substance or matter, but motion itself. Matter thus must be laid aside, and with it the basic principle of materialism, which has become unnecessary, as force brought down to a state of motion can give no idea of the substance. If force is the result of motion, then it becomes incomprehensible why that motion should become witness to matter and not to Spirit or a Spiritual essence. True, our reason cannot conceive of a motion minus something moving (and our reason is right); but the nature or esse of that something moving remains to Science entirely unknown; and the Spiritualist, in such case, has as much right to attribute it to a “Spirit,” as a Materialist to creative and all-potential matter. A Materialist has no special privileges in this instance, nor can he claim any. The law of the conservation of energy, as thus seen, is shown to be illegitimate in its pretensions and claims in this case. The “great dogma”—no force without matter and no matter without force—falls to the ground, and loses entirely the solemn significance with which materialism has tried to invest it. The conception of force still gives no idea of matter and compels us in no way to see in it “the origin of all origins.” (“Scientific Letters,” Professor Butlerof.)

We are assured that real science is not materialistic; and our own conviction tells us that it cannot be so, when its learning is real. There is a good reason for it, well defined by some physicists and chemists themselves. Natural sciences cannot go hand in hand with materialism. To be at the height of their calling, men of science have to reject the very possibility of materialistic doctrines having aught to do with the atomic theory; and we find that Lange, Butlerof, Du Bois Reymond,—the latter probably unconsciously—and several others, have proved it. And it is, furthermore, demonstrated by the fact, that Kanada in India, and Leucippus, Democritus, and after them Epicurus—the earliest atomists in Europe—while propagating their doctrine of definite proportions, believed in Gods or supersensuous entities, at the same time. Their ideas upon matter thus differed from those now prevalent. We must be allowed to make our statement clearer in a short synopsis of the ancient and modern views of philosophy upon atoms, and thus prove that the atomic theory kills Materialism.

From the standpoint of Materialism, which reduces the beginnings of all to matter, the Universe consists, in its fullness, of atoms and vacuity. Even leaving aside the axiom—now absolutely demonstrated by telescope and microscope—taught by the ancients, that nature abhors

519 THE VICIOUS CIRCLE.

vacuum, what is an atom? “It is, we are answered by Science,” writes Professor Butlerof, “the limited division of substance, the indivisible particle of matter. To admit the divisibility of the atom, amounts to an admission of an infinite divisibility of substance, which is equivalent to reducing substance to nihil, a nothingness. Owing to a feeling of self-preservation alone, materialism cannot admit infinite divisibility; otherwise, it would have to bid farewell for ever to its basic principle and thus sign its own death-warrant.” Büchner, for instance, like a true dogmatist in materialism, declares that “to accept infinite divisibility is absurd, and amounts to doubting the very existence of matter.” The Atom is indivisible then, saith Materialism? Very well.

“See now what a curious contradiction this fundamental principle of the materialists is leading them into,” writes Butlerof. “The atom is indivisible, and at the same time we know it to be elastic. An attempt to deprive it of elasticity is unthinkable; it would amount to an absurdity. Absolutely non-elastic atoms could never exhibit a single one of those numerous phenomena that are attributed to their correlations. Without any elasticity, the atoms could not manifest their energy, and the substance of the materialists would remain weeded of every force. Therefore, if the Universe is composed of atoms, then those atoms must be elastic. It is here that we meet with an insuperable obstacle. For, what are the conditions requisite for the manifestation of elasticity? An elastic ball, when striking against an obstacle, is flattened and contracts, which it would be impossible for it to do, were not that ball to consist of particles, the relative position of which experiences at the time of the blow a temporary change. This may be said of elasticity in general; no elasticity is possible without change with respect to the position of the compound particles of an elastic body. This means that the elastic body is changeful and consists of particles, or, in other words, that elasticity can pertain only to those bodies that are divisible. And the atom is elastic.”

This is sufficient to show how absurd are the simultaneous admissions of the non-divisibility and elasticity of the atom. The atom is elastic, ergo, the atom is divisible, and must consist of particles, or of sub-atoms. And these sub-atoms? They are either non-elastic, and in such case they represent no dynamic importance, or, they are elastic also; and in that case, they, too, are subject to divisibility. And thus ad infinitum. But infinite divisibility of atoms resolves matter into simple centres of force, i.e., precludes the possibility of conceiving matter as an objective substance.

This vicious circle is fatal to materialism. It finds itself caught in its own nets, and no issue is possible for it out of the dilemma. If it says that the atom is indivisible, then it will have mechanics asking it the awkward question: “How does the Universe move in this case, and how do its forces correlate? A world built on absolutely non-elastic atoms, is like an engine without steam, it is doomed to eternal inertia.”⁵⁴¹

 

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520 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Accept the explanations and teachings of Occultism, and, the blind inertia of physical Science being replaced by the intelligent active Powers behind the veil of matter, motion and inertia become subservient to those Powers. It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter, and the infinite divisibility of the atom, that the whole science of Occultism is built. It opens limitless horizons to substance informed by the divine breath of its soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamt of by the most spiritually disposed chemists and physicists.

The above views were enunciated by an Academician, the greatest chemist in Russia, and a recognised authority even in Europe—the late Professor Butlerof. True, he was defending the phenomena of the Spiritualists, the materializations, so called, in which he believed as Professors Zöllner, and Hare did, as Mr. A. Russell Wallace, Mr. W. Crookes, and many another Fellow of the Royal Society, do still, whether openly or secretly. But his argument with regard to the nature of the essence that acts behind the physical phenomena of light, heat, electricity, etc., is no less scientific and authoritative for all that, and apply admirably to the case in hand. Science has no right to deny to the Occultists their claim to a more profound knowledge of the so-called Forces; which, they say, are only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet supersensuous, and beyond any kind of matter with which they (the Scientists) have hitherto become acquainted. The most science can do is to assume the attitude of agnosticism and to maintain it. Then it can say: “Your case is no more proven than is ours; but we confess to knowing nothing in reality either about Force or matter, or that which lies at the bottom of the so-called correlations of Forces. Therefore, time alone can prove who is right and who is wrong. Let us wait patiently, and meanwhile show courtesy instead of scoffing at each other.”

But to do this requires a boundless love of truth and the surrender of that prestige—however false—of infallibility, which the men of Science have acquired among the ignorant and flippant, though cultured, masses of the profane. To blend the two sciences, the archaic and the modern, requires first of all the abandonment of the actual materialistic lines. It necessitates a kind of religious mysticism and even the study of old magic, which our Academicians will never take up. The necessity is easily explained. Just as in old alchemical works the real meaning of the substances and elements meant are concealed under the most ridiculous metaphors, so are the physical, psychic, and spiritual natures of the Elements (say of fire) concealed in the Vedas, and especially in the Purânas, under allegories comprehensible only to the Initiates. Had they no meaning, then indeed all those long legends and allegories about the sacredness of the three types of fire, and the forty-nine original fires—

521 CHEMICAL GODS.

personified by the Sons of Daksha’s daughters and the Rishis, their husbands, “who with the first son of Brahmâ and his three descendants constitute the forty-nine fires”—would be idiotic verbiage and no more. But it is not so. Every fire has a distinct function and meaning in the worlds of the physical and the spiritual. It has, moreover, in its essential nature a corresponding relation to one of the human psychic faculties, besides its well determined chemical and physical potencies when coming in contact with the terrestrially differentiated matter. Science has no speculations to offer upon fire per se; Occultism and ancient religious science have. This is shown even in the meagre and purposely veiled phraseology of the Purânas, where (as in the Vâyu Purâna) many of the qualities of the personified fires are explained. Thus, Pavaka is electric, or Vaidyuta, fire; Pavamâna, the fire produced by friction, (or Nirmathya); and Suchi is solar (or Saura) fire⁵⁴²—all these three being the sons of Abhimânin, the Agni (fire), eldest son of Brahmâ and of Swâha. Pavaka, moreover, is made parent to Kavyavâhana, the fire of the Pitris: Suchi to Havyavâhana—the fire of the gods; and Pavamâna, to Saharaksha, the fire of the Asuras. Now all this shows that the writers of the Purânas were perfectly conversant with the “Forces” of Science and their correlations; moreover, with the various qualities of the latter in their bearing upon those psychic and physical phenomena which receive no credit and are unknown to physical science now. Very naturally, when an Orientalist,—especially one with materialistic tendencies—reads that these are only appellations of fire employed in the invocations and rituals, he calls this “Tantrika superstition and mystification”; and he becomes more careful to avoid errors in spelling, than to give attention to the secret meaning attached to the personifications, or to seek their explanation in the physical correlations of forces, so far as known. So little credit, indeed, is given to the ancient Aryans for knowledge, that even such glaring passages as in Book I. chap. ii, Vishnu Purâna, are left without any notice. Nevertheless, what can this sentence mean?—“Then Ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and other qualities, existed as distinguishable according to their properties, . . . . but possessing many and various energies and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. . . . Having combined . . . they assumed through mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and directed by Spirit . . .” etc. This means, of course, that the writers were perfectly acquainted with correlation and were well posted about the origin of Kosmos from the “indiscrete Principle”—Avyaktânugrahena, as applied

 

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522 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

to Parabrahmam and Mulaprakriti conjointly, and not to “Avyakta, either First Cause, or matter,” as Wilson gives it. The old Initiates knew of no “miraculous creation,” but taught the evolution of atoms (on our physical plane), and their first differentiation from laya into the protyle, as Mr. Crookes has suggestively named matter, or primordial substance beyond the zero-line: there where we place Mulaprakriti, the “root-Principle” of the world stuff and of all in the world.

This can be easily demonstrated. Take, for instance, the newly-published catechism of the Visishtadwaita Vedantins, an orthodox and exoteric system, yet fully enunciated and taught in the XIth century (its founder, Ramanujâcharya, being born in a.d. 1017), at a time when European “Science” still believed in the squareness and flatness of the Earth, of Cosmas-Indicopleustes of the VIth century. It teaches that before evolution began, Prakriti (Nature) was in a condition of laya or absolute homogeneity, as “matter exists in two conditions, the sukshma, or latent and undifferentiated, and the sthula or differentiated condition.” Then it became anu, atomic. It teaches of Sudda-satwa—“a substance not subject to the qualities of matter, from which it is quite different,” and adds that out of that substance the bodies of the inhabitants of Vaikuntaloka (the heaven of Vishnu), the gods, are formed. That every particle or atom of Prakriti contains Jiva (divine life), and is the sarira (body) of that Jiva which it contains, while every Jiva is in its turn the sarira of the supreme spirit, as “Parabrahm pervades every Jiva, as well as every particle of matter.” Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Visishtadwaita, when compared with that of the Adwaita—the non-dualists,—it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogony accepted by either Christianity, or its great opponent, modern Science. The followers of one of the greatest minds that ever appeared on Earth, the Adwaita Vedantins are called Atheists, because they regard all save Parabrahm, the secondless, or Absolute Reality—as an illusion. Yet the wisest Initiates came from their ranks, as also the greatest Yogis. The Upanishads show that they most assuredly knew not only what is the causal substance in the effects of friction, and that their forefathers were acquainted with the conversion of heat into mechanical force, but that they were acquainted with the noumena of every spiritual as well as of every cosmic phenomenon.

Truly the young Brahmin who graduates in the universities and colleges of India with the highest honours; who starts in life as an M.A. and an LL.B., with a tail initialed from Alpha to Omega after his name, and a contempt for his national gods proportioned to the honours received in his education in physical sciences; truly he has but to read in the light of the latter, and with an eye to the correlation of

523 SUGGESTIVE ALLEGORIES.‌

physical Forces, certain passages in his Purânas, if he would learn how much more his ancestors knew than he will ever know—unless he becomes an occultist. Let him turn to the allegory of Purûravas and the celestial Gandharva,⁵⁴³ who furnished the former with a vessel full of heavenly fire. The primeval mode of obtaining fire by friction has its scientific explanation in the Vedas, and is pregnant with meaning for him who reads between the lines. The Tretagni (sacred triad of fires) obtained by the attrition of sticks made of the wood of the Aswattha tree (the Bo-tree, of Wisdom and Knowledge)—sticks “as many finger-breaths long as there are syllables in the gayâtri” must have a secret meaning, or else the writers of the Vedas and Purânas were no sacred writers but mystificators. That it has such a meaning, the Hindu Occultists are a proof, and they alone are able to enlighten Science, as to why and how, “the fire, that was primevally one, was made threefold (treta) in our present Manvantara, by the Son of Ila (Vâch), the primeval woman after the Deluge, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu. The allegory is suggestive, in whatever Purâna it may be read and studied.

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§ VII. AN ATTACK ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF FORCE BY A MAN OF SCIENCE.

The wise words of several (English) men of Science have now to be quoted in our favour. Ostracised for “principle’s sake” by the few, they are tacitly approved of by the many. That one of them preaches almost Occult doctrines, in some things identical with, and often amounting to a public recognition of our “Fohat and his seven Sons”—

 

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524 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Occult Gandharva of the Vedas—will be recognised by every Occultist, and even by some profane readers.

If the latter open Volume V. of the Popular Science Review (pp. 329-334), they will find in it an article on “Sun Force and Earth Force,” by Dr. B.

W. Richardson, F.R.S., which reads as follows:

“At this moment, when the theory of mere motion as the origin of all varieties of force is again becoming the prevailing thought, it were almost heresy to re-open a debate, which for a period appears, by general consent, to be virtually closed; but I accept the risk, and shall state, therefore, what were the precise views of the immortal heretic, whose name I have whispered to the readers, (Samuel Metcalfe), respecting Sun Force. Starting with the argument on which nearly all physicists are agreed, that there exist in nature two agencies—matter which is ponderable, visible, and tangible, and a something which is imponderable, invisible, and appreciable only by its influence on matter—Metcalfe maintains that the imponderable and active agency which he calls ‘caloric’ is not a mere form of motion, not a vibration amongst the particles of ponderable matter, but itself a material substance flowing from the Sun through Space,⁵⁴⁴ filling the voids between the particles of solid bodies, and conveying by sensation the property called heat. The nature of caloric, or Sun-Force, is contended for by him on the following grounds:

“(i.) That it may be added to, and abstracted from other bodies and measured with mathematical precision.

“(ii.) That it augments the volume of bodies, which are again reduced in size by its abstraction.

“(iii.) That it modifies the forms, properties, and conditions of all other bodies.

“(iv.) That it passes by radiation through the most perfect vacuum⁵⁴⁵ that can be formed, in which it produces the same effects on the thermometer as in the atmosphere.

“(v.) That it exerts mechanical and chemical forces which nothing can restrain, as in volcanoes, the explosion of gunpowder, and other fulminating compounds.

“(vi.) That it operates in a sensible manner on the nervous system, producing intense pain; and when in excess, disorganization of the tissues.

“As against the vibratory theory, Metcalfe further argues that if caloric were a mere property or quality, it could not augment the volume of other bodies; for this purpose it must itself have volume, it must occupy space, and it must, therefore, be a material agent. If caloric were only the effect of vibratory motion amongst the particles of ponderable matter, it could not radiate from hot bodies without the simultaneous transition of the vibrating particles; but the fact stands out that heat can radiate from material ponderable substance without

 

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525 DR. RICHARDSON’S HERESY.

loss of weight of such substance. . . . With this view as to the material nature of caloric or sun-force; with the impression firmly fixed on his mind that ‘everything in Nature is composed of two descriptions of matter, the one essentially active and ethereal, the other passive and motionless,’⁵⁴⁶ Metcalfe based the hypothesis that the Sun-force, or caloric, is a Self-active principle. For its own particles, he holds, it has repulsion; for the particles of all ponderable matter it has affinity; it attracts the particles of ponderable matter with forces which vary inversely as the squares of the distance. It thus acts through ponderable matter. If universal space were filled with caloric, sun-force, alone (without ponderable matter), caloric would also be inactive and would constitute a boundless Ocean of powerless or quiescent ether, because it would then have nothing on which to act, while ponderable matter, however inactive of itself, has ‘certain properties by which it modifies and controls the actions of caloric, both of which are governed by immutable laws that have their origin in the mutual relations and specific properties of each.’

“And he lays down a law which he believes is absolute, and which is thus expressed:

“‘By the attraction of caloric for ponderable matter, it unites and holds together all things; by its self-repulsive energy it separates and expands all things.’”

This, of course, is almost the occult explanation of cohesion. Dr. Richardson continues:

“As I have already said, the tendency of modern teaching is to rest upon the hypothesis . . . that heat is motion, or, as it would, perhaps, be better stated, a specific force or form of motion.⁵⁴⁷

“But this hypothesis, popular as it is, is not one that ought to be accepted to the exclusion of the simpler views of the material nature of sun-force, and of its influence in modifying the conditions of matter. We do not yet know sufficient to be dogmatic.” ⁵⁴⁸

. . . “The hypothesis of Metcalfe respecting sun-force and earth-force is not only very simple, but most fascinating. . . . Here are two elements in the Universe, the one is ponderable matter . . . The second element is the all-pervading Ether, solar-fire. It is without weight, substance, form, or colour; it is matter infinitely divisible, and its particles repel each other; its rarity

 

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526 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

is such that we have no word, except ether,⁵⁴⁹ by which to express it. It pervades and fills space, but alone it too is quiescent—dead.⁵⁵⁰ We bring together the two elements, the inert matter, the self-repulsive Ether (?) and thereupon dead (?) ponderable matter is vivified”; [Ponderable matter may be inert but never dead—this is Occult Law.—H.P.B.] . . . “through the particles of the ponderable substance the ether [Ether’s second principle.—H.P.B.] penetrates, and, so penetrating, it combines with the ponderable particles and holds them in mass, holds them together in bond of union; they are dissolved in the Ether.”

“This distribution of solid ponderable matter through ether extends, according to the theory before us, to everything that exists at this moment. The ether is all-pervading. The human body itself is charged with the ether [Say astral light.—H.P.B.]; its minute particles are held together by it; the plant is in the same condition; the most solid earth, rock, adamant, crystal, metal, all are the same. But there are differences in the capacities of different kinds of ponderable matter to receive sun-force, and upon this depends the various changing conditions of matter; the solid, the liquid, the gaseous condition. Solid bodies have attracted caloric in excess over fluid bodies, and hence their firm cohesion; when a portion of molten zinc is poured upon a plate of solid zinc, the molten zinc becomes as solid because there is a rush of caloric from the liquid to the solid, and in the equalization the particles, previously loose or liquid, are more closely brought together. . . . Metcalfe himself, dwelling on the above-named phenomena, and accounting for them by the unity of principle of action, which has already been explained, sums up his argument in very clear terms, in a comment on the densities of various bodies. ‘Hardness and softness’ (he says), ‘solidity and liquidity, are not essential conditions of bodies, but depend on the relative proportions of ethereal and ponderable matter of which they are composed. The most elastic gas may be reduced to the liquid form by the abstraction of caloric, and again converted into a firm solid, the particles of which would cling together with a force proportional to their augmented affinity for caloric. On the other hand, by adding a sufficient quantity of the same principle to the densest metals, their attraction for it is diminished when they are expanded into the gaseous state, and their cohesion is destroyed.’”

Having thus quoted at length the heterodox views of the great “heretic”—views that need only a little alteration of terms here and there, the same eminent scientist—an original and liberal thinker, undeniably—proceeds to sum up those views, and continues:

 

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527 WE DISAGREE.

“I shall not dwell at great length on this unity of sun-force and earth, which this theory implies. But I may add that out of it, or out of the hypothesis of mere motion as force, and of virtue without substance, we may gather, as the nearest possible approach to the truth on this, the most complex and profound of all subjects, the following inferences:

“(a) Space, inter-stellary, inter-planetary, inter-material, inter-organic, is not a vacuum, but is filled with a subtle fluid or gas, which for want of a better term⁵⁵¹ we may still call, as the ancients did, Aith-ur—Solar fire, Æther. This fluid, unchangeable in composition, indestructible, invisible,⁵⁵² pervades everything and all [ponderable.—H. P. B.] matter,⁵⁵³ the pebble in the running brook, the tree overhanging, the man looking on, is charged with the ether in various degree; the pebble less than the tree, the tree less than man. All in the planet is in like manner so charged! A world is built up in ethereal fluid, and moving through a sea of it.

“(b) The Ether, whatever its nature is, is from the sun and from the suns⁵⁵⁴ the suns are the generators of it, the store-houses of it, the diffusers of it.⁵⁵⁵

“(c.) Without the ether there could be no motion; without it particles of ponderable matter could not glide over each other; without it there could be no impulse to excite those particles into action.

“(d.) Ether determines the constitution of bodies. Were there no ether there could be no change of constitution in substance; water, for instance, could only exist as a substance, compact and insoluble beyond any conception we could form of it. It could never even be ice, never flint, never vapour, except for ether.

“(e) Ether connects sun with planet, planet with planet, man with planet, man with man. Without ether there could be no communication in the Universe; no light, no heat, no phenomenon of motion.”

Thus we find that Ether and elastic atoms are, in the alleged mechanical conception of the Universe, the Spirit and Soul of Kosmos, and that the theory—put it any way and under whatever disguise—always leaves a more widely opened issue for men of

 

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528 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Science to speculate beyond the line drawn by modern materialism—or call it agnosticism rather, to be more correct⁵⁵⁶—than the majority avails itself of. Atoms, Ether, or both, modern speculation cannot get out of the circle of ancient thought; and the latter was soaked through with archaic occultism. Undulatory or corpuscular theory—it is all one. It is speculation from the aspects of phenomena, not from the knowledge of the essential nature of the cause and causes. When modern Science has explained to its audience the late achievements of Bunsen and Kirchoff, and shown the seven colours, the “primary” of a ray which is decomposed in a fixed order on a screen; and described the respective lengths of luminous waves, what has it proved? It has justified its reputation for exactness in mathematical achievement by measuring even the length of a luminous wave—“varying from about seven hundred and sixty millionths of a millimètre at the red end of the spectrum to about three hundred and ninety-three millionths of a millimètre at the violet end.” But when the exactness of the calculation with regard to the effect on the light-wave is thus vindicated, Science is forced to admit that the force (which is the supposed cause) is believed to produce “inconceivably minute undulations” in some medium—“generally regarded as identical with the ethereal medium”⁵⁵⁷—and that medium itself is still only—a hypothetical agent!”

Auguste Comte’s pessimism with respect to the impossibility of knowing some day the chemical composition of the sun, has not been belied thirty years later by Kirchoff, as claimed. The spectroscope has helped us to see that the elements, with which the modern chemist is familiar, must in all probability be present in the sun’s outward robes—not in the sun itself; and, taking these “robes,” the solar cosmic veil, for the sun itself, the physicists have declared its luminosity to be due to combustion and fl, and have mistaken the vital principle of that luminary for a purely material thing, and called it “chromosphere.”⁵⁵⁸ We have hypotheses and theories only so far, not law—by any means.

 

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529 MYSTERIOUS SUN FLUID.‌

§ VIII. LIFE, FORCE, OR GRAVITY.

The imponderable fluids have had their day; “mechanical Forces” are less talked about; Science has put on a new face for this last quarter of a century; but gravitation has remained, owing its life to new combinations after the old ones had nearly killed it. It may answer scientific hypotheses very well, but the question is whether it answers as well to truth, and represents a fact in nature. Attraction by itself is not sufficient to explain merely planetary motion; how can it presume to explain the rotatory motion in the infinitudes of Space? Attraction alone will never fill all the gaps, unless a special impulse is admitted for every sidereal body, and the rotation of every planet with its satellites is shown to be due to some one cause combined with attraction. And even then, says an astronomer (“Philosophie Naturelle,” art. 142), Science would have to name that cause.

Occultism has named it for ages, and so have all the ancient philosophers; but then all such beliefs are now proclaimed exploded superstitions. The “extra cosmic” God has killed every possibility of belief in intra cosmic intelligent Forces, yet who, or what is the original pusher in that motion? “When we have learned the cause, unique et speciale, that pushes, we will be ready to combine it with the one which attracts,” says Francœur (“Astronomie,” p. 342). And again—“Attraction between the celestial bodies is only repulsion: it is the Sun that drives them incessantly onward; for otherwise, their motion would stop.”

If ever this theory of the Sun-Force being the primal cause of all life on earth and motion in heaven is accepted, and if that other far bolder one of W. Herschel—about certain organisms in the Sun—is accepted even as a provisional hypothesis, then will our teachings be vindicated, and esoteric allegory shown to have anticipated Modern Science by millions of years, probably, for these are the Archaic teachings. Mârttânda (the Sun) watches and threatens—without abandoning the central position to which his Mother, Aditi, relegated him—his seven brothers, the planets; “he pursues them, turning slowly around himself . . . and follows them from afar, moving in the same direction that they do, on the path that encircles their houses”—or the orbit. (See Comment to Stanza IV., Book I.) It is the Sun-fluids or Emanations that impart all motion and awaken all into life, in the Solar System. It is attraction and repulsion, but not as understood by modern physics and according to the law of gravity; but in harmony with the laws of Manvantaric motion de-

530 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

signed from the early Sandhya, the Dawn of the rebuilding and higher reformation of the System. These laws are immutable; but the motion of all the bodies, which motion is diverse and alters with every minor Kalpa—is regulated by the Movers, the Intelligences within the Cosmic Soul. Are we so very wrong in believing all this? Well, here is a modern and a great man of Science who, speaking of vital electricity, uses language far more akin to Occultism than to modern materialistic thought. We refer the sceptical reader to an article on “The Source of Heat in the Sun,” by Robert Hunt, F.R.S., (in Popular Science Review, Vol. IV. (1865), pp. 148-49), who, speaking of the luminous envelope of the Sun and its “peculiar curdy appearance,” says:

“Arago proposed that this envelope should be called the Photosphere, a name now generally adopted. By the elder Herschel, the surface of this photosphere was compared to mother-of-pearl. . . . . It resembles the Ocean on a tranquil summer-day, when its surface is slightly crisped by a gentle breeze.

. . . Mr. Nasmyth has discovered a more remarkable condition than any that had previously been suspected. . . . objects which are peculiarly lens-shaped . . . . like ‘willow leaves’ . . . . different in size . . . . . not arranged in any order . . . . . crossing each other in all directions . . . . . with an irregular motion among themselves . . . . . . . They are seen approaching to and receding from each other, and sometimes assuming new angular positions, so that the appearance . . . . . has been compared to a dense shoal of fish, which, indeed, they resemble in shape. . . . The size of these objects gives a grand idea of the gigantic scale upon which physical (?) operations are carried out in the Sun. They cannot be less than 1,000 miles in length, and from two to three hundred miles in breadth. The most probable conjecture which has been off respecting those leaf or lens-like objects, is that the photosphere⁵⁵⁹ is an immense ocean of gaseous matter (what kind of “matter?”) . . . in a state of intense (apparent) incandescence, and that they are perspective projections of the sheets of flame. . . .”

Solar “flames” seen through telescopes are reflections, says Occultism. But see what Occultists have to say to this in Book I.

“Whatever they may be (those sheets of flame), it is evident they are the immediate sources of solar heat and light. Here we have a surrounding envelope of photogenic matter,⁵⁶⁰ which pendulates with mighty energies, and by communicating its motion to the ethereal medium in stellar space, produces heat and light in far distant worlds. We have said that those forms have been compared to certain organisms, and J. Herschel says, ‘Though it would be too daring to speak of such organizations as partaking of life [why not?],⁵⁶¹ yet we do not know that vital action is competent to develop heat, light, and electricity.’ . . . Can it be that there is truth in this fine thought? May the pulsing of vital matter

 

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531 SUN-FORCE AND EARTH-FORCE.

in the central Sun of our System be the source of all that life which crowds the earth, and without doubt overspreads the other planets, to which the Sun is the mighty Minister? ” . . .

Occultism answers these queries in the affirmative; and Science will find this to be the case, one day.

Again, on p. 156, Mr. Hunt writes:

“But regarding Life—Vital Force—as a power far more exalted than either light, heat, or electricity, and indeed capable of exerting a controlling power over them all” (this is absolutely occult). . . . . “we are certainly disposed to view with satisfaction that speculation which supposes the photosphere to be the primary seat of vital power, and to regard with a poetic pleasure that hypothesis which refers the Solar energies to Life.”

Thus, we have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas—namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those life currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. For see what another eminent physician says, who calls this (our life-fluid) “nervous Ether.” Change a few sentences in the article, extracts from which now follow, and you have another quasi-Occult treatise on Life Force. This once, it is again Dr.

B. W. Richardson, F.R.S., who gives his views in the “Popular Science Review,” Vol. X., p. 380—3, on “Nervous Ether,” as he has on “Sun-Force” and “Earth-Force”:

“The idea attempted to be conveyed by the theory is, that between the molecules of the matter, solid or fluid, of which the nervous organisms, and, indeed, of which all the organic parts of a body are composed, there exists a refined subtle medium, vaporous or gaseous, which holds the molecules in a condition for motion upon each other, and for arrangement and rearrangement of form; a medium by and through which all motion is conveyed; by and through which the one organ or part of the body is held in communion with the other parts, by which and through which the outer living world communicates with the living man: a medium, which, being present, enables the phenomena of life to be demonstrated, and which, being universally absent, leaves the body actually dead. . . . . .”

And the whole Solar System falls into Pralaya—the author might have added. But let us read further:

. . . “I use the word Ether in its general sense as meaning a very light, vaporous or gaseous matter; I use it, in short, as the astronomer uses it when he speaks of the Ether of Space, by which he means a subtle but material medium.

. . . . When I speak of a nervous Ether, I do not convey that the ether is existent in nervous structure only: I believe truly that it is a special part of the nervous organization; but, as nerves pass into all structures that have capacities for movement and sensibilities, so the nervous ether passes into all such parts; and as the nervous ether is, according to my view, a direct product from blood, so we may look upon it as a part of the atmosphere of the blood.

532 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

. . . The evidence in favour of the existence of an elastic medium pervading the nervous matter and capable of being influenced by simple pressure is all-convincing. . . . In nervous structure there is, unquestionably, a true nervous fluid, as our predecessors taught.⁵⁶² The precise chemical (?)⁵⁶³ composiion of this fluid is not yet well known; the physical characters of it have been little studied. Whether it moves in currents, we do not know; whether it circulates, we do not know; whether it is formed in the centres and passes from them to the nerves, or whether it is formed everywhere where blood enters nerve, we do not know. The exact uses of the fluid we do not consequently know. It occurs to my mind, however, that the veritable fluid of nervous matter is not of itself sufficient to act as the subtle medium that connects the outer with the inner universe of man and animal. I think—and this is the modification I suggest to the older theory—there must be another form of matter present during life; a matter which exists in the condition of vapour or gas, which pervades the whole nervous organism, surrounds as an enveloping atmosphere⁵⁶⁴ each molecule of nervous structure, and is the medium of all motion, communicated to and from the nervous centres. . . . When it is once fairly presented to the mind that during life there is in the animal body a finely diffused form of matter, a vapour filling every part—and even stored in some parts; a matter constantly renewed by the vital chemistry; a matter as easily disposed of as the breath, after it has served its purpose—a new flood of light breaks on the Intelligence.” . . . .

A new flood of light is certainly thrown on the wisdom of ancient and mediæval Occultism and its votaries. For Paracelsus wrote the same thing more than three hundred years ago, namely, in the sixteenth century, as follows:

“The whole of the Microcosm is potentially contained in the Liquor Vitæ, a nerve fluid . . . in which is contained the nature, quality, character, and essence of beings.” . . . (De Generatione Hominis). . . . “The Archæus or Liquor Vitæ is an essence that is equally distributed in all parts of the human body. . . . The Spiritus Vitæ takes it origin from the Spiritus Mundi. Being an emanation of the latter, it contains the elements of all cosmic influences, and is therefore the cause by which the action of the stars (cosmic forces) upon the invisible body of man (his vital lingasharira) may be explained.” (De Viribus Membrorum. See “Life of Paracelsus” by Franz Hartmann, M.D., F.T.S.)

Had Dr. Richardson studied all the secret works of Paracelsus, he would not have been obliged to confess so often—“we do not know” . . . . “it is not known to us” . . . . etc., etc. Nor would he have ever pronounced the following sentence, recanting the best portions of his independent rediscovery, in which he says (p. 384):

 

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533 PANTHEISM OR MONOTHEISM.

“It may be urged that in this line of thought is included no more than the theory of the existence of the ether . . . . supposed to pervade space. . . . . It may be said that this universal ether pervades all the organism of the animal body as from without, and as part of every organization. This view would be Pantheism physically discovered if it were true (!!) It fails to be true because it would destroy the individuality of every individual sense. . . . .”

We fail to see it, and we know it is not so. Pantheism may be “physically rediscovered.” It was known, seen, and felt by the whole of antiquity. Pantheism manifests itself in the vast expanse of the starry heavens, in the breathing of the seas and oceans and the quiver of life of the smallest blade of grass. Philosophy rejects one finite and imperfect God in the universe, as the anthropomorphic deity of the monotheist is represented by his followers. It repudiates in its name of Philo-Theo-Sophia the grotesque idea that Infinite, Absolute Deity should, or rather could, have any, whether direct or indirect, relation to finite illusive evolutions of matter, and therefore cannot imagine a universe outside that Deity, or the latter absent from the smallest speck of animate or inanimate substance.⁵⁶⁵ Why either the Ether of Space, or “nervous Ether” should “destroy the individuality of every sense” seems incomprehensible for one acquainted with the real nature of that “nervous ether” under its Sanskrit, or rather esoteric and Kabalistic name. Dr. Richardson agrees that—

“If we did not individually produce the medium of communication between ourselves and the outer world, if it were produced from without and adapted to one kind of vibration alone, there were fewer senses required than we possess: for, taking two illustrations only—ether of light is not adapted for sound, and yet we hear as well as see; while air, the medium of motion of sound, is not the medium of light, and yet we see and hear.”

This is not so. The opinion that “Pantheism fails to be true because it would destroy the individuality of every individual sense” shows that all the conclusions of the learned doctor are based on the modern physical theories, though he would fain reform them. But he will find it impossible to do this unless he allows the existence of spiritual senses to replace the gradual atrophy of the physical. “We see and hear,” in accordance (of course in Dr. Richardson’s mind) with the explanations of the phenomena of sight and hearing, by that same materialistic

 

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534 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

science which postulates that we cannot see and hear otherwise. The Occultists and mystics know better. The Vedic Aryans were as familiar with the mysteries of sound and colour as our physiologists are on the physical plane, but they had mastered the secrets of both on planes inaccessible to the materialist. They knew of a double set of senses; spiritual and material. In a man who is deprived of one or more senses, the remaining become the more developed: e.g., the blind man will recover his sight through the senses of touch, of hearing, etc., and he who is deaf will be able to hear through sight, by seeing audibly the words uttered by the lips and mouth of the speaker. But these are cases that belong to the world of matter still. The spiritual senses, those that act on a higher plane of consciousness are rejected a priori by physiology because the latter is ignorant of the sacred science. It limits the action of ether to vibrations, and, dividing it from air—though air is simply differentiated and compound ether—makes it assume functions to fit in with the special theories of the physiologist. But there is more real science in the teachings of the Upanishads when these are correctly understood, than the Orientalists, who do not understand them at all, are ready to admit. Mental as well as physical correlations of the seven senses (seven on the physical and seven on the mental planes) are clearly explained and defined in the Vedas, and especially in the Upanishad called Anugîtâ: “The indestructible and the destructible, such is the double manifestation of the Self. Of these the indestructible is the existent (the true essence or nature of Self, the underlying principles). The manifestation as an individual (or entity) is called the destructible.” Thus speaks the Ascetic in Anugîtâ; and also: “Every one who is twice-born (initiated) knows such is the teaching of the ancients. . . . . Space is the first entity. . . . . Now Space (Akâsa, or the noumenon of Ether) has one quality . . . and that is sound only . . . and the qualities of sound are Shadga, Rishabha, Gândhâra, Madhyama, Panchama, and beyond these five Nishâda and Dhaivata”; (the Hindu gamut). These seven notes of the scale are the principles of sound. (Vide ch. xxxvi. of Anugîtâ.) The qualities of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and dogmatize on them from their manifestation (likewise sevenfold in itself) on the material or objective plane above is quite arbitrary. For it is only by the Self emancipating itself from these (seven) causes of illusion that one acquires the knowledge (secret wisdom) of the qualities of objects of sense on their dual plane of manifestation—the visible and the invisible. Thus it is said:

“State this wonderful mystery . . . . . Hear the assignment of causes exhaustively. The nose, and the tongue, and the eye, and the

535 THE SEVEN PHYSICAL SENSES.

skin, and the ear as the fifth (organ of sense) Mind and Understanding,⁵⁶⁶ these seven (senses) should be understood to be the causes of (the knowledge of their) qualities. Smell, and taste, and colour, sound, and touch as the fifth, the object of the mental operation, and the object of the Understanding (the highest spiritual sense or perception), these seven are causes of action. He who smells, he who eats, he who sees, he who speaks, and he who hears as the fifth, he who thinks, and he who understands, these seven should be regarded as the causes of the agents.⁵⁶⁷ These (the agents) being possessed of qualities (sattwa, rajas, tamas), enjoy their own qualities, agreeable and disagreeable” (Anugîtâ).

Then one reads in the Bhagavadgîtâ (chap. vii.) the Deity (or Krishna) saying:

“. . . . Only some know me truly. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space (or Akâsa, Æther), Mind, Understanding and Egoism (or the perception of all the former on the illusive plane). . . This is a lower form of my nature. Know (that there is) another (form of my) nature, and higher than this, which is animate, O you of mighty arms! and by which this Universe is upheld. . . . All this is woven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread (Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, p. 298). . . . I am the taste in the

 

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536 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

water, O son of Kunti! I am the light of the sun and moon. I am . . . sound (‘i.e., the Occult essence which underlies all these and the other qualities of the various things mentioned,’ Transl.), in space . . . the fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the fire . . . etc., etc.”

Truly, then, one should study Occult philosophy before one begins to verify and seek the mysteries of nature on its surface alone, as he alone “who knows the truth about the qualities of nature, who understands the creation of all entities . . . is emancipated” from error. Says the “preceptor”: “Accurately understanding the great tree of which the unperceived (Occult nature, the root of all) is the sprout from the seed (Parabrahmam) which consists of the understanding (Mahat, or the universal intelligent Soul) as its trunk, the branches of which are the great egoism,⁵⁶⁸ in the holes of which are the sprouts, namely, the senses, of which the great (Occult,or invisible) elements are the flower-bunches,⁵⁶⁹ the gross elements (the gross objective matter), the smaller boughs, which are always possessed of leaves, always possessed of flowers . . . . which is eternal and the seed of which is the Brahman (the deity); and cutting it with that excellent sword—knowledge (secret wisdom)—one attains immortality and casts off birth and death.”

This is the Tree of Life, the Asvattha tree, only after the cutting of which the slave of life and death, Man, can be emancipated.

But the men of Science know nought, nor will they hear of the “Sword of Knowledge” used by the adepts and ascetics. Hence the one-sided remarks of the most liberal among them, based on and flowing from undue importance given to the arbitrary divisions and classification of physical science. Occultism heeds them very little, and nature still less. The whole range of physical phenomena proceed from the Primary of Ether—Akâsa, as dual-natured Akâsa proceeds from undifferentiated Chaos, so-called, the latter being the primary aspect of Mulaprakriti, the root-matter and the first abstract Idea one can form of Parabrahmam. Modern Science may divide its hypothetically conceived ether in as many ways as it likes; the real Æther of Space will remain as it is throughout. It has its seven principles, as all the rest of nature has, and where there was no Ether there would be no sound, as it is the vibrating sound-board in nature in all of its seven differentiations. This is the first mystery the Initiates of old have learned. Our present normal physical senses were (from our present point of view) abnormal in those days of slow and progressive downward evolution and fall into matter. And there was a day when all that which in our modern times is regarded as phenomena, so puzzling to the

 

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537 WHAT IS NERVOUS ETHER?

physiologists now compelled to believe in them—such as thought transference, clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.; in short, all that which is called now “wonderful and abnormal”—all that and much more belonged to the senses and faculties common to all humanity. We are, however, cycling back and cycling forward; i.e., having lost in spirituality that which we acquired in physical development until almost the end of the Fourth Race, we (mankind) are as gradually and imperceptibly losing now in the physical all that we regain once more in the spiritual re-evolution. This process must go on until the period which will bring the Sixth Root-Race on a parallel line with the spirituality of the Second, long extinct mankind.

But this will hardly be understood at present. We must return to Dr. Richardson’s hopeful though somewhat incorrect hypothesis about “nervous ether.” Under the misleading translation of the word as “Space” (Akâsa), it has just been shown in the ancient Hindu system as the “first born” of the One, having but one quality, sound (which is septenary). In esoteric language this “One” is the “Father” Deity, and “Sound” is synonymous with Logos (Verbum, or the Son). Whether consciously or otherwise, it must be the latter; and Dr. Richardson, while preaching an Occult doctrine—chooses the lowest form of the septenary nature of that “sound” and speculates upon it, adding:

“The theory, I offer, is that the nervous Ether is an animal product. In different classes of animals it may differ in physical quality so as to be adapted to the special wants of the animal, but essentially it plays one part in all animals, and is produced, in all, in the same way. . . .”

Herein lies the nucleus of error leading to all the resultant mistaken views. This “Nervous Ether” is the lowest principle of the Primordial Essence which is Life. It is animal vitality diffused in all nature and acting according to the conditions it finds for its activity. It is not an “animal product,” but the living animal, the living flower or plant are its products. The animal tissues only absorb it according to their more or less morbid or healthy state—as do physical materials and structures (in their primogenial State—nota bene)—and henceforward, from the moment of the birth of the Entity, are regulated, strengthened, and fed by it. It descends in a larger supply to vegetation in the Sushumna sun-ray which lights and feeds the moon, and it is through her beams that it pours its light upon, and penetrates man and animal, more during their sleep and rest, than when they are in full activity. Therefore Dr. Richardson errs again in stating that:

“The nervous ether is not, according to my idea of it, in itself active, nor an excitant of animal motion in the sense of a force; but it is essential as supplying the conditions by which the motion is rendered possible.” (It is just the reverse.) . . . . “It is the conductor of all vibrations of heat, of light, of sound, of electrical action, of mechanical

538 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

friction.⁵⁷⁰ It holds the nervous system throughout in perfect tension, during states of life (true). By exercise it is disposed of (rather generated) . . . and when demand for it is greater than the supply, its deficiency is indicated by nervous collapse or exhaustion.⁵⁷¹ It accumulates in the nervous centres during sleep, bringing them, if I may so speak, to their due tone, and therewith raising the muscles to awakening and renewed life. . . .”

Just so; this is quite correct, and as comprehensible. Therefore, “The body fully renewed by it, presents capacity for motion, fulness of form, life. The body bereft of it presents inertia, the configuration of shrunken death, the evidence of having lost something physical that was in it when it lived.”

Modern Science denies the existence of a “vital principle.” This extract is a clear proof of its grand mistake. But this “physical something,” that we call life-fluid—the Liquor Vitæ of Paracelsus—has not deserted the body, as Dr. Richardson thinks. It has only changed its state from activity to passivity, and become latent owing to the too morbid state of the tissues, on which it has no more hold. Once the rigor mortis absolute, the “Liquor Vitæ” will re-awaken into action, and begin its work on the atoms chemically. Brahmâ-Vishnu—the creator and the Preserver of Life—will have transformed himself into Siva the Destroyer.

Lastly he writes on p. 387:

“The nervous Ether may be poisoned; it may, I mean, have diffused through it, by simple gaseous diffusion, other gases or vapours derived from without; it may derive from within products of substances swallowed and ingested, or gases of decomposition produced during disease in the body itself.”

And the learned gentleman might have added on the same Occult principle: “That the ‘nervous Ether’ of one person can be poisoned by the ‘nervous Ether’ of another person or his auric emanations. But see what Paracelsus said of ‘Nervous Ether’”:

“The Archæus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repels other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influences a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences. The vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates (within) and around him like a luminous sphere (aura) and it may be made to act at a distance. . . . It may poison the essence of life (blood) and cause diseases, or it may purify it after

 

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539 THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE.

it has been made impure, and restore the health” (Paragranum; “Life of Paracelsus,” by Dr. F. Hartmann.)

That the two, Archæus and “nervous Ether,” are identical, is shown by the English Scientist, who says that the tension of it generally may be too high or too low; that it may be so “owing to local changes in the nervous matter it invests.” . . . “Under sharp excitation it may vibrate as if in a storm and plunge every muscle under cerebral or spinal control into uncontrolled motion—unconscious convulsions.”

This is called nervous excitation, but no one, except Occultists, knows the reason of such nervous perturbation or explains the primary causes of it. The “principle of Life” may kill when too exuberant, as also when there is too little of it. But this principle on the manifested (or our) plane is but the effect and the result of the intelligent action of the “Host”—collectively, Principle—the manifesting Life and Light. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from the ever-invisible, eternal and Absolute One Life in a descending and a re-ascending scale of hierarchic degrees—a true septenary ladder, with Sound (or the Logos) at the upper end and the Vidyadharas⁵⁷² (the inferior Pitris) at the lower.

 

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540‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Of course, the Occultists are fully aware of the fact that the Vitalist “fallacy,” so derided by Vogt and Huxley, is, nevertheless, still countenanced in very high scientific quarters, and, therefore, they are happy to feel that they do not stand alone. Thus, Professor de Quatrefages writes:

“It is very true we do not know what life is; but no more do we know what the force is that set the stars in motion. . . . . Living beings are heavy, and therefore subject to gravitation; they are the seat of numerous and various physico-chemical phenomena which are indispensable to their existence, and which must be referred to the action of etherodynamy (electricity, heat, etc.). But these phenomena are here manifested under the infl of another force. . . . . Life is not antagonistic to the inanimate forces, but it governs and rules their action by its laws.”⁵⁷³

———

§ IX. THE SOLAR THEORY.

A SHORT ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOUND AND SINGLE ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE AS AGAINST THE OCCULT TEACHINGS. HOW FAR SCIENTIFIC IS THIS THEORY, AS GENERALLY ACCEPTED.

In his reply to Dr. Gull’s attack on the theory of vitality (connected inseparably with the Elements of the ancients in the Occult philosophy), Professor Beale, the great physiologist, has a few words as suggestive as they are beautiful:

“There is a mystery in life—a mystery which has never been fathomed, and which appears greater, the more deeply the phenomena of life are studied and contemplated. In living centres—far more central than the centres seen by the highest magnifying powers, in centres of living matter, where the eye cannot penetrate, but towards which the understanding may tend—proceed changes of the nature of which the most advanced physicists and chemists fail to afford us the conception: nor is there the slightest reason to think that the nature of these changes will ever be ascertained by physical investigation, inasmuch as they are certainly of an order or nature totally distinct from that to which any other phenomenon known to us can be relegated.”

This “mystery,” or the origin of the life essence, Occultism locates in the same centre as the nucleus of prima materia (for they are one) of our Solar system.

 

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541 THE HEART OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

“The Sun is the heart of the Solar World (System) and its brain is hidden behind the (visible) Sun. From thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein. . . . The planets are its limbs and pulses. . . .” (Commentary.)

It was stated elsewhere (in the Theosophist) that Occult philosophy denies that the Sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a world, a glowing sphere, the real Sun being hidden behind, and the visible being only its reflection, its shell. The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir J. Herschel for “Solar inhabitants,” are the reservoirs of solar vital energy, “the vital electricity that feeds the whole system.

. . . . The Sun in abscondito being thus the storehouse of our little Kosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out,” and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real Solar palace and presence, which reflects, however, faithfully the interior work.

Thus, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system, of which the Sun is the heart—the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body—during the manvantaric solar period, or life; the Sun contracting as rhythmically at every return of it, as the human heart does. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years, and a whole year to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.

This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases,⁵⁷⁴ which is due to the contraction of the Solar heart. The universe (our world in this case) breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the earth; and as our globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours. The dark region is not due “to the absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun and interposed between the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it ( “Le Soleil” II., 184), nor are the spots formed “by the matter (heated gaseous matter) which the irruption projects upon the solar disc” (ibid). It is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ be made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen, such as

 

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542 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

used by the astronomers in their lectures—say for the moon—then every one would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second—due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood.

It is said in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that “all the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but modifications of a single material element.” (“World-Life,” p. 48.)

Occult philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and languages, adding only, on the principle of the immutable law of analogy—“as it is above, so it is below”—that other axiom, that there is neither Spirit nor matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden is (or Sat). The homogeneous primordial Element is simple and single only on the terrestrial plane of consciousness and sensation, since matter, after all, is nothing else than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element which is defined on our earth by current science, as the ultimate undecomposable constituent of some kind of matter, would be pronounced in the world of a higher spiritual perception as something very complex indeed. Our purest water would be found to yield, instead of its two declared simple elements of oxygen and hydrogen, many other constituents, undreamt of by our terrestrial modern chemistry. As in the realm of matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is cognized on the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of the perfectly homogeneous substance, the sarcode of the Hæckelian monera, is now viewed as the archebiosis of terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley’s “protoplasm”);⁵⁷⁵ and Bathybius Hæckelii has to be traced to its pre-terrestrial archebiosis. This is first perceived by the astronomers at its third stage of evolution, and in the “secondary creation,” so-called. But the students of Esoteric philosophy understand too well the secret meaning of the stanza: “Brahmâ has essentially the aspect of prakriti, both evolved and unevolved . . . . Spirit, O twice-born, (Initiate) is the leading aspect of Brahmâ. The next is a two-fold aspect—of Prakriti and Purusha, both evolved and unevolved; and time is the last! Anu is one of the names of Brahmâ (as distinct from Brahma neuter), and it means “atom”: Aníyâmsam aníyasám, “the most atomic of the atomic,” the “immutable and imperishable (achyuta) Purushottama.”

Surely, then, the elements now known to us—be their number whatever it may—as they are understood and defined at present, are not,

 

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543 THE QUINTESSENCE OF KOSMOS.

nor can they be, the primordial elements. Those were formed from “the curds of the cold radiant mother” and “the fire-seed of the hot Father” who “are one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of modern science, those elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial fire-mist—the masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ; for as Professor Newcomb shows (in his “Popular Astronomy, “on page 444), resolvable nebulæ are not a class of proper nebulæ.

More than half of those which were at first mistaken for nebulae—he thinks—are what he calls “starry clusters.” The elements now known, have arrived at their state of permanency in this 4th Round and 5th Race. They have a short period of rest before they are propelled once more on their upward spiritual evolution; when the “living fire of Orcus” will dissociate the most irresolvable and scatter them into the primordial one—again.

Meanwhile the Occultist goes further, as has been shown in the Commentaries on the Seven Stanzas. Hence he can hardly hope for any help or recognition from science, which will reject both his “áníyâmsam aníyásám (the absolutely spiritual atom) and his Manasaputras—“mind-born men.” By resolving the “single material element” into one absolute irresolvable element—Spirit, or “Root-matter,” thus placing it at once outside the reach and province of physical philosophy—he has, of course but little in common with the orthodox men of science. He maintains that Spirit and Matter are two facets of the unknowable unity, their apparently contrasted aspects depending, (a) on the various degrees of differentiation of the latter, and (b) on the grades of consciousness attained by man himself. This is, however, metaphysics, and has little to do with physics—however great in its own terrestrial limitation that physical philosophy may now be.

Nevertheless, once that Science admits, if not the actual existence, at any rate, the possibility of the existence, of a Universe with its numberless forms, conditions, and aspects built out of a “single substance,”⁵⁷⁶ it has

 

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544 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

to go further. Unless it also admits the possibility of One Element, or the one life of the Occultists. It will have to hang up that “single substance,” especially if limited to only the solar nebulae, like the coffin of Mahomet, in mid air, though minus the attractive magnet that sustains that coffin. Fortunately for the speculative physicists, if unable to state with any degree of precision what the nebular theory does imply, we have, thanks to Professor Winchell, and several disagreeing astronomers, been able to learn what it does not imply.⁵⁷⁷ (Vide Supra.)

Unfortunately, this is far from clearing even the most simple of the problems that have vexed, and still do vex, the men of learning in their research after truth. We have to proceed with our inquiries, starting with the earliest hypotheses of modern science, if we would discover where and why it sins. Perchance it may be found that Stallo is right, after all. That the blunders, contradictions, and fallacies made by the most eminent men of learning are simply due to their abnormal attitude. They are, and want to remain materialistic quand même, and yet “the general principles of the atomo-mechanical theory—the basis of modern physics—are substantially identical with the cardinal doctrines of ontological metaphysics.” Thus, “the fundamental errors of ontology become apparent in proportion to the advance of physical Science.” (Int. p. VI., “Concepts of Modern Physics.”) Science is honeycombed with metaphysical conceptions, but the Scientists will not admit the charge and fight desperately to put atomo-mechanical masks on purely incorporeal and spiritual laws in nature, on our plane—refusing to admit their substantiality even on other planes, the bare existence of which they reject à priori.

It is easy to show, however, how Scientists, wedded to their materialistic views, have endeavoured, ever since the day of Newton, to put false masks on fact and truth. But their task is becoming with every year more difficult; and with every year also, Chemistry, above all the other sciences, approaches nearer and nearer the realm of the Occult in nature. It is assimilating the very truths taught by the Occult Sciences

 

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545 THE ORIGINAL BASE.

for ages, but hitherto bitterly derided. “Matter is eternal,” says the Esoteric Doctrine. But the matter the Occultists conceive of in its laya, or zero state, is not the matter of modern science; not even in its most rarefied gaseous state. Mr. Crookes’ “radiant matter” would appear matter of the grossest kind in the realm of the beginnings, as it becomes pure spirit before it has returned back even to its first point of differentiation. Therefore, when the adept or alchemist adds that, though matter is eternal, for it is Pradhâna, yet atoms are born at every new manvantara, or reconstruction of the universe, it is no such contradiction as a materialist, who believes in nothing beyond the atom, might think. There is a difference between manifested and unmanifested matter, between pradhâna, the beginningless and endless cause, and prakriti, or the manifested effect. Says the sloka;—

“That which is the unevolved cause is emphatically called by the most eminent sages, pradhâna, original base, which is subtle prakriti, viz., that which is eternal, and which at once is, and is not, a mere process.”⁵⁷⁸ That which in modern phraseology is respectively referred to as Spirit and Matter, is one in eternity as the perpetual cause, and it is neither Spirit nor matter, but it—rendered in Sanskrit tad (“that”),—all that is, was, or will be, all that the imagination of man is capable of conceiving. Even the exoteric Pantheism of Hinduism renders it as no monotheistic philosophy ever did, for in superb phraseology its cosmogony begins with the well-known words:

“There was neither day nor night, neither heaven nor earth, neither darkness nor light. And there was not ought else apprehensible by the senses or by the mental faculties. There was then one Brahmâ, essentially prakriti (Nature) and Spirit. For the two aspects of Vishnu which are other than his supreme essential aspect are prakriti and Spirit, and Brahman. When these two other aspects of his no longer subsist, but are dissolved, then that aspect whence form and the rest, i.e., creation, proceed anew, is denominated time, O twice-born.”

It is that which is dissolved, or the illusionary dual aspect of That, the essence of which is eternally one, that we call eternal matter or Substance (Vide in Part II., “Primordial Substance and Divine Thought”), formless, sexless, inconceivable, even to our sixth sense or mind,⁵⁷⁹ in which, therefore, we refuse to see that which Monotheists call a personal, anthropomorphic God.

How are these two propositions—“that matter is eternal,” and “the atom periodical, and not eternal”—viewed by modern exact Science? The materialistic physicist will criticize and laugh them to scorn. The

 

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546 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

liberal and progressive man of Science, however, the true and earnest scientific searcher after truth—e.g., the eminent chemist, Mr. Crookes, will corroborate the probability of the two statements. For, hardly has the echo of his lecture on the “Genesis of the Elements” died away—the lecture which, delivered by him before the Chemical Section of the British Association, at the last Birmingham meeting, so startled every evolutionist who heard or read it—than there came another one in March last, 1888. Once more the President of the Chemical Society brings before the world of Science and the public the fruits of some new discoveries in the realm of atoms, and these discoveries justify the occult teachings in every way. They are more startling even than the statements made by him in the first lecture (quoted later) and deserve well the attention of every Occultist, Theosophist, and Metaphysician. This is what he says in his “Elements and Meta-Elements,” thus justifying Stallo’s charges and prevision with the fearlessness of a scientific mind which loves science for truth’s sake, regardless of any consequences to his own glory and reputation. We quote his own words:

Permit me, gentlemen, now to draw your attention for a short time to a subject which concerns the fundamental principles of chemistry, a subject which may lead us to admit the possible existence of bodies which, though neither compounds nor mixtures, are not elements in the strictest sense of the word—bodies which I venture to call “meta-elements.” To explain my meaning it is necessary for me to revert to our conception of an element. What is the criterion of an element? Where are we to draw the line between distinct existence and identity? No one doubts that oxygen, sodium, chlorine, sulphur are separate elements; and when we come to such groups as chlorine, bromine, iodine, etc., we still feel no doubt, although were degrees of “elementicity” admissible—and to that we may ultimately have to come—it might be allowed that chlorine approximates much more closely to bromine than to oxygen, sodium, or sulphur. Again, nickel and cobalt are near to each other, very near, though no one questions their claim to rank as distinct elements. Still I cannot help asking what would have been the prevalent opinion among chemists had the respective solutions of these bodies and their compounds presented identical colours, instead of colours which, approximately speaking, are mutually complementary. Would their distinct nature have even now been recognised? When we pass further and come to the so-called rare earths the ground is less secure under our feet. Perhaps we may admit scandium, ytterbium, and others of the like sort to elemental rank; but what are we to say in the case of praseo- and neo-dymium, between which there may be said to exist no well-marked chemical difference, their chief claim to separate individuality being slight differences in basicity and crystallizing powers, though their physical distinctions, as shown by spectrum observations, are very strongly marked? Even here we may imagine the disposition of the majority of chemists would incline toward the side of leniency, so that they would admit these two bodies within the charmed circle. Whether in so doing they would be able to appeal to any broad principle is an open question. If we admit these candidates

547 OCCULT CHEMISTRY.

how in justice are we to exclude the series of elemental bodies or meta-elements made known to us by Krüss and Nilson? Here the spectral differences are well marked, while my own researches on didymium show also a slight difference in basicity between some at least of these doubtful bodies. In the same category must be included the numerous separate bodies into which it is probable that yttrium, erbium, samarium, and other “elements”—commonly so-called—have been and are being split up. Where then are we to draw the line? The different groupings shade off so imperceptibly the one into the other that it is impossible to erect a definite boundary between any two adjacent bodies and to say that the body on this side of the line is an element, while the one on the other side is non-elementary, or merely something which simulates or approximates to an element. Wherever an apparently reasonable line might be drawn it would no doubt be easy at once to assign most bodies to their proper side, as in all cases of classification the real difficulty comes in when the border-line is approached. Slight chemical differences, of course, are admitted, and, up to a certain point, so are well-marked physical differences. What are we to say, however, when the only chemical difference is an almost imperceptible tendency for the one body—of a couple or of a group—to precipitate before the other? Again, there are cases where the chemical differences reach the vanishing point, although well-marked physical differences still remain. Here we stumble on a new difficulty: in such obscurities what is chemical and what is physical? Are we not entitled to call a slight tendency of a nascent amorphous precipitate to fall down in advance of another a “physical difference?” And may we not call coloured reactions depending on the amount of some particular acid present and varying, according to the concentration of the solution and to the solvent employed, “chemical differences?” I do not see how we can deny elementary character to a body which differs from another by well-marked colour, or spectrum-reactions, while we accord it to another body whose only claim is a very minute difference in basic powers. Having once opened the door wide enough to admit some spectrum differences, we have to inquire how minute a difference qualifies the candidate to pass? I will give instances from my own experience of some of these doubtful candidates.

And here the great chemist gives several cases of the very extraordinary behaviour of molecules and earths, apparently the same, and which yet, when examined very closely, were found to exhibit differences which, however imperceptible, still show that none of them are simple bodies, and that the 60 or 70 elements accepted in chemistry, can no longer cover the ground. Their name, apparently, is legion, but as the so-called “periodic theory” stands in the way of an unlimited multiplication of elements, Mr. Crookes is obliged to find some means of reconciling the new discovery with the old theory. “That theory,” he says:

“Has received such abundant verification that we cannot lightly accept any interpretation of phenomena which fails to be in accordance with it. But if we suppose the elements reinforced by a vast number of bodies slightly differing from each other in their properties, and forming, if I may use the expression,

548 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

aggregations of nebulæ where we formerly saw, or believed we saw, separate stars, the periodic arrangement can no longer be definitely grasped. No longer, that is, if we retain our usual conception of an element. Let us, then, modify this conception- For “element” read “elementary group”—such elementary groups taking the place of the old elements in the periodic scheme—and the difficulty falls away. In defining an element, let us take not an external boundary, but an internal type. Let us say, e.g., the smallest ponderable quantity of yttrium is an assemblage of ultimate atoms almost infinitely more like each other than they are to the atoms of any other approximating element. It does not necessarily follow that the atoms shall all be absolutely alike among themselves. The atomic weight which we ascribed to yttrium, therefore, merely represents a mean value around which the actual weights of the individual atoms of the “element” range within certain limits. But if my conjecture is tenable, could we separate atom from atom, we should find them varying within narrow limits on each side of the mean. The very process of fractionation implies the existence of such differences in certain bodies.”

Thus fact and truth have once more forced the hand of “exact” Science, and compelled it to enlarge its views and change its terms which, masking the multitude, reduced them to one body—like the Septenary Elohim and their hosts transformed by the materialistic religionists into one Jehovah. Replace the chemical terms “Molecule,” “atom,” “particle,” etc., by the words “Hosts,” “Monads,” “Devas,” etc., and one might think the genesis of gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric intelligent Forces, was being described. But the learned lecturer adds something still more suggestive to his descriptive remarks; whether consciously or unconsciously, who knoweth? For he says the following:

“Until lately such bodies passed muster as elements. They had definite properties, chemical and physical; they had recognised atomic weights. If we take a pure dilute solution of such a body, yttrium for instance, and if we add to it an excess of strong ammonia, we obtain a precipitate which appears perfectly homogeneous. But if instead we add very dilute ammonia in quantity sufficient only to precipitate one-half of the base present, we obtain no immediate precipitate. If we stir up the whole thoroughly so as to insure a uniform mixture of the solution and the ammonia, and set the vessel aside for an hour, carefully excluding dust, we may still find the liquid clear and bright, without any vestige of turbidity. After three or four hours, however, an opalescence will declare itself, and the next morning a precipitate will have appeared. Now let us ask ourselves, What can be the meaning of this phenomenon? The quantity of precipitant added was insufficient to throw down more than half the yttria present, therefore a process akin to selection has been going on for several hours. The precipitation has evidently not been effected at random, those molecules of the base being decomposed which happened to come in contact with a corresponding molecule of ammonia, for we have taken care that the liquids should be uniformly mixed, so that one molecule of the original salt would not be more exposed to decomposition

549 MONADS AND ATOMS.

than any other. If, further, we consider the time which elapses before the appearance of a precipitate, we cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that the action which has been going on for the first few hours is of a selective character. The problem is not why a precipitate is produced, but what determines or directs some atoms to fall down and others to remain in solution. Out of the multitude of atoms present, what power is it that directs each atom to choose the proper path? We may picture to ourselves some directive force passing the atoms one by one in review, selecting one for precipitation and another for solution till all have been adjusted.”

The italics in the above passage are ours. Well may a man of science ask himself, “What power is it that directs each atom,” and what is it that its character should be selective? Theists would solve the question by answering “God”; and would solve nothing philosophically. Occultism answers on its own pantheistic grounds, and refers the reader to a subsequent section, “Gods, Monads, and Atoms.” The learned lecturer sees in it that which is his chief concern: the finger-posts and the traces of a path which may lead to the discovery, and the full and complete demonstration of an homogeneous element in nature. He remarks:

“In order that such a selection can be effected there evidently must be some slight differences between which it is possible to select, and this difference almost certainly must be one of basicity, so slight as to be imperceptible by any test at present known, but susceptible of being nursed and encouraged to a point when the difference can be appreciated by ordinary tests.”

Occultism, which knows of the existence and presence in Nature of the One eternal element at the first differentiation of which the roots of the tree of life are periodically struck, needs no scientific proofs. It says:Ancient Wisdom has solved the problem ages ago. Aye; earnest, as well as mocking reader, Science is slowly but as surely approaching our domains of the Occult. It is forced by its own discoveries to adopt nolens volens our phraseology and symbols. Chemical Science is now compelled, by the very force of things, to accept even our illustration of the evolution of the gods and atoms, so suggestively and undeniably figured in the caduceus of Mercury, the God of Wisdom, and in the allegorical language of the Archaic Sages. Says a commentary in the esoteric doctrine:

. . . . The trunk of the Asvattha (the tree of Life and Being, the rod of the caduceus) grows from and descends at every Beginning (every new manvantara) from the two dark wings of the Swan (Hansa) of Life. The two Serpents, the ever-living and its illusion (Spirit and matter) whose two heads grow from the one head between the wings, descend along the trunk, interlaced in close embrace. The two tails join on earth (the manifested Universe) into one, and this is the great illusion, O Lanoo!”

550 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Every one knows what the caduceus is, already modified by the Greeks. The original symbol—with the triple head of the serpent—became altered into a rod with a knob, and the two lower heads were separated, thus disfiguring somewhat the original meaning. Yet it is as good an illustration as can be for our purpose, this laya rod entwined by two serpents. Verily the wonderful powers of the magic caduceus were sung by all the ancient poets, with a very good reason for those who understood the secret meaning.

Now what says the learned President of the Chemical Society of Great Britain, in that same lecture, which has any reference to, or bearing upon, our above-mentioned doctrine. Very little; only this—and nothing more:

“In the Birmingham address already referred to I asked my audience to picture the action of two forces on the original protyle—one being time, accompanied by a lowering of temperature; the other, swinging to and fro like a mighty pendulum, having periodic cycles of ebb and swell, rest and activity, being intimately connected with the imponderable matter, essence, or source of energy we call electricity. Now, a simile like this effects its object if it fixes in the mind the particular fact it is intended to emphasize, but it must not be expected necessarily to run parallel with all the facts. Besides the lowering of temperature with the periodic ebb and flow of electricity, positive or negative, requisite to confer on the newly-born elements their particular atomicity, it is evident that a third factor must be taken into account. Nature does not act on a flat plane; she demands space for her cosmogenic operations, and if we introduce space as the third factor, all appears clear. Instead of a pendulum, which, though to a certain extent a good illustration, is impossible as a fact, let us seek some more satisfactory way of representing what I conceive may have taken place. Let us suppose the zigzag diagram not drawn upon a plane, but projected in space of three dimensions. What figure can we best select to meet all the conditions involved? Many of the facts can be well explained by supposing the projection in space of Professor Emerson Reynolds’ zigzag curve to be a spiral. This figure is, however, inadmissible, inasmuch as the curve has to pass through a point neutral as to electricity and chemical energy twice in each cycle. We must, therefore, adopt some other figure. A figure of eight (8), or lemniscate, will foreshorten into a zigzag just as well as a spiral, and it fulfils every condition of the problem.”

A lemniscate for the evolution downward, from Spirit into matter;

551 THE CADUCEUS OF LIFE.

another form of a spiral, perhaps, in its reinvolutionary path onward, from matter into Spirit, and the necessary gradual and final reabsorption into the laya state, that which Science calls in her own way “the point neutral as to electricity” etc., or the zero point. Such are the Occult facts and statement. They may be left with the greatest security and confidence to Science, to be justified some day. Let us hear some more, however, about this primordial genetic type of the symbolical caduceus.

“Such a figure will result from three very simple simultaneous motions. First, a simple oscillation backwards and forwards (suppose east and west); secondly, a simple oscillation at right angles to the former (suppose north and south) of half the periodic time—i.e., twice as fast; and thirdly, a motion at right angles to these two (suppose downwards), which, in its simplest form, would be with unvarying velocity. If we project this figure in space we find on examination that the points of the curves, where chlorine, bromine, and iodine are formed, come close under each other; so also will sulphur, selenium, and tellurium; again, phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony; and in like manner other series of analogous bodies. It may be asked whether this scheme explains how and why the elements appear in this order? Let us imagine a cyclical translation in space, each evolution witnessing the genesis of the group of elements which I previously represented as produced during one complete vibration of the pendulum. Let us suppose that one cycle has thus been completed, the centre of the unknown creative force in its mighty journey through space having scattered along its track the primitive atoms—the seeds, if I may use the expression—which presently are to coalesce and develop into the groupings now known as lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, and chlorine. What is most probably the form of track now pursued? Were it strictly confined to the same plane of temperature and time, the next elementary groupings to appear would again have been those of lithium, and the original cycle would have been eternally repeated, producing again and again the same 14 elements. The conditions, however, are not quite the same. Space and electricity are as at first, but temperature has altered, and thus, instead of the atoms of lithium being supplemented with atoms in all respects analogous with themselves, the atomic groupings which come into being when the second cycle commences form, not lithium, but its lineal descendant, potassium. Suppose, therefore, the vis generatrix travelling to and fro in cycles along a lemniscate path, as above suggested, while simultaneously temperature is declining and time is flowing on—variations which I have endeavoured to represent by the downward sink—each coil of the lemniscate track crosses the same vertical line at lower and lower points. Projected in space, the curve shows a central line neutral as far as electricity is concerned, and neutral in chemical properties—positive electricity on the north, negative on the south. Dominant atomicities are governed by the distance east and west from the neutral centre line, monatomic elements being one remove from it, diatomic two removes, and so on. In every successive coil the same law holds good.”

And, as if to prove the postulate of Occult Science and Hindu philo-

552 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

sophy, that, at the hour of the Pralaya, the two aspects of the unknowable deity, “the Swan in darkness”—Prakriti and Purusha, nature or matter in all its forms and Spirit—no longer subsist but are (absolutely) dissolved,” we learn the conclusive scientific opinion of the great English chemist, who caps his proofs by saying: “We have now traced the formation of the chemical elements from knots and voids in a primitive, formless fluid. We have shown the possibility, nay, the probability that the atoms are not eternal in existence, but share with all other created beings the attributes of decay and death.”

Occultism says amen to this, as the Scientific “possibility” and “probability” are for it facts demonstrated beyond the necessity of further proof or any extraneous physical evidence. Nevertheless, it repeats with as much assurance as ever: “matter is eternal, becoming atomic (its aspect) only periodically.” This is as sure as that the other proposition, which is almost unanimously accepted by astronomers and physicists—namely, that the wear and tear of the body of the Universe is steadily going on, and that it will finally lead to the extinction of the Solar fires and the destruction of the Universe—is quite erroneous on the lines traced by Men of Science. There will be, as there ever were in time and eternity, periodical dissolutions of the manifested Universe, but (a) a partial pralaya after every “Day of Brahmâ”; and (b) an Universal pralaya—the Maha-pralaya—only after the lapse of every Brahmâ’s age. But the scientific causes for such dissolution, as brought forward by exact Science, have nothing to do with the true causes. However that may be, Occultism is once more justified by Science, for Mr. Crookes said:

“We have shown, from arguments drawn from the chemical laboratory, that in matter which has responded to every test of an element, there are minute shades of difference which may admit of selection. We have seen that the time-honoured distinction between elements and compounds no longer keeps pace with the developments of chemical science, but must be modified to include a vast array of intermediate bodies—“meta-elements.” We have shown how the objections of Clerk-Maxwell, weighty as they are, may be met; and finally, we have adduced reasons for believing that primitive matter was formed by the act of a generative force, throwing off at intervals of time atoms endowed with varying quantities of primitive forms of energy. If we may hazard any conjectures as to the source of energy embodied in a chemical atom, we may, I think, premise that the heat radiations propagated outwards through the ether from the ponderable matter of the universe, by some process of nature not yet known to us, are transformed at the confines of the universe into the primary—the essential—motions of chemical atoms, which, the instant they are formed, gravitate inwards, and thus restore to the universe the energy which otherwise would be lost to it through radiant heat. If this conjecture be well founded, Sir William Thomson’s startling prediction of the final decrepitude of the universe through the dissipation of its energy falls to the ground. In this

553 TRUE SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

fashion, gentlemen, it seems to me that the question of the elements may be provisionally treated. Our slender knowledge of these first mysteries is extending steadily, surely, though slowly.”

By a strong and curious coincidence even our “septenary” doctrine seems to force the hand of Science. If we understand rightly, Chemistry speaks of fourteen groupings of primitive atoms—lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine; and Mr. Crookes, speaking of the “dominant atomicities,” enumerates seven groups of these, for he says:

“As the mighty focus of creative energy goes round, we see it in successive cycles sowing in one tract of space seeds of lithium, potassium, rubidium, and cæsium; in another tract, chlorine, bromine, and iodine; in a third, sodium, copper, silver, and gold; in a fourth, sulphur, selenium, and tellurium; in a fifth, beryllium, calcium, strontium, and barium; in a sixth, magnesium, zinc, cadmium, and mercury; in a seventh, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth”—which makes seven groupings on the one hand. And after showing “in other tracts the other elements—namely, aluminium, gallium, indium, and thallium; silicon, germanium, and tin; carbon, titanium, and zirconium.”

He adds: “While a natural position near the neutral axis is found for the three groups of elements relegated by Professor Mendeleeff to a sort of Hospital for Incurables—his eighth family.” It might be interesting to compare these “seven of the eighth family of ‘incurables’ with the allegories concerning the seven primitive sons of “Mother, Infinite Space,” or Aditi, and the eighth son rejected by her. Many a strange coincidence may thus be found between “those intermediate links . . . named ‘meta-elements or elementoids and those whom occult science names their noumenoi,’ the intelligent minds and rulers of those groupings of Monads and Atoms. But this would lead us too far. Let us be content with finding the confession of the fact that “this deviation from absolute homogeneity should mark the constitution of these molecules or aggregations of matter which we designate elements and will perhaps be clearer if we return in imagination to the earliest dawn of our material universe, and, face to face with the Great Secret, try to consider the processes of elemental evolution.” Thus finally Science, in the person of its highest representatives, in order to make itself clearer to the profane, adopts the phraseology of such old adepts as Roger Bacon, and returns to the “protyle.” All this is hopeful and suggestive of the “signs of the times.”

Indeed these “signs” are many and multiply daily; but none are more important than those just quoted. For now the chasm between the occult “superstitious and unscientific” teachings and “exact” science is completely bridged, and one, at least, of the few eminent chemists of the day is in the realm of the infinite possibilities of occultism. Every new

554‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

step he will take will bring him nearer and nearer to that mysterious centre, from which radiate the innumerable paths that lead down Spirit into matter, and which transform the gods and the living monads into man and sentient nature.

But we have something more to say on this subject in the following section.

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§ X. THE COMING FORCE.

ITS POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES.

Shall we say that Force is “moving matter,” or “matter in motion,” and a manifestation of energy; or that matter and force are the phenomenal differentiated aspects of the one primary, undifferentiated Cosmic Substance?

This query is made with regard to that Stanza which treats of Fohat and his “Seven brothers or Sons,” in other words, of the cause and the effects of Cosmic Electricity, the latter called, in Occult parlance, the seven primary forces of Electricity, whose purely phenomenal, and hence grossest effects are alone cognizable by physicists on the cosmic and especially on the terrestrial plane. These include, among other things, Sound, Light, Colour, etc., etc. Now what does physical Science tell us of these “Forces”? Sound, it says, is a sensation produced by the impact of atmospheric molecules on the tympanum, which, by setting up delicate tremors in the auditory apparatus, thus communicate themselves to the brain. Light is the sensation caused by the impact of inconceivably minute vibrations of ether on the retina of the eye.

So, too, we say. But this is simply the effect produced in our atmosphere and its immediate surroundings, all, in fact, which falls within the range of our terrestrial consciousness. Jupiter Pluvius sent his symbol in drops of rain, of water composed, as is believed, of two “elements,” which chemistry dissociates and recombines. The compound molecules are in its power, but their atoms still elude its grasp. Occultism sees in all these Forces and manifestations a ladder, the lower rungs of which belong to exoteric physics, and the higher are traced to a living, intelligent, invisible Power, which is, as a rule, the unconcerned, and exceptionally, the conscious cause of the sense-born phenomenon designated as this or another natural law.

555 DIVINE, INFERNAL, OR TERRESTRIAL FORCE?

We say and maintain that Sound, for one thing, is a tremendous Occult power; that it is a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality when directed with occult knowledge. Sound may be produced of such a nature that the pyramid of Cheops would be raised in the air, or that a dying man, nay, one at his last breath, would be revived and filled with new energy and vigour.

For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that produce an ozone, the fabrication of which is beyond chemistry, but within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a man or an animal whose astral “vital body” has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord. As one saved thrice from death by that power, the writer ought to be credited with knowing personally something about it.

And if all this appears too unscientific to be even noticed, let Science explain “to what mechanical and physical laws known to it, is due the recently produced phenomena of the so-called “Keely motor?” What is it that acts as the formidable generator of invisible but tremendous force, of that power which is not only capable of driving an engine of 25 horse-power, but has even been employed to lift the machinery bodily? Yet this is done simply by drawing a fiddle-bow across a tuning fork, as has been repeatedly proven. For the etheric Force, discovered by the well-known (in America and now in Europe) John Worrell Keely, of Philadelphia, is no hallucination. Notwithstanding his failure to utilize it, a failure prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first, the phenomena exhibited by the discoverer during the last few years have been wonderful, almost miraculous, not in the sense of the supernatural⁵⁸⁰ but of the superhuman. Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds as easily as he reduced a dead ox to the same condition.

The reader is now asked to give a serious attention to that newly-discovered potency which the discoverer has named “Inter-Etheric Force and Forces.”

In the humble opinion of the Occultists, as of his immediate friends,

 

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556 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Mr. Keely, of Philadelphia, was, and still is, at the threshold of some of the greatest secrets of the Universe; of that chiefly on which is built the whole mystery of physical Forces, and the esoteric significance of the “Mundane Egg” symbolism. Occult philosophy, viewing the manifested and the unmanifested Kosmos as a unity, symbolizes the ideal conception of the former by that “Golden Egg” with two poles in it. It is the positive pole that acts in the manifested world of matter, while the negative is lost in the unknowable absoluteness of sat—“Be-ness.”⁵⁸¹ Whether this agrees with the philosophy of Mr. Keely, we cannot tell, nor does it really much matter. Nevertheless, his ideas about the ethero-material construction of the Universe look strangely like our own, being in this respect nearly identical. This is what we find him saying in an able pamphlet compiled by Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, an American lady of wealth and position, whose incessant efforts in the pursuit of truth can never be too highly appreciated: “Mr. Keely, in explanation of the working of his engine, says: ‘In the conception of any machine heretofore constructed, the medium for inducing a neutral centre has never been found. If it had, the difficulties of perpetual-motion seekers would have ended, and this problem would have become an established and operating fact. It would only require an introductory impulse of a few pounds, on such a device, to cause it to run for centuries, In the conception of my vibratory engine, I did not seek to attain perpetual motion; but a circuit is formed that actually has a neutral centre, which is in a condition to be vivified by my vibratory ether, and, while under operation by said substance, is really a machine that is virtually independent of the mass (or globe),⁵⁸² and it is the wonderful velocity of the vibratory circuit which makes it so. Still, with all its perfection, it requires to be fed with the vibratory ether to make it an independent motor . . . .”

“All structures require a foundation in strength according to the weight of the mass they have to carry, but the foundations of the universe rest on a vacuous point far more minute than a molecule; in fact, to express this truth properly, on an inter-etheric point, which requires an infinite mind to understand it. To look down into the depths of an etheric centre is precisely the same as it would be to search into the broad space of heaven’s ether to find the end, with this difference: that one is the positive field, while the other is the negative field . . . .”

 

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557 AN UNCONSCIOUS OCCULTIST.

This, as easily seen, is precisely the Eastern doctrine. His inter-etheric point is the laya-point of the Occultists, which, however, does not require “an infinite mind to understand it,” but only a specific intuition and ability to trace its hiding-place in this world of matter. Of course, the laya centre cannot be produced, but an inter-etheric vacuum can—as proved in the production of bell-sounds in space. Mr. Keely speaks as an unconscious Occultist, nevertheless, when he remarks in his theory of planetary suspension:

“As regards planetary volume, we would ask in a scientific point of view—How can the immense difference of volume in the planets exist without disorganising the harmonious action that has always characterised them? I can only answer this question properly by entering into a progressive analysis, starting on the rotating etheric centres that were fixed by the Creator⁵⁸³ with their attractive or accumulative power. If you ask what power it is that gives to each etheric atom its inconceivable velocity of rotation (or introductory impulse), I must answer that no finite mind will ever be able to conceive what it is. The philosophy of accumulation is the only proof that such a power has been given. The area, if we can so speak, of such an atom, presents to the attractive or magnetic, the elective or propulsive, all the receptive force and all the antagonistic force that characterises a planet of the largest magnitude; consequently, as the accumulation goes on, the perfect equation remains the same. When this minute centre has once been fixed, the power to rend it from its position would necessarily have to be so great as to displace the most immense planet that exists. When this atomic neutral centre is displaced, the planet must go with it. The neutral centre carries the full load of any accumulation from the start, and remains the same, for ever balanced in the eternal space.”

Mr. Keely illustrates his idea of “a neutral centre” in this way:

“We will imagine that, after an accumulation of a planet of any diameter, say, 20,000 miles, more or less, for the size has nothing to do with the problem; there should be a displacement of all the material, with the exception of a crust 5,000 miles thick, leaving an intervening void between this crust and a centre of the size of an ordinary billiard ball, it would then require a force as great to move this small central mass as it would to move the shell of 5,000 miles thickness. Moreover, this small central mass would carry the load of this crust for ever, keeping it equidistant; and there could be no opposing power, however great, that could bring them together. The imagination staggers in contemplating the immense load which bears upon this point of centre, where weight ceases. . . . This is what we understand by a neutral centre.”

And what Occultists understand by a “laya centre.”

The above is pronounced “unscientific” by many. But so is everything that is not sanctioned and kept on strictly orthodox lines by physical science. Unless the explanation given by the inventor himself is accepted—and his explanations, being, as observed, quite orthodox from

 

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558 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the spiritual and the Occult stand-points, if not from that of materialistic speculative (called exact) Science, are therefore ours in this particular—what can science answer to facts already seen which it is no longer possible for anyone to deny? Occult philosophy divulges few of its most important vital mysteries. It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide apart, and only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal wave that carries on humanity slowly, silently, but steadily toward the dawn of the Sixth-Race mankind. For once out of the safe custody of their legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be occult: they fall into the public domain and have to run the risk of becoming in the hands of the selfish—of the Cains of the human race—curses more often than blessings. Nevertheless, whenever such individuals as the discoverer of Etheric Force—John Worrell Keely—men with peculiar psychic and mental capacities⁵⁸⁴ are born, they are generally and more frequently helped than allowed to go unassisted; groping on their way, though, if left to their own resources, falling very soon victims to martyrdom and unscrupulous speculators. Only they are helped on the condition that they should not become, whether consciously or unconsciously, an additional peril to their age: a danger to the poor, now offered in daily holocaust by the less wealthy to the very wealthy.⁵⁸⁵ This necessitates a short digression and an explanation.

Some twelve years back, during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the writer, in answering the earnest queries of a theosophist, one of the earliest admirers of Mr. Keely, repeated to him what she had heard in quarters, information from which she could never doubt.

It had been stated that the inventor of the “Self-Motor” was what is called, in the jargon of the Kabalists, a “natural-born magician.” That he was and would remain unconscious of the full range of his powers, and would work out merely those which he had found out and ascertained in his own nature—firstly, because, attributing them to a wrong source, he could never give them full sway; and

 

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559 THE FIRST-BORN OF ETHER.

secondly, because it was beyond his power to pass to others that which was a capacity inherent in his special nature. Hence the whole secret could not be made over permanently to anyone for practical purposes or use.⁵⁸⁶ Individuals born with such a capacity are not very rare. That they are not heard of more frequently is due to the fact that they live and die, in almost every case, in utter ignorance of being possessed of abnormal powers at all. Mr. Keely possesses powers which are called “abnormal” just because they happen in our day to be as little known as blood circulation was before Harvey’s time. Blood existed, and it behaved as it does at present in the first man born from woman; and so does that principle in man which can control and guide etheric vibratory force. At any rate it exists in all those mortals whose inner selves are primordially connected, by reason of their direct descent, with that group of Dhyan-Chohans who are called “the first-born of Ether.” Mankind, psychically considered, is divided into various groups, each of which is connected with one of the Dhyanic groups that first formed psychic man; (see paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the Commentary to Stanza VII.) Mr. Keely being greatly favoured in this respect, and moreover, besides his psychic temperament, being intellectually a genius in mechanics, may thus achieve most wonderful results. He has achieved some already—more than any mortal man, not initiated into the final mysteries, has achieved in this age up to the present day. What he has done is certainly quite sufficient “to demolish with the hammer of Science the idols of Science”—the idols of matter with the feet of clay—as his friends justly predict and say of him. Nor would the writer for a moment think of contradicting Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, when in her paper on “Psychic Force and Etheric Force,” she states that Mr. Keely, as a philosopher, “is great enough in soul, wise enough in mind, and sublime enough in courage to overcome all difficulties, and to stand at last before the world as the greatest discoverer and inventor in the world.”

And again she writes: “Should Keely do no more than lead scientists from the dreary realms where they are groping into the open field of elemental force, where gravity and cohesion are disturbed in their haunts and diverted to use; where, from unity of origin, emanates infinite energy in diversified forms, he will achieve immortal fame. Should he demonstrate, to the destruction of materialism, that the universe is animated by a mysterious principle to which matter, however perfectly organized, is absolutely subservient, he will be a greater spiritual benefactor to our race than the modern world has yet found in any man. Should he be able to substitute, in the treatment of disease,

 

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560 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the finer forces of nature for the grossly material agencies which have sent more human beings to their graves than war, pestilence and famine combined, he will merit and receive the gratitude of mankind. All this and more will he do, if he and those who have watched his progress, day by day for years, are not too sanguine in their expectations.”

Writing in the T. P. S. (“Theosophical Publication Society”) series (No. 9), the same lady, in her pamphlet, “Keely’s Secrets,” brings forward a passage from an article, written a few years ago by the writer of the present volume, in her journal, the Theosophist, in these words:

“The author of No. 5 of the pamphlets issued by the Theosophical Publication Society, ‘What is Matter and What is Force,’ says therein, ‘The men of science have just found out “a fourth state of matter,” whereas the Occultists have penetrated years ago beyond the sixth, and therefore do not infer, but know of, the existence of the seventh, the last.’ This knowledge comprises one of the secrets of Keely’s so-called ‘compound secret.’ It is already known to many that his secret includes ‘the augmentation of energy,’ the insulation of the ether, and the adaptation of dynaspheric force to machinery.”

It is just because Keely’s discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of the most occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their logical end seems certain to Occultists. But of this more presently. Even in its limitations this discovery may prove of the greatest benefit. For:

“Step by step, with a patient perseverance which some day the world will honour, this man of genius has made his researches, overcoming the colossal difficulties which again and again raised up in his path what seemed to be (to all but himself) insurmountable barriers to further progress: but never has the world’s index finger so pointed to an hour when all is making ready for the advent of the new form of force that mankind is waiting for. Nature, always reluctant to yield her secrets, is listening to the demands made upon her by her master, necessity. The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows that its days are numbered. Electricity holds back, with bated breath, dependent upon the approach of her sister colleague. Air ships are riding at anchor, as it were, waiting for the force which is to make aërial navigation something more than a dream. As easily as men communicate with their offices from their homes by means of the telephone, so will the inhabitants of separate continents talk across the ocean. Imagination is palsied when seeking to foresee the grand results of this marvellous discovery, when once it is applied to art and mechanics. In taking the throne which it will force steam to abdicate, dynaspheric force will rule the world with a power so mighty in the interests of civilization, that no finite mind can conjecture the results. Laurence Oliphant, in his preface to ‘Scientific Religion,’ says: ‘A new moral future is dawning upon the human race—one, certainly, of which it stands much in need.” In no way could this

561 INTER-ETHERIC WAVES.

new moral future be so widely, so universally, commenced as by the utilizing of dynaspheric force to beneficial purposes in life. . . . .”

The Occultists are ready to admit all this with the eloquent writer. Molecular vibration is, undeniably, “Keely’s legitimate field of research,” and the discoveries made by him will prove wonderful—yet only in his hands and through himself. The world so far will get but that with which it can be safely entrusted. The truth of this assertion has, perhaps, not yet quite dawned upon the discoverer himself, since he writes that he is absolutely certain that he will accomplish all that he has promised, and will then give it out to the world; but it must dawn upon him, and at no very far distant date. And what he says in reference to his work is a good proof it:

“In considering the operation of my engine, the visitor, in order to have even an approximate conception of its modus operandi, must discard all thought of engines that are operated upon the principle of pressure and exhaustion, by the expansion of steam or other analogous gas which impinges upon an abutment, such as the piston of a steam-engine. My engine has neither piston nor eccentrics, nor is there one grain of pressure exerted in the engine, whatever may be the size or capacity of it.

“My system, in every part and detail, both in the developing of my power and in every branch of its utilization, is based and founded on sympathetic vibration. In no other way would it be possible to awaken or develop my force, and equally impossible would it be to operate my engine upon any other principle. . . . . . . This, however, is the true system; and henceforth all my operations will be conducted in this manner—that is to say, my power will be generated, my engines run, my cannon operated, through a wire.

“It has been only after years of incessant labour, and the making of almost innumerable experiments, involving not only the construction of a great many most peculiar mechanical structures, and the closest investigation and study of the phenomenal properties of the substance ‘ether,’ per se, produced, that I have been able to dispense with complicated mechanism, and to obtain, as I claim, mastery over the subtle and strange force with which I am dealing.”

The passages underlined by us, are those which bear directly on the occult side of the application of the vibratory force, or what Mr. Keely calls “sympathetic vibration.” The “wire” is already a step below, or downward from the pure etheric plane into the terrestrial. The discoverer has produced marvels—the word “miracle” is not too strong—when acting through the inter-etheric Force alone, the fifth and sixth principles of Akâsa. From a “generator” six feet long, he has come down to one “no larger than an old-fashioned silver watch”; and this by itself is a miracle of mechanical (but not spiritual) genius. But, as well expressed by his great patroness and defender, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, “the two forms of force which he has been experimenting with, and the phenomena attending them, are the very antithesis of each other.” One was generated and acted upon by and

562 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

through himself. No one, who should have repeated the thing done by himself, could have produced the same results. It was “Keely’s ether” that acted truly, while “Smith’s or Brown’s” ether would have remained for ever barren of results. For Keely’s difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and regulate the “force” without the intervention of any “will power” or personal influence, whether conscious or unconscious of the operator. In this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for no one but himself could operate on his “machines.” Occultly this was a far more advanced achievement than the “success” which he anticipates from his “wire,” but the results obtained from the fifth and sixth planes of the etheric (or Astral) Force, will never be permitted to serve for purposes of commerce and traffic That Keely’s organism is directly connected with the production of the marvellous results is proven by the following statement emanating from one who knows the great discoverer intimately.

At one time the shareholders of the “Keely Motor Co.” put a man in his workshop for the express purpose of discovering his secret. After six months of close watching, he said to J. W. Keely one day: “I know how it is done, now.” They had been setting up a machine together, and Keely was manipulating the stop-cock which turned the force on and off. “Try it, then,” was the answer. The man turned the cock, and nothing came. “Let me see you do it again,” the man said to Keely. The latter complied, and the machinery operated at once. Again the other tried, but without success. Then Keely put his hand on his shoulder and told him to try once more. He did so, with the result of an instantaneous production of the current. This fact, if true, settles the question.

We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity “as a certain form of atomic vibration.” In this he is quite right; but this is electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. He estimates—

This proves our point. There are no vibrations that could be counted or even estimated at an approximate rate beyond “the realm of the fourth son of Fohat,” using an occult phraseology, or that motion which corresponds to the formation of Mr. Crookes’ radiant matter, or lightly called some years ago the “fourth state of matter”—on this our plane.

563 A PREMATURE DISCOVERY.

If the question is asked why Mr. Keely was not allowed to pass a certain limit, the answer is easy; because that which he has unconsciously discovered, is the terrible sidereal Force, known to, and named by the Atlanteans mash-mak, and by the Aryan Rishis in their Ashtar Vidya by a name that we do not like to give. It is the vril of Bulwer Lytton’s “Coming Race,” and of the coming races of our mankind. The name vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.

It is this vibratory Force, which, when aimed at an army from an Agni Rath fixed on a flying vessel, a balloon, according to the instructions found in Ashtar Vidya, reduced to ashes 100,000 men and elephants, as easily as it would a dead rat. It is allegorised in the Vishnu Purâna, in the Râmâyana and other works, in the fable about the sage Kapila whose glance made a mountain of ashes of King Sagara’s 60,000 sons, and which is explained in the esoteric works, and referred to as the Kapilaksha—“Kapila’s Eye.”

And is it this Satanic Force that our generations were to be allowed to add to their stock of Anarchist’s baby-toys, known as melenite, dynamite clock-works, explosive oranges, “flower baskets,” and such other innocent names? Is it this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some modern Attila, e.g., a blood-thirsty anarchist, would reduce Europe in a few days to its primitive chaotic state with no man left alive to tell the tale—is this force to become the common property of all men alike?

What Mr. Keely has already done is grand and wonderful in the extreme; there is enough work before him in the demonstration of his new system to “humble the pride of those scientists who are materialistic, by revealing those mysteries which lie behind the world of matter,” without revealing it nolens volens to all. For surely Psychists and Spiritualists—of whom there are a good number in the European armies—would be the first to experience personally the fruits of such mysteries revealed. Thousands of them would find themselves (and perhaps with the populations of whole countries to keep them company) in blue Ether very soon, were such a Force to be even entirely discovered, let alone made publicly known. The discovery in its completeness is by several thousand—or shall we say hundred thousand?—years too premature. It will be at its appointed place and time only when the great roaring flood of starvation, misery, and underpaid labour ebbs back again—as it will when happily at last the just demands of the many are attended to; when the proletariat exists but in name, and the pitiful cry for bread, that rings throughout the world unheeded, has died away. This may be hastened by the spread of learning,

564 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and by new openings for work and emigration, with better prospects than exist now, and on some new continent that may appear. Then only will “Keely’s Motor and Force,” as originally contemplated by himself and friends, be in demand, because it will be more needed by the poor than by the wealthy.

Meanwhile the force discovered by him will work through wires, and this, if he succeeds, will be quite sufficient in the present generation to make of him the greatest discoverer of this age.

What Mr. Keely says of Sound and Colour is also correct from the Occult stand-point. Hear him talk as though he were the nursling of the “Gods-revealers,” and had gazed all his life into the depths of Father-Mother Æther.

In comparing the tenuity of the atmosphere with that of the etheric flows, obtained by him from his invention for breaking up the molecules of air by vibration, Keely says that:

. . . “It is as platina to hydrogen gas. Molecular separation of air brings us to the first sub-division only; inter-molecular, to the second; atomic, to the third; inter-atomic, to the fourth; etheric, to the fifth; and inter-etheric, to the sixth sub-division, or positive association with luminiferous ether.⁵⁸⁷ In my introductory argument I have contended that this is the vibratory envelope of all atoms. In my definition of atom I do not confine myself to the sixth subdivision where this luminiferous ether is developed in its crude form as far as my researches prove.⁵⁸⁸ I think this idea will be pronounced by the physicists of the present day, a wild freak of the imagination. Possibly, in time, a light may fall upon this theory that will bring its simplicity forward for scientific research. At present I can only compare it to some planet in a dark space, where the light of the sun of science has not yet reached it. . .”

“I assume that sound, like odour, is a real substance of unknown and wonderful tenuity, emanating from a body where it has been induced by percussion and throwing out absolute corpuscles of matter, inter-atomic particles, with velocity of 1,120 feet per second; in vacuo 20,000. The substance which is thus disseminated is a part and parcel of the mass agitated, and, if kept under this agitation continuously, would, in the course of a certain cycle of time, become thoroughly absorbed by the atmosphere; or, more truly, would pass through the atmosphere to an elevated point of tenuity corresponding to the condition of sub-division that governs its liberation from its parent body.” . . .

“The sounds from vibratory forks, set so as to produce etheric chords, while disseminating their tones (compound), permeate most thoroughly all substances that come under the range of their atomic bombardment. The clapping of a bell in vacuo liberates these atoms with the same velocity and volume as one in the open air; and were the agitation of the bell kept up continuously for a few millions of centuries it would

 

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565 THE SECRETS OF SOUND AND ODOUR.

thoroughly return to its primitive element; and, if the chamber were hermetically sealed, and strong enough, the vacuous volume surrounding the bell would be brought to a pressure of many thousands of pounds to the square inch, by the tenuous substance evolved. In my estimation, sound truly defined is the disturbance of atomic equilibrium, rupturing actual atomic corpuscles; and the substance thus liberated must certainly be a certain order of etheric flow. Under these conditions, is it unreasonable to suppose that, if this flow were kept up, and the body thus robbed of its element, it would in time disappear entirely? All bodies are formed primitively from this highly tenuous ether, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and they are only returned to their high gaseous condition when brought under a state of differential equilibrium.” . . .

“As regards odour, we can only get some definite idea of its extreme and wondrous tenuity by taking into consideration that a large area of atmosphere can be impregnated for a long series of years from a single grain of musk; which, if weighed after that long interval, will be found to be not appreciably diminished. The great paradox attending the flow of odorous particles is that they can be held under confinement in a glass vessel! Here is a substance of much higher tenuity than the glass that holds it, and yet it cannot escape. It is as a sieve with its meshes large enough to pass marbles, and yet holding fine sand which cannot pass through; in fact, a molecular vessel holding an atomic substance. This is a problem that would confound those who stop to recognize it. But infinitely tenuous as odour is, it holds a very crude relation to the substance of sub-division that governs a magnetic flow (a flow of sympathy, if you please to call it so). This sub-division comes next to sound, but is above sound. The action of the flow of a magnet coincides somewhat to the receiving and distributing portion of the human brain, giving off at all times a depreciating ratio of the amount received. It is a grand illustration of the control of mind over matter, which gradually depreciates the physical till dissolution takes place. The magnet on the same ratio gradually loses its power and becomes inert. If the relations that exist between mind and matter could be equated and so held, we would live on in our physical state eternally, as there would be no physical depreciation. But this physical depreciation leads, at its terminus, to the source of a much higher development—viz., the liberation of the pure ether from the crude molecular; which, in my estimation, is to be much desired.”—(From Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore’s paper, “The New Philosophy.” )

It may be remarked that, save a few small divergencies, no Adept nor Alchemist could have explained the above any better, in the light of modern Science, however much the latter may protest against the novel views. This is, in all its fundamental principles, if not details, Occultism pure and simple, yet withal, modern natural philosophy as well.

This “New Force,” or whatever Science may call it, the effects of which are undeniable—admitted by more than one naturalist and physicist who has visited Mr. Keely’s laboratory and witnessed personally its tremendous effects—what is it? Is it a “mode of motion,” also, “in Vacuo,” since there is no matter to generate it except Sound—another “mode of motion,” no doubt, a sensation caused like

566‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

colour by vibrations? Fully as we believe in these vibrations as the proximate—the immediate—cause of such sensations, we as absolutely reject the one-sided scientific theory that there is no factor to be considered as external to us, other than etheric or atmospheric vibrations.⁵⁸⁹

There is a transcendental set of causes put in motion—so to speak—in the occurrence of these phenomena, which, not being in relation to our narrow range of cognition, can only be traced to their source and their nature, and understood by the Spiritual faculties of the Adept. They are, as Asclepios puts it to the King, “incorporeal corporealities”—such as “appear in the mirror,” and “abstract forms” that we see, hear, and smell, in our dreams, and visions. What have the “modes of motion,” light, and ether to do with these? Yet we see, hear, and smell, and touch them, ergo they are as much realities to us in our dreams, as any other thing on this plane of Maya.

———

§ XI. ON THE ELEMENTS AND ATOMS,

FROM THE STAND-POINT OF SCIENCE AND THAT OF OCCULTISM.

When the Occultist speaks of “Elements,” and of human Beings who lived during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as impossible to determine, according to the opinion of one of the best

 

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567 METAPHYSICAL CHEMISTRY.

English geologists⁵⁹⁰, as the nature of matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he says “Man” and Elements, he neither means “man” in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the elemental atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, the entitative abstractions of matter in its highly attenuated state, as existing at present in scientific minds; nor, again, the compound Elements of antiquity. In Occultism the word Element means “rudiment” in every case. When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proëmial, incipient sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that form which now lies latent in physical man during his life-time, and takes shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or that form which for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an “Elementary.”⁵⁹¹ With regard to “Element,” when the term is used metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient divine man; and, in its physical usage, inchoate matter in its first undifferentiated condition, or in the laya state, which is the eternal and the normal condition of substance, differentiating only periodically, and is during that differentiation in an abnormal state—in other words, a transitory illusion of the senses.

As to the “elemental atoms,” so called, the Occultists refer to them by that name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by the Hindu to Brahmâ when he calls him Anu, the “Atom.” Every elemental atom, in search of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the Alchemists, is, in their firm belief (when not knowledge), a soul; not necessarily a disembodied soul, but a jiva, as the Hindus call it, a centre of potential vitality, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the case of compound Souls—an intelligent active existence, from the highest to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It requires a metaphysician—and an Eastern metaphysician—to understand our meaning. All those atom-Souls are differentiations from the one, and in the same relation to it as the divine Soul—the Buddhi—to its informing and inseparable Spirit, or Atman.

Modern physics, while borrowing from the ancients their atomic theory, forgot one point, the most important of the doctrine; hence they got only the husks and will never be able to get at the kernel. They left behind, in the adoption of physical atoms, the suggestive fact that

 

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568 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

from Anaxagoras down to Epicurus, the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all those Philosophers believed more or less in animated atoms, not in invisible specks of so-called “brute” matter. Rotatory motion was generated in their views, by larger (read, more divine and pure) atoms forcing downwards other atoms; the lighter ones being thrust simultaneously upward. The esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve downward and upward of differentiated elements through intercyclic phases of existence, until each reaches again its starting point or birthplace. The idea was metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing “gods” or souls, in the shape of atoms, as the causes of all the effects produced on Earth by the secretions from the divine bodies.⁵⁹² No ancient philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated Spirit from matter or vice versâ. Everything originated in the one, and, proceeding from the one, must finally return to the One. “Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which, from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth. And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter”;⁵⁹³ Atoms and Souls having been synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The “whirling Souls,” Gilgoolem, a doctrine in which so many learned Jews have believed (See Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopædia), had no other meaning esoterically. The learned Jewish Initiates never meant by the “Promised land” Palestine alone, but the same Nirvana as the learned Buddhist and Brahmin do—the bosom of the Eternal One, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its substitute on Earth.⁵⁹⁴ The passage of the Soul-Atom “through the Seven Planetary Chambers” had the same metaphysical and also physical meaning. It had the latter when it was said to dissolve into Ether (See Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., p. 297.) Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and materialist, knew and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that he taught that the

 

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569 PANTHEISM VERSUS MATERIALISM.

Soul (entirely distinct from immortal Spirit when the former is enshrined latent in it, as it is in every atomic speck), was composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms.

And this shows that the ancient Initiates, who were followed more or less closely by all profane antiquity, meant by the term “atom,” a Soul, a Genius or Angel, the first-born of the ever-concealed cause of all causes; and in this sense their teachings become comprehensible. They claimed, as do their successors, the existence of Gods and Genii, angels or “demons,” not outside, or independent of, the Universal Plenum, but within it. Only this Plenum, during the life-cycles, is infinite. They admitted and taught a good deal of that which modern Science teaches now—namely, the existence of a primordial “World-stuff or Cosmic Substance,” from which worlds are formed, ever and eternally homogeneous, except during its periodic existence, when it differentiates its universal diffusion throughout infinite space; and the gradual formation of sidereal bodies from it. They taught the revolution of the Heavens, the Earth’s rotation, the Heliocentric System, and the Atomic Vortices—Atoms—in reality Souls and intelligences. But those “Atomists” were spiritual, most transcendental, and philosophical Pantheists. It is not they who would have ever conceived, or dreamt that monstrous contrasted progeny, the nightmare of our modern civilized Race; namely—inanimate material, self-guiding atoms, on the one hand, and an extra-Cosmic God on the other.

It may be useful to show what, in the teachings of the old Initiates, the Monad was, and what its origin.

Modern exact Science, as soon as it began to grow out of its teens, perceived the great, and, to it, hitherto esoteric axiom, that nothing—whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of being—could come into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested universe without its adequate effects, whether in space or time; nor can there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its existence to a still higher one—the final and absolute cause having to remain to man for ever an incomprehensible Causeless Cause. But even this is no solution, and must be viewed, if at all, from the highest philosophical and metaphysical standpoints, otherwise the problem had better be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which human reason—however trained to metaphysical subtleties—trembles, threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any European who would undertake to solve the problem of existence by the articles of faith of the true Vedantin, for instance. Let him read and study the sublime teachings on the subject of Soul and Spirit, of

570 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Sankarâchârya (Viveka Chudâmani),⁵⁹⁵ and the reader will realize what is now said.

While the Christian is taught that the human soul is a breath of God—being created by him for sempiternal existence, i.e., having a beginning, but no end (and therefore never to be called eternal)—the Occult teaching says, “Nothing is created, but is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in this universe—from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought—that was not in the universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal is; as everything on the objective plane is an ever becoming—because transitory.”

The monad—a truly “indivisible thing,” as defined by Good, who did not give it the sense we now do—is here rendered as the Atma in conjunction with Buddhi and the higher Manas. This trinity is one and eternal, the latter being absorbed in the former at the termination of all conditioned and illusive life. The monad, then, can be traced through the course of its pilgrimage and its changes of transitory vehicles only from the incipient stage of the manifested Universe. In Pralaya, or the intermediate period between two manvantaras, it loses its name, as it loses it when the real one self of man merges into Brahm in cases of high Samadhi (the Turiya state) or final Nirvana; “when the disciple” in the words of Sankara, “having attained that primeval consciousness, absolute bliss, of which the nature is truth, which is without form and action, abandons this illusive body that has been assumed by the atma just as an actor (abandons) the dress (put on).” For Buddhi (the Anandamaya sheath) is but a mirror which reflects absolute bliss; and, moreover, that reflection itself is yet not free from ignorance, and is not the Supreme Spirit, being subject to conditions, being a spiritual modification of Prakriti, and an effect; Atma alone is the one real and eternal substratum of all—the essence and absolute knowledge—the Kshetragna.⁵⁹⁶ It is called in the Esoteric philosophy “the One Witness,”

 

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571 THE DIAMOND HEART.

and, while it rests in Devachan, is referred to as “the Three Witnesses to Karma.”

Atma (our seventh principle) being identical with the universal Spirit, and man being one with it in his essence, what is then the Monad proper? It is that homogeneous spark which radiates in millions of rays from the primeval “Seven”;—of which seven further on. It is the emanating spark from the uncreated Ray—a mystery. In the esoteric, and even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Adi Buddha (Chogi dangpoi sangye), the One unknown, without beginning or end, identical with Parabrahm and Ain-Soph, emits a bright ray from its darkness.

This is the Logos (the first), or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha (also called Dorjechang). As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his heart—the “diamond heart,” Vajrasattva (Dorjesempa). This is the second logos of creation, from whom emanate the seven (in the exoteric blind the five) Dhyani Buddhas, called the Anupadaka, “the parentless.” These Buddhas are the primeval monads from the world of incorporeal being, the Arupa world, wherein the Intelligences (on that plane only) have neither shape nor name, in the exoteric system, but have their distinct seven names in esoteric philosophy. These Dhyani Buddhas emanate, or create from themselves, by virtue of Dhyana, celestial Selves—the super-human Bodhisattvas. These incarnating at the beginning of every human cycle on earth as mortal men, become occasionally, owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of Humanity, after which they may re-appear as Manushi (human) Buddhas. The Anupadaka (or Dhyani-Buddhas) are thus identical with the Brahminical Manasaputra, “mind-born sons”—whether of Brahmâ or either of the other two Trimurtian Hypostases, hence identical also with the Rishis and Prajâpatis. Thus, a passage is found in Anugîtâ, which, read esoterically, shows plainly, though under another imagery, the same idea and system. It says: “Whatever entities there are in this world, moveable or immoveable, they are the very first to be dissolved (at pralaya); and next the developments produced from the elements (from which the visible Universe is fashioned); and, after these developments (evolved entities), all the elements. Such is the upperward gradation among entities. Gods, Men, Gandharvas, Pisâchas, Asuras, Râkshasas, all have been created by Svabhâva (Prakriti, or plastic nature), not by actions, nor by a cause”—i.e., not by any physical cause.

“These Brâhmanas (the Rishi Prajâpati?), the creators of the world, are born here (on earth) again and again. Whatever is produced from

572 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

them is dissolved in due time in those very five great elements (the five, or rather seven, Dhyani Buddhas, also called “Elements” of Mankind), like billows in the ocean. These great elements are in every way beyond the elements that make up the world (the gross elements). And he who is released even from these five elements (the tanmâtras)⁵⁹⁷ goes to the highest goal.” “The Lord Prajâpati (Brahmâ) created all this by the mind only,” i.e., by Dhyana, or abstract meditation and mystic powers like the Dhyani Buddhas (vide supra). Evidently then, these “Brâhmanas” are identical with the Bodhisattvas (the terrestrial) of the heavenly Dhyani Buddhas. Both, as primordial, intelligent “Elements,” become the creators or the emanators of the monads destined to become human in that cycle; after which they evolve themselves, or, so to say, expand into their own selves as Bodhisattvas or Brâhmanas, in heaven and earth, to become at last simple men—“the creators of the world are born here, on earth again and again” —truly. In the Northern Buddhist system, or the popular exoteric religion, it is taught that every Buddha, while preaching the good law on earth, manifests himself simultaneously in three worlds: in the formless, as Dhyani Buddha, in the World of forms, as a Bodhisattva, and in the world of desire, the lowest (or our world) as a man. Esoterically the teaching differs: The divine, purely Adi-Buddhic monad manifests as the universal Buddhi (the Mahâ-buddhi or Mahat in Hindu philosophies) the spiritual, omniscient and omnipotent root of divine intelligence, the highest anima mundi or the Logos. This descends “like a flame spreading from the eternal Fire, immoveable, without increase or decrease, ever the same to the end” of the cycle of existence, and becomes universal life on the Mundane Plane. From this Plane of conscious Life shoot out, like seven fiery tongues, the Sons of Light (the logoi of Life); then the Dhyani-Buddhas of contemplation: the concrete forms of their formless Fathers—the Seven Sons of Light, still themselves, to whom may be applied the Brahmanical mystic phrase: “Thou art ‘that’—Brahm.” It is from these Dhyani-Buddhas that emanate their chhayas (Shadows) the Bodhisattvas of the celestial realms, the prototypes of the super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas, and of the terrestrial Buddhas, and finally of men. The “Seven Sons of Light” are also called “Stars.”

The star under which a human Entity is born, says the Occult teaching, will remain for ever its star, throughout the whole cycle of its incarnations in one Manvantara. But this is not his astrological star. The latter is concerned and connected with the personality, the former with

 

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573 THE CREST-JEWEL OF WISDOM.

the individuality. The “Angel” of that Star, or the Dhyani-Buddha will be either the guiding or simply the presiding “Angel,” so to say, in every new rebirth of the monad, which is part of his own essence, though his vehicle, man, may remain for ever ignorant of this fact. The adepts have each their Dhyani-Buddha, their elder “twin Soul,” and they know it, calling it “Father-Soul,” and “Father-Fire.” It is only at the last and supreme initiation, however, that they learn it when placed face to face with the bright “Image.” How much has Bulwer Lytton known of this mystic fact when describing, in one of his highest inspirational moods, Zanoni face to face with his Augoeides?

The Logos, or both the unmanifested and the manifested Word, is called by the Hindus, Iswara, “the Lord,” though the Occultists give it another name. Iswara, say the Vedantins, is the highest consciousness in nature. “This highest consciousness,” answer the Occultists, “is only a synthetic unit in the world of the manifested Logos—or on the plane of illusion; for it is the sum total of Dhyan-Chohanic consciousnesses.” “Oh, wise man, remove the conception that not-Spirit is Spirit,” says Sankarâchârya. Atma is not-Spirit in its final Parabrahmic state, Iswara or Logos is Spirit; or, as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity of manifested living Spirits, the parent-source and nursery of all the mundane and terrestrial monads, plus their divine reflection, which emanate from, and return into, the Logos, each in the culmination of its time. There are seven chief groups of such Dhyan Chohans, which groups will be found and recognised in every religion, for they are the primeval seven Rays. Humanity, occultism teaches us, is divided into seven distinct groups and their sub-divisions, mental, spiritual, and physical.⁵⁹⁸ The monad, then, viewed as one, is above the seventh principle (in Kosmos and man), and as a triad, it is the direct radiant progeny of the said compound unit, not the breath (and special creation out of nihil) of “God,” as that unit is called; for such an idea is quite unphilosophical, and degrades Deity, dragging it down to a finite, attributive condition. As well expressed by the translator of the “Crest-Jewel of Wisdom”—though Iswara is “God” “unchanged in the profoundest depths of pralayas and in the intensest activity of the manvantaras” . . ., still “beyond (him) is

 

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574 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

‘Atma,’ round whose pavilion is the darkness of eternal Maya.”⁵⁹⁹ The “triads” born under the same Parent-planet, or rather the radiations of one and the same Planetary Spirit (Dhyani Buddha) are, in all their after lives and rebirths, sister, or “twin-souls,” on this Earth.⁶⁰⁰

This was known to every high Initiate in every age and in every country: “I and my Father are one,” said Jesus (John x. 30).⁶⁰¹ When He is made to say, elsewhere (xx. 17): “I ascend to my Father and your Father,” it meant that which has just been stated. It was simply to show that the group of his disciples and followers attracted to Him belonged to the same Dhyani Buddha, “Star,” or “Father,” again of the same planetary realm and division as He did. It is the knowledge of this occult doctrine that found expression in the review of “The Idyll of the White Lotus,” when Mr. T. Subba Row wrote: “Every Buddha meets at his last initiation all the great adepts who reached Buddhahood during the preceding ages . . . every class of adepts has its own bond of spiritual communion which knits them together. . . . . The only possible and effectual way of entering into such brotherhood . . . . is by bringing oneself within the influence of the Spiritual light which radiates from one’s own Logos. I may further point out here . . . . that such communion is only possible between persons whose souls derive their life and sustenance from the same divine ray, and that, as seven distinct rays radiate from the ‘Central Spiritual Sun,’ all adepts and Dhyan Chohans are divisible into seven classes, each of which is guided, controlled, and overshadowed by one of the seven forms or manifestations of the divine Wisdom.” (“Theosophist,” Aug., 1886.)

 

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575 WHAT ARE THE SEVEN PLANETS?

It is then the “Seven Sons of Light”—called after their planets and (by the rabble) often identified with them—namely Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and—presumably for the modern critic, who goes no deeper than the surface of old religions⁶⁰²—the Sun and Moon, which are, according to the Occult teachings, our heavenly Parents, or “Father,” synthetically. Hence, as already remarked, polytheism is really more philosophical and correct, as to fact and nature, than anthropomorphic monotheism. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, the four exoteric planets, and the three others, which must remain unnamed, were the heavenly bodies in direct astral and psychic communication with the Earth, its Guides, and Watchers—morally and physically; the visible orbs furnishing our Humanity with its outward and inward characteristics, and their “Regents” or Rectors with our Monads and spiritual faculties. In order to avoid creating new misconceptions, let it be stated that among the three secret orbs (or star-angels) neither Uranus nor Neptune entered; not only because they were unknown under these names to the ancient Sages, but because they, as all other planets, however many there may be, are the gods and guardians of other septenary chains of globes within our systems.

Nor do the two last discovered great planets depend entirely on the Sun like the rest of the planets. Otherwise, how explain the fact that Neptune receives 900 times less light than our Earth, and Uranus 390 times less, and that their satellites show a peculiarity of inverse rotation found in no other planets of the Solar System. At any rate, what we say applies to Uranus, though recently the fact begins again to be disputed.

This subject will, of course, be considered mere vagary by all those who confuse the universal order of being with their own systems of classification. Here, however, simple facts from Occult teachings are stated, to be either accepted or rejected, as the case may be. There are details which, on account of their great metaphysical abstractions, cannot be entered upon. Hence, we merely state that only seven of our planets are as intimately related to our globe, as the Sun is to all

 

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576 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the bodies subject to him in his system. Of these bodies the poor little number of primary and secondary planets known to astronomy, looks wretched enough, in truth.⁶⁰³ Therefore, it stands to reason that there are a great number of planets, small and large, that have not been discovered yet, but of the existence of which ancient astronomers—all of them initiated adepts—must have certainly been aware. But, as their relation to the gods was sacred, it had to remain arcane, as also the names of various other planets and stars.

Besides which, even the Roman Catholic theology speaks of “seventy planets that preside over the destinies of the nations of this globe”; and, save the erroneous application, there is more truth in this tradition than in exact modern astronomy. The seventy planets are connected with the seventy elders of the people of Israel (Numb. 11, 16) because the regents of these planets are meant, not the orbs themselves; and the word seventy is a play and a blind upon the 7 × 7 of the subdivisions. Each people and nation, as said already, has its direct Watcher, Guardian and Father in Heaven—a Planetary Spirit. We are willing to leave their own national God, Jehovah, to the descendants of Israel, the worshippers of Sabaoth or Saturn; for, indeed, the monads of the people chosen by him are his own, and the Bible has never made a secret of it. Only the text of the English (Protestant) Bible is, in disagreement, as usual, with those of the Septuagint and the Vulgate. Thus, while in the former one reads (in Deuter. xxxii., 8 and 9 ) “When the most high (not Jehovah) divided to the nations their inheritance . . . he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel,” in the Septuagint the text reads “according to the number of the Angels” (Planet-Angels), which is more concordant with truth and fact. Moreover, all the texts agree that “the Lord’s (Jehovah) portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance” (Deut. xxxii. 9); and this settles the question. The “Lord” Jehovah took for his portion Israel—what have other nations to do with that particular national Deity? Let then, the “angel Gabriel” watch over Iran and “Mikael-Jehovah” over the Hebrews. These are not the gods of other nations, and it is difficult to see why Christians

 

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577 CYCLIC FALL OF THE GODS.

should have selected a god against whose commandments Jesus was the first one to rise in rebellion.

The Planetary origin of the Monad (Soul) and of its faculties was taught by the Gnostics. On its way to the Earth, as on its way back from the Earth, each soul born in, and from, the “Boundless Light,”⁶⁰⁴ had to pass through the seven planetary regions both ways. The pure Dhyani and Devas of the oldest religions had become, in course of time, with the Zoroastrians, the Seven Devs, the ministers of Ahriman, “each chained to his planet” (see Origen’s Copy of the Chart); with the Brahmins, the Asuras and some of its Rishis—good, bad and indifferent; and among the Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth or (Hermes) who was the chief of the seven whose names are given by Origen as Adonai, genius of the Sun; Tao, of the Moon; Eloi, of Jupiter; Sabao, of Mars; Orai, of Venus; Astaphai, of Mercury; and Ildabaoth (Jehovah), of Saturn. Finally, the Pistis-Sophia, which the greatest modern authority on exoteric Gnostic beliefs, the late Mr. C. W. King, refers to as “that precious monument of Gnosticism,”—this old document echoes, while distorting it to sectarian purposes, the archaic belief of the ages. The Astral Rulers of the Spheres (the planets) create the monads (the Souls) from their own substance “out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments,” endowing the monads with a spark of the Divine Light, which is their substance. It will be shown in Book II. why these “Lords of the Zodiac and Spheres” have been transformed by sectarian theology into the rebellious angels of the Christians, who took them from the Seven Devs of the Magi, without understanding the significance of the allegory. (Vide Part II., “On the Seven Souls,” and Section xv. in this Part, “Gods, Monads and Atoms”).

As usual, that which is and was from its beginning divine, pure, and spiritual in its earliest unity, became, by reason of its differentiation by the distorted prism of man’s conceptions, human and impure, as reflecting man’s own sinful nature. Thus, in time, the planet Saturn became reviled by the worshippers of other “gods.” The nations born under Saturn—the Jewish, for instance—with whom he had become Jehovah, after having been held as a son of Saturn, or Ilda-Baoth, by the Ophites, and in the book of Jasher—were eternally fighting with those born under Jupiter, Mercury, or any other planet, except Saturn-Jehovah; genealogies and prophecies notwithstanding, Jesus the initiate (or Jehoshua)—the type from whom the “historical” Jesus was

 

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578 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

copied—was not of pure Jewish blood, and thus recognised no Jehovah; nor did he worship any planetary god beside his own “Father,” whom he knew, and with whom he communed as every high initiate does, “Spirit to Spirit and Soul to Soul.” This can hardly be taken exception to, unless the critic explains to every one’s satisfaction the strange sentences put in the mouth of Jesus by the author of the Fourth Gospel (chapter viii.) during his disputes with the Pharisees.

“I know ye are Abraham’s seed⁶⁰⁵ . . . I speak the things which I have seen with my Father; and ye do the things which ye heard from your Father. . . . . Ye do the works of your Father. . . . . Ye are of your Father, the Devil. . . . . He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When one speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own; for his father also is a liar and the father thereof,” etc., etc.

That “Father” of the Pharisees was Jehovah, because identical with Cain, Saturn, Vulcan, etc.—the planet under which they were born, and the God whom they worshipped. Evidently there must be an occult meaning sought in these words and admonitions, however mistranslated, since they are pronounced by one who threatened with hell-fire anyone who says simply raca (fool) to his brother (Matthew v., 22). And evidently, again, the planets are not merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but the domains of various beings with whom the profane are so far unacquainted; nevertheless, having a mysterious, unbroken, and powerful connection with men and globes. Every heavenly body is the temple of a god, and these gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown “Not Spirit.” There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:

“Each of these Stars is a religious house.” . . . .

Thus can all exoteric religions be shown the falsified copies of the esoteric teaching. It is the priesthood which has to be held responsible for the reaction in favour of materialism of our day. It is by worshiping and enforcing on the the masses the worship of the shells—personified for purposes of allegory—of pagan ideals, that the latest exoteric religion has made of Western lands a Pandemonium, in which the higher classes worship the golden calf, and the lower and ignorant masses are made to worship an idol with feet of clay.

 

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579 ANTIQUITY OUR GREAT MASTER.‌

§ XII. ANCIENT THOUGHT IN MODERN DRESS.

Modern Science is ancient thought distorted, and no more. We have seen, however, what intuitional scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader may be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.

With regard to cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are undeniably ancient thought, improved by contradictory theories of recent origin. But the whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic astronomy and physics, in those days always called philosophy. In all the Aryan and Greek speculations, one meets with the conception of an all-pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous matter, or Chaos, re-named by modern scientists “Nebular condition of the world-stuff.” What Anaxagoras called “Chaos” in his Homoiomeria is now called “primitive fluid” by Sir W. Thomson. The Hindu and Greek Atomists—Kanada, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc., etc., are now reflected as in a clear mirror, in the supporters of the atomic theory of our modern days, beginning with Leibnitz’s Monads, and ending with the “Vortical Atoms” of Sir W. Thomson.⁶⁰⁶ True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned as was its predecessor? Light from its metaphysical aspect was fully treated of in Isis Unveiled:

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist and the Kabalist. Both are electricity—the life principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine will of the architect,⁶⁰⁷ or rather the architects, the ‘Builders’ (called One collectively), its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that ‘God,’ according to

 

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580 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Plato, ‘lighted a fire which we now call the sun,’⁶⁰⁸ and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialised, are concentrated upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.”

This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated by Dr. Richardson, save the submission of the former to some details of the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory, but assert only that it needs completion and re-arrangement. But the Occultists are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt, F.R.S., remarks, in his Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations, that:

. . . . “the undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments. Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, 1853, p. 402, showing that ‘the colours of vegetable life arise . . . . from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-coloured rays of light,’ and that ‘it is by the light of the sun that the coloured juices of plants are elaborated, that the colours of bodies are changed, etc. . . . .’ remarks that it is not easy to allow ‘that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.’ And he is forced, he says, ‘by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material (?).’ Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he ‘cannot agree . . . . with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science.’⁶⁰⁹ J. Herschel’s doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, ‘is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body,’ if correct, damages a good deal, if it does not kill the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.” (Isis Unveiled.)

To this remark of Sir W. Brewster—“forced to reason as if light was material”—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is certainly as material as electricity itself is. And if electricity is not material, if it is only “a mode of motion,” how is it that it can be stored up in Faure’s accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address to the Chemical Section of the British Association, of which he was President (at Birmingham, 1886). This is what Helmholtz says (in his Faraday Lectures, 1881):

“If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.”

Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section IX. there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto

 

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581 A CHASE AFTER THE PRIMAL MATTER.

occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not excluding astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as chemistry can. Two proofs of it are to be found in the world of Science—two great chemists, each among the greatest in his own country, and these are Mr. Crookes and the late Professor Butlerof: one, a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena; the other, as fervid a Spiritualist as he was great in natural Sciences. It becomes evident that while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever-shrouded worlds, to the mysterious beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its veil. “It is the unknown and the ever unknowable,” warns the Monist-Agnostic. Not so; answers the persevering chemist: “We are on the track and are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tickets unknown.” ⁶¹⁰

A few lines at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis of the Elements—two or three sentences—showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road to the greatest discoveries. He has been overshadowing for some time “the original protyle,” and came to the conclusion that “he who grasps the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of creation.” The protyle, as that great chemist explains:

“. . . is a word analogous to protoplasm, to express the idea of the original primal matter existing before the evolution of the chemical elements. The word I have ventured to use for this purpose is compounded of πρὸ (earlier than) and ὕλη (the stuff of which things are made). The word is scarcely a new coinage, for 600 years ago Roger Bacon wrote in his Arte Chymiae, “The elements are made out of ὕλη and every element is converted into the nature of another element.”

The Knowledge of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old magician⁶¹¹ by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on

 

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582 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

magic and alchemy, having a key to the real meaning of words. But see what Mr. Crookes says of protyle, next neighbour to the unconscious Mulaprakriti of the Occultists:

. . . . . “Let us start at the moment when the first element came into existence. Before this time, matter, as we know it, was not. It is equally impossible to conceive of matter without energy, as of energy without matter; from one point of view both are convertible terms. Before the birth of atoms, all those forms of energy, which become evident when matter acts upon matter, could not have existed⁶¹²—they were locked up in the protyle as latent potentialities only. Coincident with the creation of atoms, all those attributes and properties, which form the means of discriminating one chemical element from another, start into existence fully endowed with energy.” (Presidential Address, p. 16.)

With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the Occultist would put it otherwise. They would say that no atom is ever “created,” for the atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One Atom,—“the atom of atoms”—viewed during Manvantara as the Jagad-Yoni the material causative womb of the world. Pradhâna (unmodified matter), that which is the first form of Prakriti, or material visible, as well as invisible nature, and Purusha, spirit, are eternally one; and they are Nirupadhi, (without adventitious qualities or attributes) only during Pralaya, and when beyond any of the planes of consciousness of existence. The atom, as known to modern science, is inseparable from Purusha, which is spirit, but is now called “Energy” in Science. The protyle atom has not been comminuted or subtilized: it has simply passed into that plane, which is no plane, but the eternal state of everything beyond the planes of illusion. Both Purusha and Pradhâna are immutable and unconsumable, or Aparinâmin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both during the Mayavic periods may be referred to as Vyaya and Parinâmin, or that which can expand, pass away and disappear, and is “modifiable.” In this sense Purusha, must of course, be held distinct in our conceptions from Parabrahmam. Nevertheless that, which is called “energy” or “force” in Science and has been explained as a dual Force by Metcalfe, is never, in fact, and cannot be energy alone; for it is the substance of the world, its soul, the all-permeant “Sarvaga,” in conjunction with Kâla “time.” The three are the trinity in one, during Manvantara, the all-potential Unity, which acts on the plane of illusion (Maya) as three distinct things. In Orphic

 

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583 ALL-POTENTIAL UNITY.

philosophy in Greece they were called Phanes, Chaos, and Chronos—the triad of the Occult philosophers of that period.

But see how closely Mr. Crookes brushes by the “Unknowable,” and what “potentialities” there are for the acceptance of Occult truths in his discoveries. He continues, speaking of the evolution of atoms:

“. . . . Let us pause at the end of the first complete vibration and examine the result. We have already found the elements of water, ammonia, carbonic acid, the atmosphere, plant and animal life, phosphorus for the brain, salt for the seas, clay for the solid earth . . . phosphates and silicates sufficient for a world and inhabitants not so very different from what we enjoy at the present day. True the human inhabitants would have to live in a state of more than Arcadian simplicity, and the absence of calcic phosphate would be awkward as far as the bone is concerned⁶¹³ . . . At the lower end of our curve . . . we see a great hiatus . . . This oasis, and the blanks which precede and follow it, may be referred with much probability to the particular way in which our Earth developed into a member of our solar system. If this be so, it may be that on our Earth only these blanks occur, and not generally throughout the universe.”

This justifies several assertions in the Occult works.

Firstly, “that neither stars nor the sun can be said to be constituted of those terrestrial elements with which the chemist is familiar, though they are all present in the sun’s outward robes—and a host more of elements so far unknown to science.”

Secondly, that our globe has its own special laboratory on the far-away outskirts of its atmosphere, crossing which, every atom and molecule change and differentiate from their primordial nature.

And Thirdly, that though no element present on our earth could ever be possibly found wanting in the sun, there are many others which have either not reached, or not as yet been discovered on, our globe. “Some may be missing in certain stars and heavenly bodies in the process of formation; or, though present in them, these elements, on account of their present state, may not respond as yet to the usual scientific tests.”⁶¹⁴ Mr. Crookes speaks of an element of still lower atomic weight than hydrogen, an element purely hypothetical as far as our earth is concerned . . . though existing in abundance in the chromosphere of the Sun—the helium. Occult Science adds that not one of the elements regarded by chemistry as such really deserves the name.

Again we find Mr. Crookes speaking with approbation of “Dr. Carnelly’s weighty argument in favour of the compound nature of the so-calledelements, from their analogy to the compound radicles!” Hitherto,

 

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584 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

alchemy alone succeeded within the historical periods, and in the so-called civilized countries, in obtaining a real element, or a particle of homogeneous matter, the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus. But then it was before Lord Bacon’s day.⁶¹⁵

“. . . Let us now turn to the upper portion of the scheme. With hydrogen of atomic weight = 1, there is little room for other elements, save, perhaps, for hypothetical Helium. But what if we get ‘through the looking-glass,’ and cross the zero line in search of new principles—what shall we find on the other side of zero? Dr. Carnelly asks for an element of negative atomic weight; here is ample room and verge enough for a shadow series of such unsubstantialities. Helmholtz says that electricity is probably as atomic as matter; is electricity one of the negative elements, and the luminiferous ether another? Matter, as we now know it, does not here exist; the forms of energy which are apparent in the motions of matter are as yet only latent possibilities. A substance of negative weight is not inconceivable.⁶¹⁶ But can we form a clear conception of a body which combines with other bodies in proportions expressible by negative qualities?”⁶¹⁷

“A genesis of the elements such as is here sketched out would not be confined to our little solar system, but would probably follow the same general sequence of events in every centre of energy now visible as a star.”

“Before the birth of atoms to gravitate towards one another, no pressure could be exercised; but at the outskirts of the fire-mist sphere, within which all is protyle—at the shell on which the tremendous forces involved in the birth a chemical element exert full sway—the fierce heat would be accompanied by gravitation sufficient to keep the newly-born elements from flying off into space. As temperature increases, expansion and molecular motion increase, molecules tend to fly asunder, and their chemical affinities become deadened; but the enormous pressure of the gravitation of the mass of atomic matter, outside what I may for brevity call the birth-shell, would counteract the action of heat.”

“Beyond the birth-shell would be a space in which no chemical action could take place, owing to the temperature there being above what is called the dissociation-point for compounds. In this space the lion and the lamb would lie down together; phosphorus and oxygen would mix without union; hydrogen and chlorine would show no tendency to closer bonds; and even fluorine, that

 

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585 THE “SEVENTH” IN CHEMISTRY.

energetic gas which chemlsts have only isolated within the last month or two, would float about free and uncombined.”

“Outside this space of free atomic matter would be another shell, in which the formed chemical elements would have cooled down to the combination point, and the sequence of events so graphically described by Mr. Mattieu Williams in “The Fuel of the Sun” would now take place, culminating in the solid earth and the commencement of geological time” (p. 19).

This is, in a strictly scientific, but beautiful language, the description of the evolution of the differentiated Universe in the secret teachings. The learned gentleman closes his address in words, every sentence of which is like a flash of light from beyond the dark veil of materiality, hitherto thrown upon the exact sciences, and a step forward towards the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Occult. (Vide § XV., “Gods, Monads, and Atoms.”) Thus he says:

“We have glanced at the difficulty of defining an element; we have noticed, too, the revolt of many leading physicists and chemists against the ordinary acceptation of the term element; we have weighed the improbability of their eternal existence,⁶¹⁸ or their origination by chance. As a remaining alternative, we have suggested their origin by a process of evolution like that of the heavenly bodies according to Laplace, and the plants and animals of our globe according to Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace.⁶¹⁹ In the general array of the elements, as known to us, we have seen a striking approximation to that of the organic world.⁶²⁰ In lack of direct evidence of the decomposition of any element, we have sought and found indirect evidence . . . . We have next glanced at the view of the genesis of the elements; and lastly we have reviewed a scheme of their origin suggested by Professor Reynold’s method of illustrating the periodic classification⁶²¹ . . . Summing up all the above considerations we cannot,

 

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586 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

indeed, venture to assert positively that our so-called elements have been evolved from one primordial matter; but we may contend that the balance of evidence, I think, fairly weighs in favour of this speculation.”

Thus inductive Science, in its Branches of Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, while advancing timidly towards the conquest of Nature’s secrets in her final effects on our terrestrial plane, recedes to the days of Anaxagoras and the Chaldees in its discoveries of (a) the origin of our phenomenal world, and (b) the modes of formation of the bodies that compose the universe. And having to turn back for their cosmogonical hypotheses to the beliefs of the earliest philosophers, and the systems of the latter—systems that were all based on the teachings of a universal secret doctrine with regard to the primeval matter with its properties, functions, and laws,—have we not the right to hope that the day is not far off when Science will show a better appreciation of the wisdom of the ancients than it has hitherto done?

No doubt Occult philosophy could learn a good deal from exact modern science; but the latter, on the other hand, might profit by ancient learning in more than one way, and chiefly in Cosmogony. For

587 PURANAS VERSUS ROYAL SOCIETY.

instance, the mystical signification, alchemical and transcendental, of the many imponderable substances that fill interplanetary space, and which, interpenetrating each, are the direct cause, at the lower end, of the production of natural phenomena manifesting through vibration (so-called). The knowledge of the real (not the hypothetical) nature of Ether, or rather of the Akâsa, and other mysteries, in short, can alone lead to the knowledge of Forces. It is that substance against which the materialistic school of the physicists rebels with such fury, especially in France,⁶²² and which exact Science has to advocate notwithstanding. They cannot make away with it without incurring the risk, like a modern Samson, of pulling down the pillars of the Temple of Science, and getting buried under its roof.

The theories built upon the rejection of Force outside and independent of Matter pure and simple, have been all shown fallacious. They do not, and cannot, cover the ground, and many of the scientific data are thus proved unscientific. “Ether produced Sound” is said in the Purânas, and the statement is laughed at. It is the vibrations in the air, we are corrected. And what is air? Could it exist if there were no etheric medium in Space to buoy up its molecules? The case stands simply thus. Materialism cannot admit the existence of anything outside matter, because with the acceptance of an imponderable Force—the source and head of all the physical Forces—other intelligent Forces would have to be admitted virtually, and that would lead Science very far. For it would have to accept as a sequel the presence in Man of a still more spiritual power—entirely independent, for once, of any kind of matter physicists know anything about. Hence, apart from an hypothetical ether of Space and gross physical bodies, the whole Sidereal and unseen Space is, in the sight of the materialists, one boundless void in nature—blind, unintelligent, useless.

And now the next question is: What is that Cosmic Substance, and how far can one go to suspect its nature or to wrench from it its secrets, and thus feel justified in giving it a name? How far, especially, has modern Science gone in the direction of those secrets, and what it is doing to solve them. The latest hobby of Science, the “Nebular Theory,” may afford us some answer to this question. Let us then examine the credentials of the Nebular Theory.

 

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588‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ XIII. SCIENTIFIC AND ESOTERIC EVIDENCE FOR, AND OBJECTIONS TO, THE MODERN NEBULAR THEORY.

Of late Esoteric Cosmogony has been frequently opposed by the phantom of this theory and its ensuing hypotheses. “Can this most scientific teaching be denied by your adepts?” it is asked. “Not entirely,” is the reply, “but the admissions of the men of Science themselves kill it; and there remains nothing for the adepts to deny.”

To make of Science an integral whole necessitates, indeed, the study of spiritual and psychic, as well as physical Nature. Otherwise it will ever be like the anatomy of man, discussed of old by the profane from the point of view of his shell-side and in ignorance of the interior work. Even Plato, the greatest philosopher of his country, became guilty, before his initiation, of such statements as that liquids pass into the stomach through the lungs. Without metaphysics, as Mr. H. J. Slack says, real science is inadmissible.

The nebulæ exist; yet the nebular theory is wrong. A nebula exists in a state of entire elemental dissociation. It is gaseous and—something else besides, which can hardly be connected with gases, as known to physical science; and it is self-luminous. But that is all. The sixty-two “coincidences” enumerated by Professor Stephen Alexander,⁶²³ confirming the nebular theory, may all be explained by esoteric science; though, as this is not an astronomical work, the refutations are not attempted at present. Laplace and Faye come nearer to the correct theory than any; but of the speculations of Laplace there remains little in the present theory except its general features. Nevertheless, “there is in Laplace’s theory,” says John Stuart Mill, “nothing hypothetical; it is an example of legitimate reasoning from present effect to its past cause; it assumes nothing more than that objects which really exist, obey the laws which are known to be obeyed by all terrestrial objects resembling them.” (System of Logic, p. 229).

This from such an eminent logician as Mill was, would be valuable, if it could only be proved that “terrestrial objects resembling . . .” celestial objects at such a distance as the nebulæ are—resemble those objects in reality, not alone in appearance.

Another of the fallacies from the Occult stand-point, which are embodied in the modern theory as it now stands, is the hypothesis that the planets were all detached from the Sun; that they are bone of

 

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589 “SO FAR SHALT THOU GO . . . .”

his bone, and flesh of his flesh; whereas, the Sun and planets are only co-uterine brothers, having had the same nebular origin, only in a different mode from that postulated by modern astronomy.

The many objections raised against the homogeneity of original diffuse matter, on the ground of the uniformity in the composition of the fixed stars, by some opponents of the modern nebular theory, do not affect the question of that homogeneity at all, but only the said theory. Our solar nebula may not be completely homogeneous, or, rather, it may fail to reveal itself as such to the astronomers, and yet be de facto homogeneous. The stars do differ in their constituent materials and even exhibit elements quite unknown on earth; nevertheless, this does not affect the point that primeval matter—i.e., as it appeared even in its first differentiation from its laya condition⁶²⁴—is yet to this day homogeneous, at immense distances, in the depths of infinitude, and likewise at points not far removed from the outskirts of our solar system.

Finally, there does not exist one single fact brought forward by the learned objectors against the “nebular theory,” (false as it is, and hence, illogically enough, fatal to the hypothesis of the homogeneity of matter,) that can withstand criticism. One error leads into another. A false premise will naturally lead to a false conclusion, although an inadmissible inference does not necessarily affect the validity of the major proposition of the syllogism. Thus, one may leave every side-issue and inference from the evidence of spectra, and lines, as simply provisional for the present, and abandon all matters of detail to physical science. The duty of the Occultist lies with the Soul and Spirit of Cosmic Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and behaviour. That of official physical science is to analyze and study its shell—the Ultima Thule of the Universe and man, in the opinion of Materialism.

With the latter, Occultism has nought to do. It is only with the theories of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir W. Herschel, who believed in a Spiritual world, that Occult Cosmogony might treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But the views of those physicists differed vastly from the latest modern speculations. Kant and Herschel had in their mind’s eye speculations upon the origin and the final destiny, as well as the present aspect, of the Universe, from a far more philosophical and psychic standpoint; whereas modern Cosmology and Astronomy now repudiate anything like research into the mysteries of being. The result is what might be expected: complete failure and inextricable contradictions in the thousand and one varieties of so-called scientific theories, and in this theory as in all others.

The nebular hypothesis, involving the theory of the existence of a

 

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590 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

primeval matter, diffused in a nebulous condition, is of no modern date in astronomy as everyone knows. Anaximenes, of the Ionian school, had already taught that the sidereal bodies were formed through the progressive condensation of a primordial pregenetic matter, which had almost a negative weight, and was spread out through Space in an extremely sublimated condition.

Tycho Brahe, who viewed the Milky Way as an ethereal substance, thought the new star that appeared in Cassiopeia, in 1572, had been formed out of that matter (Astronomiæ Instauratæ Progymnasmata, 1610, p. 795). Kepler believed the star of 1604 had been likewise formed out of the ethereal substance that fills the universe (De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii, 1606, p. 115). He attributed to that same ether the apparition of a luminous ring around the moon, during the total eclipse of the sun observed at Naples in 1605. Still later, in 1716,—the existence of a self-luminous matter was recognised by Halley (Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 29, No. 347 (Jan. 1716), p. 390). Finally, the journal of this name published in 1811 the famous hypothesis on the transformation of the nebulæ into stars, by the eminent astronomer, Sir W. Herschel (Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 101 (1811), p. 269 et. seq.), after which the nebular theory was accepted by the Royal Academies. (See C. Wolf, Les Hypothèses Cosmogoniques, 1886, p. 2.)

In “Five years of Theosophy,” on p. 245, an article headed “Do the Adepts deny the Nebular Theory?” may be read. The answer there given is “No; they do not deny its general propositions, nor the approximative truth of the scientific hypotheses. They only deny the completeness of the present, as well as the entire error of the many so-called “exploded” old theories, which, during the last century, have followed each other in such rapid succession.”

This was proclaimed at the time “an evasive answer.” Such disrespect to official science, it was argued, must be justified by the presentation, to replace the orthodox speculation, of another theory more complete than theirs, and having a firmer ground to stand upon. To this there is but one reply; it is useless to give out isolated theories with regard to things embodied in a whole and consecutive system, which, when separated from the main body of the teaching, would necessarily lose their vital coherence and thus do no good when studied independently. To be able to appreciate and accept the occult views on the nebular theory, one has to study the whole esoteric cosmogonical system. And the time has hardly arrived for the astronomers to be asked to accept Fohat and the divine Builders. Even the undeniably correct surmises of Sir W. Herschel, that had nothing “supernatural” in them, about the sun being called “globe of fire” (perhaps) metaphorically, and his early speculations about the nature of that which is now called the Nasmyth willow-leaf theory—caused that most eminent of all astro-

591 FORCES ARE EMANATIONS.

nomers to be smiled at by other, far less eminent colleagues, who saw and now see in his ideas only “imaginative and fanciful theories.” Before the whole esoteric system could be given out and appreciated by the astronomers, they would have to return to some of those “antiquated ideas,” not only to those of Herschel, but to the dreams of the oldest Hindu astronomers, and to abandon their own theories, none the less “fanciful” because they have appeared in one case nearly 80 years and in the other many thousands of years later. Foremost of all they would have to repudiate the ideas on the Sun’s solidity and incandescence; the sun “glowing” most undeniably, but not “burning.” Then it is stated, with regard to Sir W. Herschel’s view that those “objects,” as he called the “willow leaves,” are the immediate sources of the solar light and heat. And though the esoteric teaching does not regard these as he did—namely, organisms as partaking of the nature of life,” for the Solar “Beings” will hardly place themselves within telescopic focus—yet it asserts that the whole Universe is full of such “organisms,” conscious and active according to the proximity or distance of their planes to, or from, our plane of consciousness; and that finally the great astronomer was right in saying that “we do not know that vital action is competent to develop at once heat, light, and electricity” while speculating on those supposed “organisms.” For, at the risk of being laughed at by the whole world of physicists, the Occultists maintain that all the “Forces” of the Scientists have their origin in the Vital Principle, the one life collectively of our Solar system—that “life” being a portion, or rather one of the aspects of the One Universal life.

We may, therefore, as in the article under consideration, wherein, on the authority of the Adepts, it was maintained that it is “sufficient to make a résumé of what the solar physicists do not know,”—we may, we maintain, define our position with regard to the modern nebular theory and its evident incorrectness, by simply pointing out facts diametrically opposed to it in its present form. And to begin with, what does it teach?

Summarizing the aforesaid hypotheses, it becomes plain that Laplace’s theory—now made quite unrecognisable, moreover—was an unfortunate one. He postulates in the first place Cosmic matter, existing in a state of diffuse nebulosity “so fine that its presence could hardly have been suspected.” No attempt is made by him to penetrate into the arcana of being, except as regards the immediate evolution of our small solar system.

Consequently, whether one accepts or rejects his theory in its bearing upon the immediate cosmological problems presented for solution, he can only be said to have thrown back the mystery a little further. To the eternal query—“Whence matter itself; whence the evolutionary impetus

592 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

determining its cyclic aggregations and dissolutions; whence the exquisite symmetry and order into which the primeval atoms arrange and group themselves?”—no answer is attempted by Laplace. All we are confronted with, is a sketch of the probable broad principles on which the actual process is assumed to be based. Well, and what is this now celebrated note on the said process? What has he given so wonderfully new and original, that its ground-work, at any rate, should have served as a basis for the modern nebular theory? This is what one gathers from various astronomical works.

Laplace thought that, consequent on the condensation of the atoms of the primeval nebula, according to the “Law” of gravity, the now gaseous, or perhaps, partially liquid mass, acquired a rotatory motion. As the velocity of this rotation increased, it assumed the form of a thin disc; finally, the centrifugal force overpowering that of cohesion, huge rings were detached from the edge of the whirling incandescent masses, contracting necessarily by gravitation (as accepted) into spheroidal bodies, which would necessarily still continue to preserve the same orbit occupied previously by the outer zone from which they were separated. (“Laplace conceived that the external and internal zones of the ring would rotate with the same angular velocity, which would be the case with a solid ring; but the principle of equal areas requires the inner zones to rotate more rapidly than the outer.”)⁶²⁵ The velocity of the outer edge of each nascent planet, he said, exceeding that of the inner, there results a rotation on its axis. The more dense bodies would be thrown off last; and finally, during the preliminary state of their formation, the newly-segregated orbs in their turn throw off one or more satellites . . . In formulating the history of the rupture and planetation of rings, Laplace says:

“Almost always each ring of vapours must have broken up into numerous masses, which, moving with a nearly uniform velocity, must have continued to circulate at the same distance around the Sun. These masses must have taken a spheroidal form with a motion of rotation in the same direction as their revolution, since the inner molecules (those nearer to the Sun) would have less actual velocity than the exterior ones. They must then have formed as many planets in a state of vapour. But, if one of them was sufficiently powerful to unite successively, by its attraction, all the others around its centre, the ring of vapours must have been thus transformed into a single spheroidal mass of vapours circulating around the Sun with a rotation in the same direction as its revolution. The latter case has been the more common, but the solar system presents us the first case, in the four small planets which move between Jupiter and Mars.”

While few will be found to deny “the magnificent audacity of this

 

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593 UNANSWERABLE QUERIES.

hypothesis,” it is impossible not to recognise the insurmountable difficulties with which it is attended. Why, for instance, do we find that the satellites of Neptune and Uranus display a retrograde motion; that, in spite of its closer proximity to the Sun, Venus is less dense than the Earth? Similarly, the more distant Uranus is more dense than Saturn? How is it that so many variations in the inclination of their axes and orbits are present in the supposed progeny of the central orb; that such startling variations in the size of the planets is noticeable; that the Satellites of Jupiter are more dense by 0.288 than their primary; that the phenomena of meteoric and cometic systems still remain unaccounted for? To quote the words of a Master: “They (the Occultists) find that the centrifugal theory of Western birth is unable to cover all the ground. That, unaided, it can neither account for every oblate spheroid, nor explain away such evident difficulties as are presented by the relative density of some planets. How, indeed, can any calculation of centrifugal force explain to us, for instance, why Mercury, whose rotation is, we are told, only about one-third that of the Earth, and its density only about one-fourth greater than the Earth, should have a polar compression more than ten times as great as the latter? And again, why Jupiter, whose equatorial rotation is said to be ‘twenty-seven times greater, and its density only about one-fifth that of the earth’ should have its polar compression seventeen times greater than that of the earth? Or why Saturn, with an equatorial velocity fifty-five times greater than Mercury for centripetal force to contend with, should have its polar compression only three times greater than Mercury’s? To crown the above contradictions, we are asked to believe in the Central Forces, as taught by Modern Science, even when told that the equatorial matter of the Sun, with more than four times the centrifugal velocity of the Earth’s equatorial surface, and only about one-fourth part of the gravitation of the equatorial matter, has not manifested any tendency to bulge at the Solar equator, nor shown the least flattening of the poles of the Solar axis. In other and clearer words, the Sun, with only one fourth of our Earth’s density for the centrifugal force to work upon, has no polar compression at all! We find this objection made by more than one astronomer, yet never explained away satisfactorily so far as the ‘Adepts’ are aware.”

“Therefore, do they (the Adepts) say, that the great men of science of the West, knowing . . . . . next to nothing either about cometary matter, centrifugal and centripetal forces, the nature of the nebulæ, or the physical constitution of the Sun, the Stars, or even the Moon, are imprudent to speak as confidently as they do about the ‘central mass of the Sun’ whirling out into space planets, comets, and what not . . . .” “We maintain that it (the Sun) evolves out only the life-principle, the

594 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Soul of those bodies, giving and receiving it back, in our solar system, as the ‘Universal Life-Giver’ . . . . in infinitude and Eternity; that the solar system is as much the microcosm of the one Macrocosm as man is the former when compared with his own little Solar Cosmos.”⁶²⁶

The essential faculty possessed by all the cosmic and terrestrial elements, of generating within themselves a regular and harmonious series of results, a concatenation of causes and effects, is an irrefutable proof that they are either animated by an extra or intra intelligence, or conceal such within or behind the manifested veil. Occultism does not deny the certainty of the mechanical origin of the Universe; it only claims the absolute necessity of mechanicians of some sort behind those Elements (or within)—a dogma with us. It is not the fortuitous assistance of the atoms of Lucretius, who himself knew better, that built the Kosmos and all in it. Nature herself contradicts such a theory. Celestial space, containing matter so attenuated as is Ether, cannot be called on, with or without attraction, to explain the common motion of the sidereal hosts. Although the perfect accord of their mutual revolution indicates clearly the presence of a mechanical cause in Nature, Newton, who of all men had best right to trust to his deductions and views, was nevertheless forced to abandon the idea of ever explaining, by the laws of known Nature and its Material forces, the original impulse given to the millions of orbs. He recognised fully the limits that separate the action of natural Forces from that of the Intelligences that set the immutable laws into order and action. And if a Newton had to renounce such hope, which of the modern materialistic pigmies has the right of saying: “I know better”?

To become complete and comprehensible, a cosmogonical theory has to start with a primordial Substance diffused throughout boundless Space, of an intellectual and divine Nature. That substance must be the Soul and Spirit, the Synthesis and Seventh Principle of the manifested Kosmos, and, to serve as a spiritual Upadhi to this, there must be the sixth, its vehicle—primordial physical matter, so to speak, though its nature must escape for ever our limited normal senses. It is easy for an astronomer, if endowed with an imaginative faculty, to build a theory of the emergence of the universe out of chaos, by simply applying to it the principles of mechanics. But such a universe will always prove, with respect to its scientific human creator, a Frankenstein’s monster; it will lead him into endless perplexities. The application of the mechanical laws only can never carry the speculator beyond the objective world; nor will it unveil to men the origin and final destiny of Kosmos. This is

 

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595 WHAT ARE THE NEBULÆ?

whither the nebular theory has led Science. In sober fact and truth this theory is twin sister to that of Ether, and both are the offsprings of necessity; one as indispensable to account for the transmission of light, as the other to explain the problem of the origin of the solar systems. The question with them is, how the same homogeneous matter⁶²⁷ could, obeying the laws of Newton, give birth to bodies—sun, planets, and their satellites—subject to conditions of identity of motion and formed of such heterogeneous elements.

Has the nebular theory helped to solve the problem, even if applied solely to bodies considered as inanimate and material? We say most decidedly not. What progress has it made since 1811, when Sir W. Herschel’s paper, first presenting facts based on observation and showing the existence of nebular matter, made the “Sons” of the Royal Society “shout for joy”? Since then a still greater discovery has permitted, through spectrum analysis, the verification and corroboration of Sir W. Herschel’s conjecture. Laplace demanded some kind of primitive “world stuff” to prove the idea of progressive world-evolution and growth. Here it is, as offered two millenniums ago.

The “world stuff,” now nebulæ, was known from the highest antiquity. Anaxagoras taught that, having differentiated, the subsequent commixture of heterogeneous substances remained motionless and unorganized, until finally “the Mind”—the collective body of Dhyan Chohans, we say—began to work upon and communicated to it motion and order (Aristotle’s “Physica,” viii, 1.) The theory is now taken up in its first portion, that of any “Mind” interfering with it being rejected. Spectrum analysis reveals the existence of nebulæ formed entirely of gases and luminous vapours. Is this the primitive nebular matter? The spectra reveal, it is said, the physical conditions of the matter which emits cosmic light. The spectra of the resolvable and the irresolvable nebulæ are shown to be entirely different, the spectra of the latter showing their physical state to be that of glowing gas or vapour. The bright lines of one nebula reveal the existence of hydrogen in it, and of other material substances known and unknown. The same in the atmospheres of the Sun and stars. This leads to the direct inference that a star is formed by the condensation of a nebula; hence that even the metals themselves on earth are

 

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596 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

formed owing to the condensation of hydrogen or some other primitive matter, some ancestral cousin to “helium,” perhaps, or some yet unknown stuff? This does not clash with the occult teachings. And this is the problem that chemistry is trying to solve; and it must succeed sooner or later in the task, accepting nolens volens, when it does, the esoteric teaching. But when this does happen, it will kill the nebular theory as it now stands.

Meanwhile Astronomy cannot accept in any way, if it is to be regarded as an exact science, the present theory of the filiation of stars—even if occultism does so in its own way, as it explains this filiation differently—because astronomy has not one single physical datum to show for it. Astronomy could anticipate Chemistry in proving the existence of the fact, if it could show a planetary nebula exhibiting a spectrum of three or four bright lines, gradually condensing and transforming into a star, with a spectrum all covered with a number of dark lines. But “the question of the variability of the nebula, even as to their form, is yet one of the mysteries of Astronomy. The data of observation possessed so far are of too recent an origin, too uncertain to permit us to affirm anything.” (Cosmogonical Hypotheses of Wolf.)

Since the discovery of the spectroscope, its magic power has revealed to its adepts only one single transformation of a star of this kind; and even that one showed directly the reverse of what is needed as proof in favour of the nebular theory; namely—a star transforming itself into a planetary nebula. As told in The Observatory (Vol. I., p. 185), the temporary star which appeared in the constellation Cygnus, in November, 1876, discovered by J. F. J. Schmidt, exhibited a spectrum broken by very brilliant lines. Gradually, the continuous spectrum and most of the lines disappeared, leaving finally one single brilliant line, which appeared to coincide with the green line of the nebula.

Though this metamorphosis is not irreconcileable with the hypothesis of the nebular origin of the stars, nevertheless this single solitary case rests on no observation whatever, least of all on direct observation. The occurrence may have been due to several other causes. Since astronomers are inclined to think our planets are tending toward precipitation on the Sun, why should not that star have blazed out owing to a collision of such precipitated planets, or, as many suggest, the appulse of a comet? Anyhow, the only known instance of a star transformation since 1811 is not favourable to the nebular theory. Moreover, on the question of this theory, as in all others, astronomers disagree.

In our own age, it was Buffon, before Laplace ever thought of it, who, very much struck by the identity of motion in the planets, was the first to propose the hypothesis of the planets and their satellites originating in

597 THE META-ELEMENTS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE.

the bosom of the Sun. Forthwith, and for the purpose, he invented a special comet, supposed to have torn out, by a powerful oblique blow, the quantity of matter necessary to their formation. Laplace gave its dues to the “comet” in his “Exposition du Système du Monde.” (Note VII.) But the idea was seized and even improved upon by a conception of the alternate evolution from the Sun’s central mass of planets apparently without weight or influence on the motion of the visible planets—and as evidently without any more existence than the likeness of Moses in the moon.

But the modern theory is also a variation on the systems elaborated by Kant and Laplace. The idea of both was that, at the origin of things, all that matter which now enters into the composition of the planetary bodies was spread over all the space comprised in the solar system—and even beyond. It was a nebula of extremely small density, whose condensation gradually gave birth, by a mechanism that has hitherto never been explained, to the various bodies of our systems. This is the original nebular theory, an incomplete yet faithful repetition—a short chapter out of the large volume of universal esoteric cosmogony—of the teachings in the Secret Doctrine. And both systems, Kant’s and Laplace’s, differ greatly from the modern theory, redundant with conflicting sub-theories and fanciful hypotheses.

“The essence of cometary matter and of that which composes the stars is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which Western Science is now acquainted. While the spectroscope has shown the probable similarity (owing to the chemical action of terrestrial light upon the intercepted rays) of earthly and sidereal substance, the chemical actions, peculiar to the variously progressed orbs of space, have not been detected, nor proven to be identical with those observed on our own planet”—say the Teachers (op. cit.). Mr. Crookes says almost the same in the fragment quoted from his lecture, “Elements and Meta-Elements.”

“At the utmost,” observes C. Wolf,⁶²⁸ “could the nebular hypothesis show in its favour, with W. Herschel, the existence of planetary nebulæ in various degrees of condensation, and of spiral nebulæ, with nuclei of condensation on the branches and centre.⁶²⁹ But, in fact, the knowledge of the bond that unites the nebulæ to the stars is yet denied to us; and lacking as we do direct observation, we are even debarred from establishing it even on the analogy of chemical composition.”

It is evident that, even if the men of science, leaving aside the

 

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598 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

difficulty arising for them out of such undeniable variety and heterogeneity of matter in the constitution of nebulæ, did admit, with the ancients, that the origin of all the visible and invisible heavenly bodies must be sought for in one primordial homogeneous world-stuff, in a kind of pre–protyle,⁶³⁰—it is evident that this would not put an end to their perplexities. Unless they admit also that our actual visible Universe is merely the Sthula-Sharira, the gross body, of the sevenfold Kosmos, they will have to face another problem; especially if they risk maintaining that its now visible bodies are the result of the condensation of that one and single primordial matter. For mere observation shows them that the actions which produced the actual Universe are far more complex than could ever be embraced in that theory.

First of all, there are two distinct classes of irresolvable nebulæ,—as Science itself teaches.

The telescope is unable to distinguish between the two, but the spectroscope can, and notices, therefore, an essential difference between their physical constitutions.⁶³¹

“Some of these,” Wolf tells us, “have a spectrum of three or four bright lines, others a continuous spectrum. The first are gaseous, the others formed of a pulverulent matter. The former must constitute a veritable atmosphere: it is among these that the solar nebula of Laplace has to be placed. The latter form an ensemble of particles that may be considered as independent, and the rotation of which obeys the laws of

 

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599 THE NEBULAR THEORY A ROMANCE.

internal weight: such are the nebulæ adopted by Kant and Faye. Observation allows us to place the one as the other at the very origin of the planetary world. But when we try to go beyond and ascend to the primitive chaos which has produced the totality of the heavenly bodies, we have first to account for the actual existence of these two classes of nebulæ. If the primitive chaos were a cold luminous gas,⁶³² one could understand how the contraction resulting from attraction could have heated it and made it luminous. We have to explain the condensation of this gas to the state of incandescent particles, the presence of which is revealed to us in certain nebulæ by the spectroscope. If the original chaos was composed of such particles, how did certain of their portions pass into the gaseous state, while others have preserved their primitive condition? . . . .”

Such is the synopsis of the objections and difficulties to the acceptance of the nebular theory brought forward by the French savant, who concludes his interesting chapter by declaring that:

“The first part of the Cosmogonical problem,—what is the primitive matter of chaos; and how did that matter give birth to the sun and stars?—thus remains to this day in the domain of romance and of mere imagination.”⁶³³

If this is the last word of Science upon that subject, whither then should one turn in order to learn what the nebular theory is supposed to teach? What, in fact, is this theory? What it is, no one seems to know for a certainty. What it is not—we learn from the erudite author of the “World-Life.” He tells us that:

(I.) It “is not a theory of the evolution of the Universe . . . but only and primarily a genetic explanation of the phenomena of the solar system, and accessorily a co-ordination of the principal phenomena in the stellar and nebular firmament, as far as human vision has been able to penetrate.”

(II.) “That it does not regard the Comets as involved in that particular evolution which has produced the solar system.” (Esoteric doctrine does.) (It does, because it, too, recognises the comets as forms of cosmic existence co-ordinated with earlier stages of nebular evolution; and it actually assigns to them chiefly the formation of all worlds.)

(III.) “That it does not deny an antecedent history of the luminous fire mist”—(the secondary stage of evolution in the Secret Doctrine) . . . . “and makes no claim to having reached an absolute beginning.” And even

 

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600 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

it allows that this “fire mist may have previously existed in a cold, non-luminous and invisible condition” . . . .

(IV.) “And that finally: it does not profess to discover the origin of things, but only a stadium in material history” . . . . leaving “the philosopher and theologian as free as they ever were to seek for the origin of the modes of being.”⁶³⁴

But this is not all. Even the greatest philosopher of England—Mr. Herbert Spencer—arrayed himself against the fantastic theory by saying that (a) “The problem of existence is not resolved” by it; (b) the nebular hypothesis “throws no light upon the origin of diffused matter,” and (c) that “the nebular hypothesis (as it now stands) implies a First Cause.”⁶³⁵

The latter, we are afraid, is more than our modern physicists have bargained for. Thus, it seems that the poor “hypothesis” can hardly expect to find help or corroboration even in the world of the metaphysicians.

Considering all this, the Occultists believe they have a right to present their philosophy, however misunderstood and ostracised it may be at present. And they maintain that this failure of the scientists to discover the truth is entirely due to their materialism and contempt for transcendental sciences. Yet although the scientific minds in our century are as far from the true and correct doctrine of Evolution as ever, there may be still some hope left for the future, as we find another great scientist giving us a faint glimmer of it.

In an article in Popular Science Review (Vol. XIV., p. 252) on “Recent Researches in Minute Life,” we find Mr. H. J. Slack, F.C.S., Sec. R.M.S., saying: “There is an evident convergence of all sciences, from physics to chemistry and physiology, toward some doctrine of evolution and development, of which the facts of Darwinism will form part, but what ultimate aspect this doctrine will take, there is little, if any, evidence to show, and perhaps it will not be shaped by the human mind until metaphysical as well as physical inquiries are much more advanced.”

This is a happy forecast indeed. The day may come, then, when the “Natural Selection,” as taught by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer, will form only a part, in its ultimate modification, of our Eastern doctrine of Evolution, which will be Manu and Kapila esoterically explained.

 

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601 HERMES AND KANT.‌

§ XIV. FORCES—MODES OF MOTION OR INTELLIGENCES?

This is, then, the last word of physical science up to the present year, 1888. Mechanical laws will never be able to prove the homogeneity of primeval matter, except inferentially and as a desperate necessity, when there will remain no other issue—as in the case of Ether. Modern Science is secure only in its own domain and region; within the physical boundaries of our solar system, beyond which everything, every particle of matter, is different from the matter it knows: which matter exists in states of which Science can form no idea. That matter, which is truly homogeneous, is beyond human perceptions, if perception is tied down merely to the five senses. We feel its effects through those intelligences which are the results of its primeval differentiation, whom we name Dhyan-Chohans; called in the Hermetic works the “Seven Governors,” those to whom Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” refers as the Building Powers, and whom Asklepios calls the “Supernal Gods.” That matter—the real primordial substance, the noumenon of all the “matter” we know of,—even some of the astronomers have been led to believe in, and to despair of the possibility of ever accounting for rotation, gravitation, and the origin of any mechanical physical laws—unless these Intelligences be admitted by Science. In the above-quoted work upon astronomy, by Wolf,⁶³⁶ the author endorses fully the theory of Kant, and the latter, if not in its general aspect, at any rate in some of its features, reminds one strongly of certain esoteric teachings. Here we have the world’s system reborn from its ashes, through a nebula; the emanation from the bodies, dead and dissolved in Space—resultant of the incandescence of the solar centre reanimated by the combustible matter of the planets. In this theory, generated and developed in the brain of a young man hardly twenty-five years of age, who had never left his native place, a small town of Northern Prussia (Königsberg) one can hardly fail to recognise either an inspiring external power, or the reincarnation which the Occultists see in it. It fills a gap which Newton, with all his genius, failed to bridge. And surely it is our primeval matter, Akâsa, that Kant had in view, when proposing to solve Newton’s difficulty and his failure to explain, by the natural forces, the primitive impulse imparted to the planets, by the postulation of a universally pervading primordial substance. For, as he remarks in chapter viii., if it is once admitted that the perfect harmony of the stars and planets and

 

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602 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the coincidence of their orbital planes prove the existence of a natural cause, which would thus be the primal cause, “that cause cannot really be the matter which fills to-day the heavenly spaces.” It must be that which filled space—was space—originally, whose motion in differentiated matter was the origin of the actual movements of the sidereal bodies; and which, “in condensing itself in those very bodies, thus abandoned the space that is found void to-day.” In other words, it is that same matter of which are now composed the planets, comets, and the Sun himself, which, having in the origin formed itself into those bodies, has preserved its inherent quality of motion; which quality, now centred in their nuclei, directs all motion. A very slight alteration of words is needed, and a few additions, to make of this our Esoteric Doctrine.

The latter teaches that it is this original, primordial prima materia, divine and intelligent, the direct emanation of the Universal Mind—the Daiviprakriti (the divine light emanating from the Logos⁶³⁷)—which formed the nuclei of all the “self-moving” orbs in Kosmos. It is the informing, ever-present moving-power and life-principle, the vital soul of the suns, moons, planets, and even of our Earth. The former latent: the last one active—the invisible Ruler and guide of the gross body attached to, and connected with, its Soul, which is the spiritual emanation, after all, of these respective planetary Spirits.

Another quite occult doctrine is the theory of Kant, that the matter of which the inhabitants and the animals of other planets are formed is of a lighter and more subtle nature and of a more perfect conformation in proportion to their distance from the Sun. The latter is too full of Vital Electricity, of the physical, life-giving principle. Therefore, the men on Mars are more ethereal than we are, while those of Venus are more gross, though far more intelligent, if less spiritual.

The last doctrine is not quite ours—yet those Kantian theories are as metaphysical, and as transcendental as any occult doctrines; and more than one man of Science would, if he but dared speak his mind, accept them as Wolf does. From this Kantian mind and soul of the Suns and Stars to the Mahat (mind) and Prakriti of the Purânas, there is but a step. After all, the admission of this by Science would be only the admission of a natural cause, whether it would or would not stretch its belief to such metaphysical heights. But then Mahat, the mind, is a “God,” and physiology admits “mind” only as a temporary function of the material brain, and no more.

The Satan of Materialism now laughs at all alike, and denies the visible as well as the invisible. Seeing in light, heat, electricity, and even in the phenomenon of life, only properties inherent in matter, it

 

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603 THE VITAL PRINCIPLE.

laughs whenever life is called Vital Principle, and derides the idea of its being independent of and distinct from the organism.

But here again scientific opinions differ as in everything else, and there are several men of science who accept views very similar to ours. Consider, for instance, what Dr. Richardson, F.R.S. (elsewhere quoted at length) says of that “Vital principle,” which he calls “nervous ether” (“Popular Science Review,” Vol. 10):

“I speak only of a veritable material agent, refined, it may be, to the world at large, but actual and substantial: an agent having quality of weight and of volume, an agent susceptible of chemical combination, and thereby of change of physical state and condition, an agent passive in its action, moved always, that is to say, by influences apart from itself,⁶³⁸ obeying other influences, an agent possessing no initiative power, no vis or energia naturæ,⁶³⁹ but still playing a most important, if not a primary part in the production of the phenomena resulting from the action of the energeia upon visible matter” (p. 379).

As Biology and Physiology now deny, in toto, the existence of a “vital principle,” this extract, together with de Quatrefages’ admission, is a clear confirmation that there are men of science who take the same views about “things occult” as theosophists and occultists do. These recognise a distinct vital principle independent of the organism—material, of course, as physical force cannot be divorced from matter, but of a substance existing in a state unknown to Science. Life for them is something more than the mere interaction of molecules and atoms. There is a vital principle without which no molecular combinations could ever have resulted in a living organism, least of all in the so-called “inorganic” matter of our plane of consciousness.

By “molecular combinations” is meant, of course, those of the matter of our present illusive perceptions, which matter energises only on this, our plane. And this is the chief point at issue.⁶⁴⁰

 

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604 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Thus the Occultists are not alone in their beliefs. Nor are they so foolish, after all, in rejecting even the “gravity” of modern Science along with other physical laws, and in accepting instead attraction and repulsion. They see, moreover, in these two opposite Forces only the two aspects of the universal unit, called “Manifesting Mind”; in which aspects, Occultism, through its great Seers, perceives an innumerable Host of operative Beings: Cosmic Dhyan-Chohans, Entities, whose essence, in its dual nature, is the Cause of all terrestrial phenomena. For that essence is co-substantial with the universal Electric Ocean, which is Life; and being dual, as said—positive and negative—it is the emanations of that duality that act now on earth under the name of “modes of motion”; even Force having now become objectionable as a word, for fear it should lead someone, even in thought, to separate it from matter! It is, as Occultism says, the dual effects of that dual essence, which have now been called centripetal and centrifugal forces, negative and positive poles, or polarity, heat and cold, light and darkness, etc., etc.

And it is maintained that even the Greek and Roman Catholic Christians, are wiser in believing, as they do—even if blindly connecting and tracing them all to an anthropomorphic god—in Angels, Arch-angels, Archons, Seraphs, and Morning Stars: in all those theological Deliciæ humani generis, in short, that rule the cosmic elements, than Science is, in disbelieving in them altogether, and advocating its mechanical Forces. For these act very often with more than human intelligence and pertinency. Nevertheless, that intelligence is denied and attributed to blind chance. But, as De Maîstre was right in calling the law of gravitation merely a word which replaced “the thing unknown” (Soirées), so are we right in applying the same remark to all the other Forces of Science. And if it is objected that the Count was an ardent Roman Catholic, then we may cite Le Couturier, as ardent a materialist, who said the same thing, as also did J. Herschel and many others. (Vide Musée des Sciences, August, 1856.)

From Gods to men, from Worlds to atoms, from a star to a rush-light, from the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being—the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, whose links are all connected. The law of Analogy is the first key to the world-problem, and these links have to be studied co-ordinately in their occult relations to each other.

When, therefore, the Secret Doctrine—postulating that conditioned or limited space (location) has no real being except in this world of illusion, or, in other words, in our perceptive faculties—teaches that every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is interblended with our own objective world; that millions of things and beings are, in point of

605 OCCULT AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES.

localization, around and in us, as we are around, with, and in them; it is no metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.

But one has to understand the phraseology of Occultism before criticising what it asserts. For example, the Doctrine refuses (as Science does, in one sense) to use the words “above” and “below,” “higher” and “lower,” in reference to invisible spheres, as being without meaning. Even the terms “East” and “West” are merely conventional, necessary only to aid our human perceptions. For, though the Earth has its two fixed points in the poles, North and South, yet both East and West are variable relatively to our own position on the Earth’s surface, and in consequence of its rotation from West to East. Hence, when “other worlds” are mentioned—whether better or worse, more spiritual or still more material, though both invisible—the Occultist does not locate these spheres either outside or inside our Earth, as the theologians and the poets do; for their location is nowhere in the space known to, and conceived by, the profane. They are, as it were, blended with our world—interpenetrating it and interpenetrated by it. There are millions and millions of worlds and firmaments visible to us; there still greater numbers beyond those visible to the telescopes, and many of the latter kind do not belong to our objective sphere of existence. Although as invisible as if they were millions of miles beyond our solar system, they are yet with us, near us, within our own world, as objective and material to their respective inhabitants as ours is to us. But, again, the relation of these worlds to ours is not that of a series of egg-shaped boxes enclosed one within the other, like the toys called Chinese nests; each is entirely under its own special laws and conditions, having no direct relation to our sphere. The inhabitants of these, as already said, may be, for all we know, or feel, passing through and around us as if through empty space, their very habitations and countries being interblended with ours, though not disturbing our vision, because we have not yet the faculties necessary for discerning them. Yet by their spiritual sight the Adepts, and even some seers and sensitives, are always able to discern, whether in a greater or smaller degree, the presence and close proximity to us of Beings pertaining to other spheres of life. Those of the (spiritually) higher worlds, communicate only with those terrestrial mortals who ascend to them, through individual efforts, on to the higher plane they are occupying. . . .

“The sons of Bhumi (Earth) regard the Sons of Deva-lokas (angel-spheres) as their gods; and the Sons of lower kingdoms look up to the men of Bhumi, as to their devas (gods); men remaining unaware of it in their blindness. . . . They (men) tremble

606 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

before them while using them (for magical purposes). . . . The first Race of Men were the “Mind-born sons” of the former. They (the pitris and devas) are our progenitors. . . . (Book II. of Commentary on the Book of DZYAN.)

“Educated people,” so-called, deride the idea of Sylphs, Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes; the men of science regard as an insult any mention of such superstitions; and with a contempt of logic and common good sense, that is often the prerogative of “accepted authority,” they allow those, whom it is their duty to instruct, to labour under the absurd impression that in the whole Kosmos, or at any rate in our own atmosphere, there are no other conscious, intelligent beings, save ourselves.⁶⁴¹ Any other humanity (composed of distinct human beings) than a mankind with two legs, two arms, and a head with man’s features on it, would not be called human; though the etymology of the word would seem to have little to do with the general appearance of a creature. Thus, while Science sternly rejects even the possibility of there being such (to us, generally) invisible creatures, Society, while believing in it all secretly, is made to deride the idea openly. It hails with mirth such works as the Count de Gabalis, and fails to understand that open satire is the securest mask.

Nevertheless, such invisible worlds do exist. Inhabited as thickly as our own is, they are scattered throughout apparent Space in immense number; some far more material than our own world, others gradually etherealizing until they become formless and are as “Breaths.” That our physical eye does not see them, is no reason to disbelieve in them; physicists can see neither their ether, atoms, nor “modes of motion,” or Forces. Yet they accept and teach them.

If we find, even in the natural world with which we are acquainted, matter affording a partial analogy in the difficult conception of such invisible worlds, there seems little difficulty in recognizing the possibility of such a presence. The tail of a comet, which, though attracting our attention by virtue of its luminosity, yet does not disturb or impede our vision of objects, which we perceive through and beyond it, affords the first stepping-stone toward a proof of the same. The tail of a comet passes rapidly across our horizon, and we should neither feel it, nor be cognizant of its passage, but for the brilliant coruscation, often perceived only by a few interested in the phenomenon, while everyone else remains ignorant of its presence and passage through, or across, a portion of our globe. This tail may, or may not, be an integral portion of the being of the comet, but its tenuity sub-

 

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607 PLURALITY OF WORLDS.

serves our purpose as an illustration. Indeed, it is no question of superstition, but simply a result of transcendental science, and of logic still more, to admit the existence of worlds formed of even far more attenuated matter than the tail of a comet. By denying such a possibility, Science has played for the last century into the hands of neither philosophy nor true religion, but simply into those of theology. To be able to dispute the better the plurality of even material worlds, a belief thought by many churchmen incompatible with the teachings and doctrines of the Bible,⁶⁴² Maxwell had to calumniate the memory of Newton, and try to convince his public that the principles contained in the Newtonian philosophy are those “which lie at the foundation of all atheistical systems.” (Vide Vol. II., “Plurality of Worlds.”)

“Dr. Whewell disputed the plurality of worlds by appeal to scientific evidence,” writes Professor Winchell.⁶⁴³ And if even the habitability of physical worlds, of planets, and distant stars which shine in myriads over our heads is so disputed, how little chance is there for the acceptance of invisible worlds within the apparently transparent space of our own!

But, if we can conceive of a world composed (for our senses) of matter still more attenuated than the tail of a comet, hence of inhabitants in it who are as ethereal, in proportion to their globe, as we are in comparison with our rocky, hard-crusted earth, no wonder if we do not perceive them, nor sense their presence or even existence. Only, in what is the idea contrary to science? Cannot men and animals, plants and rocks, be supposed to be endowed with quite a different set of senses from those we possess? Cannot their organisms be born, developed, and exist, under other laws of being than those that rule our little world? Is it absolutely necessary that every corporeal being should be clothed in “coats of skin” like those that Adam and Eve were provided with in the legend of Genesis? Corporeality, we are told, however, by more than one man of science, “may exist under very divergent conditions.”⁶⁴⁴ Do not we know through the

 

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608 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

discoveries of that very all-denying science that we are surrounded by myriads of invisible lives? If these microbes, bacteria and the tutti quanti of the infinitesimally small, are invisible to us by virtue of their minuteness, cannot there be, at the other pole of it, beings as invisible owing to the quality of their texture or matter—to its tenuity, in fact? Conversely, as to the effects of cometary matter, have we not another example of a half visible form of life and matter? The ray of sunlight entering our apartment, reveals in its passage myriads of tiny beings living their little life and ceasing to be, independent and heedless of whether they are perceived or not by our grosser materiality. And so again, of the microbes and bacteria and such-like unseen beings in other elements. We passed them by, during those long centuries of dreary ignorance, after the lamp of knowledge in the heathen and highly philosophical systems had ceased to throw its bright light on the ages of intolerance and bigotry during early Christianity; and we would fain pass them by again now.

And yet these lives surrounded us then as they do now. They have worked on, obedient to their own laws, and it is only as they were gradually revealed by Science that we have begun to take cognisance of them, as of the effects produced by them.

609 THE GEOLOGY OF ENOCH.

How long has it taken the world, as it is now, to become what it is? If it can be said of cosmic dust that some of it comes to the present day “which had never belonged to the earth before” (“World-Life”), how much more logical to believe—as the Occultists do—that through the countless ages and millions of years that have rolled away, since that dust aggregated and formed the globe we live in around its nucleus of intelligent primeval substance—many humanities, differing from our present mankind, as greatly as the one which will evolve millions of years hence will differ from our races, appeared but to disappear from the face of the earth, as our own will. Those primitive and far-distant humanities, having, as geologists think, left no tangible relics of themselves, are denied. All trace of them is swept away, and therefore they have never existed. Yet their relics—a very few of them, truly—are to be found, and they have to be discovered by geological research. Though, even if they were never to be met with, there is no reason to say that no men could have ever lived in those geological times, to which the period of their presence on earth is assigned. For their organisms needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no feeding; the author of “World-Life” is right, and it is no such great extreme to believe even as we do, that as there may be, on scientific hypotheses, “psychic natures enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum” to this day, so there were psychic natures enshrined in forms of equal indestructible primeval matter—the real forefathers of our fifth race.

When we speak, therefore, as in Book II., of men who inhabited this globe 18,000,000 years back, we have in the mind neither the men of our present races, nor the present atmospheric laws, thermal conditions, etc. The Earth and mankind, like the Sun, Moon, and planets, have all their growth, changes, developments, and gradual evolution in their life-periods; they are born, become infants, then children, adolescents, grown-up bodies, grow old, and finally die. Why should not Mankind be also under this universal law? Says Uriel to Enoch: “Behold, I have showed thee all things. Thou seest the Sun, Moon, and those which conduct the stars of heaven, which cause all their operations, seasons, and arrivals to return. . . . In the days of sinners the years shall be shortened . . . everything done on Earth shall be subverted . . . the moon shall change its laws” . . . etc. Ch. lxxix.)

The “days of Sinners” meant the days when matter would be in its full sway on Earth, and man would have reached the apex of physical development in stature and animality. That came to pass during the period of the Atlanteans, about the middle point of their Race (the 4th), which was drowned as prophesied by Uriel. Since then man began decreasing in physical stature, strength, and years, as will be shown in

610‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Book II. But as we are in the mid-point of our sub-race of the Fifth Root Race—the acme of materiality in each—therefore the animal propensities, though more refined, are not the less developed for that: and they are so chiefly in civilized countries.

———

§ XV. GODS, MONADS, AND ATOMS.

Some years ago we remarked⁶⁴⁵ that “the Esoteric Doctrine may well be called the ‘thread-doctrine,’ since, like Sutrâtman, in the Vedanta philosophy,⁶⁴⁶ it passes through and strings together all the ancient philosophical religious systems, and reconciles and explains them all.” We say now it does more. It not only reconciles the various and apparently conflicting systems, but it checks the discoveries of modern exact science, and shows some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the ancient records. All this will, no doubt, be regarded as terribly impertinent and disrespectful, a veritable crime of lèse-Science; nevertheless, it is a fact.

Science is, undeniably, ultra-materialistic in our days; but it finds, in one sense, its justification. Nature behaving in actu ever esoterically, and being, as the Kabalists say, in abscondito, can only be judged by the profane through her appearance, and that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane. On the other hand, the naturalists refuse to blend physics with metaphysics, the body with its informing soul and spirit, which they prefer ignoring. This is a matter of choice with some, while the minority strive very sensibly to enlarge the domain of physical science by trespassing on the forbidden grounds of metaphysics, so distasteful to some materialists. These scientists are wise in their generation. For all their wonderful discoveries would go for nothing, and remain for ever headless bodies, unless they lift the veil of matter and strain their eyes to see beyond. Now that they have studied nature in the length, breadth, and thickness of her physical frame, it is time to remove the skeleton to the second plane and search within the unknown depths for the living and real entity, for its sub-stance—the noumenon of evanescent matter.

 

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611 WHICH OF THE TWO IS BLIND?

It is only by acting on such lines that some of the truths, now called “exploded superstitions,” will be discovered to be facts and the relics of ancient knowledge and wisdom.

One of such “degrading” beliefs—in the opinion of the all-denying sceptic—is found in the idea that Kosmos, besides its objective planetary inhabitants, its humanities in other inhabited worlds, is full of invisible, intelligent Existences. The so-called Arch-Angels, Angels and Spirits, of the West, copies of their prototypes, the Dhyan-Chohans, the Devas and Pitris, of the East, are no real Beings but fictions. On this point Materialistic Science is inexorable. To support its position, it upsets its own axiomatic law of uniformity in the laws of nature, that of continuity, and all the logical sequence of analogies in the evolution of being. The masses of the profane are asked, and made, to believe that the accumulated testimony of History, which shows even the Atheists of old—such as Epicurus and Democritus—believing in gods, was false; and that philosophers like Socrates and Plato, asserting their existence, were mistaken enthusiasts and fools. If we hold our opinions merely on historical grounds, on the authority of legions of the most eminent Sages, Neo-Platonists, Mystics of all the ages, from Pythagoras down to the eminent Scientists and Professors of the present century, who, if they reject “gods,” believe in “spirits,” shall we consider such authorities as weak-minded and foolish as any Roman Catholic peasant, who believes in and prays to his once human Saint, or the Archangel, St. Michael? But is there no difference between the belief of the peasant and that of the Western heirs to the Rosicrucians and Alchemists of the Middle Ages? Is it the Van Helmonts, the Khunraths, the Paracelsuses and Agrippas, from Roger Bacon down to St. Germain, who were all blind enthusiasts, hysteriacs or cheats, or is it the handful of modern sceptics—the “leaders of thought”—who are struck with the cecity of negation? The latter, we opine. It would be a miracle indeed, quite an abnormal fact in the realm of probabilities and logic, were that handful of negators to be the sole custodians of truth, while the million-strong hosts of believers in gods, angels, and spirits—in Europe and America alone—namely, Greek and Latin Christians, Theosophists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., etc., should be no better than deluded fanatics and hallucinated mediums, and often no higher than the victims of deceivers and impostors! However varying in their external presentations and dogmas, beliefs in the Hosts of invisible Intelligences of various grades have all the same foundation. Truth and error are mixed in all. The exact extent, depth, breadth, and length of the mysteries of Nature are to be found only in Eastern esoteric sciences. So vast and so profound are these that hardly a few, a very few of the highest Initiates—those whose very existence is known but to a small number of

612 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Adepts—are capable of assimilating the knowledge. Yet it is all there, and one by one facts and processes in Nature’s workshops are permitted to find their way into the exact Sciences, while mysterious help is given to rare individuals in unravelling its arcana. It is at the close of great Cycles, in connection with racial development, that such events generally take place. We are at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Aryan Kaliyuga; and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a death-blow.

Without throwing any discredit upon time-honoured beliefs, in whatever direction, we are forced to draw a marked line between blind faith, evolved by theologies, and knowledge due to the independent researches of long generations of adepts; between, in short, faith and philosophy. There have been—in all ages—undeniably learned and good men who, having been reared in sectarian beliefs, died in their crystallized convictions. For Protestants, the garden of Eden is the primeval point of departure in the drama of Humanity, and the solemn tragedy on the summit of Calvary, the prelude to the hoped-for Millennium. For Roman Catholics, Satan is at the foundation of Kosmos, Christ in its centre, and Antichrist at its apex. For both, the Hierarchy of Being begins and ends within the narrow frames of their respective theologies: one self-created personal God and an Empyrean ringing with the Hallelujas of created angels; the rest, false gods, Satan and fiends.

Theophilosophy proceeds on broader lines. From the very beginning of Æons—in time and space in our Round and Globe—the Mysteries of Nature (at any rate, those which it is lawful for our races to know) were recorded by the pupils of those same now invisible “heavenly men,” in geometrical figures and symbols. The keys thereto passed from one generation of “wise men” to the other. Some of the symbols, thus passed from the east to the west, were brought therefrom by Pythagoras, who was not the inventor of his famous “Triangle.” The latter figure, along with the plane cube and circle, are more eloquent and scientific descriptions of the order of the evolution of the Universe, spiritual and psychic, as well as physical, than volumes of descriptive Cosmogonies and revealed “Geneses.” The ten points inscribed within that “Pythagorean triangle” are worth all the theogonies and angelologies ever emanated from the theological brain. For he who interprets them—on their very face, and in the order given—will find in these seventeen points (the seven Mathematical Points hidden) the uninterrupted series of the genealogies from the first Heavenly to terrestrial man. And, as they give the order of Beings, so they reveal the order in which were evolved the Kosmos, our earth, and the primordial elements by

613 THE MATHEMATICAL POINT.

which the latter was generated. Begotten in the invisible Depths, and in the womb of the same “Mother” as its fellow-globes—he who will master the mysteries of our Earth, will have mastered those of all others.

Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown inseparably connected with both philosophy and modern science. The gods of the ancients, the monads—from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz—and the atoms of the present materialistic schools (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with spirit. In the occult sciences they can be studied separately, but never mastered unless viewed in their mutual correlations during their life-cycle, and as a Universal Unity during Pralayas.

La Pluche shows sincerity, but gives a poor idea of his philosophical capacities when declaring his personal views on the Monad or the Mathematical Point. “A point,” he says, “is enough to put all the schools in the world in a combustion. But what need has man to know that point, since the creation of such a small being is beyond his power? A fortiori, philosophy acts against probability when, from that point which absorbs and disconcerts all her meditations, she presumes to pass on to the generation of the world. . . .”

Philosophy, however, could never have formed its conception of a logical, universal, and absolute Deity if it had no Mathematical Point within the Circle to base its speculations upon. It is only the manifested Point, lost to our senses after its pregenetic appearance in the infinitude and incognizability of the Circle, that made a reconciliation between philosophy and theology possible—on condition that the latter should abandon its crude materialistic dogmas. And it is because it has so unwisely rejected the Pythagorean Monad and geometrical figures, that Christian theology has evolved its self-created human and personal God, the monstrous Head from whence flow in two streams the dogmas of Salvation and Damnation. This is so true that even those clergymen who would be philosophers and who were masons, have, in their arbitrary interpretations, fathered upon the ancient sages the queer idea that “the Monad represented (with them) the throne of the Omnipotent Deity, placed in the centre of the Empyrean to indicate T.G.A.O.T.U.”⁶⁴⁷—read “the Great Architect of the Universe.” A curious explanation this, more Masonic than strictly Pythagorean.

Nor did the “hierogram within a Circle, or equilateral Triangle,”

 

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614 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ever mean “the exemplification of the unity of the divine Essence”; for this was exemplified by the plane of the boundless Circle. What it really meant was the triune co-equal Nature of the first differentiated Substance, or the con-substantiality of the (manifested) Spirit, matter and the Universe—their “Son,” who proceeds from the Point (the real, esoteric Logos) or the Pythagorean Monad. For the Greek Monas signifies “Unity” in its primary sense. Those unable to seize the difference between the monad—the Universal Unit—and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the ever-hidden and the revealed Logos or the Word, ought never to meddle in philosophy, let alone the Esoteric Sciences. It is needless to remind the educated reader of Kant’s Thesis to demonstrate his second Antinomy.⁶⁴⁸ Those who have read and understood it will see clearly the line we draw between the absolutely Ideal Universe and the invisible though manifested Kosmos. Our Gods and Monads are not the Elements of extension itself, but only those of the invisible reality which is the basis of the manifested Kosmos. Neither esoteric philosophy, nor Kant, nor Leibnitz would ever admit that extension can be composed of simple or unextended parts. But theologian-philosophers will not grasp this. The Circle and the Point, which latter retires into and merges with the former, after having emanated the first three points and connected them with lines, thus forming the first noumenal basis of the Second Triangle in the Manifested World, have ever been an insuperable obstacle to theological flights into dogmatic Empyreans. On the authority of this Archaic Symbol, a male, personal god, the Creator and Father of all, becomes a third-rate emanation, the Sephiroth standing fourth in descent, and on the left hand of En-Soph (see the Kabalistic Tree of Life). Hence, the Monad is degraded into a Vehicle—a “throne”!

The Monad—only the emanation and reflection of the Point (Logos) in the phenomenal World—becomes, as the apex of the manifested equilateral triangle, the “Father.” The left side or line is the Duad, the “Mother,” regarded as the evil, counteracting principle (Plutarch, Placita Philosophorum 1:7); the right side represents the Son (“his Mother’s husband” in every Cosmogony, as one with the apex); at the basic line is the Universal plane of productive Nature, unifying on the phenomenal plane Father-Mother-Son, as these were unified in the apex, in the supersensuous World.⁶⁴⁹ By mystic transmutation they became the Quaternary—the triangle became the Tetraktis.

 

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615 SPACE, FORCE AND MATTER.

This transcendental application of geometry to Cosmic and divine theogony—the Alpha and the Omega of mystical conception—became dwarfed after Pythagoras by Aristotle. By omitting the Point and the Circle, and taking no account of the apex, he reduced the metaphysical value of the idea, and thus limited the doctrine of magnitude to a simple triad—the line, the surface, and the body. His modern heirs, who play at Idealism, have interpreted these three geometrical figures as Space, Force, and Matter—“the potencies of an interacting Unity.”⁶⁵⁰ Materialistic Science, perceiving but the basic line of the manifested “triangle”—the plane of matter—translates it practically as (Father)-Matter, (Mother)-Matter, and (Son)-Matter, and theoretically as Matter, Force, and Correlation.

But to the average physicist, as remarked by a Kabalist, “Space, Force, Matter, are, what signs in algebra are to the mathematician, merely conventional symbols”; or “Force as force, and Matter as matter, are as absolutely unknowable as is the assumed empty space in which they are held to interact.” As symbols representing abstractions, “the physicist bases reasoned hypotheses of the origin of things . . . . and sees three needs in what he terms creation: (a) a place wherein to create; (b) a medium by which to create; (c) a material from which to create. And in giving a logical expression to this hypothesis through the terms space, force, matter, he believes he has proved the existence of that which each of these represents as he conceives it to be.”⁶⁵¹

The physicist who regards Space merely as a representation of our mind, or extension unrelated to things in it, which Locke defined as capable of neither resistance nor motion; the paradoxical materialist, who would have a void there, where he can see no matter, would reject with the utmost contempt the proposition that “Space is a substantial though (apparently) an absolutely unknowable living Entity.” (New Aspects, p. 9.) Such is, nevertheless, the Kabalistic teaching, and it is that of Archaic philosophy. Space is the real world, while our world is an artificial one. It is the One Unity throughout its infinitude: in its bottomless depths as on its illusive surface; a surface studded with countless phenomenal Universes, systems and mirage-like worlds. Nevertheless, to the Eastern Occultist, who is an objective Idealist at the bottom, in the real world, which is a Unity of Forces, there is “a connection of all matter in the plenum,” as Leibnitz would say. This is symbolized in the Pythagorean Triangle.

 

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616 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

It consists of ten points inscribed pyramid-like (from one to the last four) within its three lines, and it symbolizes the Universe in the famous Pythagorean Decad. The upper single dot is a Monad, and represents a Unit-Point, which is the Unity from whence all proceeds, and all is of the same essence with it. While the ten dots within the triangle represent the phenomenal world, the three sides of the equilateral triangle which enclose the pyramid of dots are the barriers of noumenal Matter, or Substance, that separate it from the world of Thought. “Pythagoras considered a point to correspond in proportion to unity; a line to 2; a superficies to 3; a solid to 4; and he defined a point as a Monad having position, and the beginning of all things; a line was thought to correspond with duality, because it was produced by the first motion from indivisible nature, and formed the junction of two points. A superficies was compared to the number three because it is the first of all causes that are found in figures; for a circle, which is the principal of all round figures, comprises a triad, in centre—space—circumference. But a triangle, which is the first of all rectilineal figures, is included in a ternary, and receives its form according to that number; and was considered by the Pythagoreans to be the creator of all sublunary things. The four points at the base of the Pythagorean triangle correspond with a solid or cube, which combines the principles of length, breadth, and thickness, for no solid can have less than four extreme boundary points.” (Pythag. Triangle, p. 19.)

It is argued that “the human mind cannot conceive an indivisible unit short of the annihilation of the idea with its subject.” This is an error, as the Pythagoreans have proved, and a number of Seers before them, although there is a special training for it, and although the profane mind can hardly grasp it. But there are such things as metamathematics and metageometry. Even mathematics pure and simple proceed from the Universal to the particular, from the mathematical, hence indivisible Point, to solid figures. The teaching originated in India, and was taught in Europe by Pythagoras, who, throwing a veil over the Circle and the Point—which no living man can define except as incomprehensible abstractions—laid the origin of the differentiated Cosmic matter in the basic or horizontal line of the Triangle. Thus the latter became the earliest of geometrical figures. The author of “New Aspects of Life” and of the Kabalistic Mysteries—objects to the objectivization, so to speak, of the Pythagorean conception and use of the equilateral triangle, and calls it a misnomer. His argument that a solid equilateral body—“one whose base, and each of its sides, form equal triangles—must have four co-equal sides or surfaces, while a triangular plane will as necessarily possess five,” demonstrates on the contrary the grandeur of the conception in all its esoteric application to the idea of

617 PHANTOMS OF THE MIND.

the pregenesis, and the genesis of Kosmos. Granted, that an ideal triangle, depicted by mathematical, imaginary lines “can have no sides at all, being simply a phantom of the mind (if sides be imputed to which, they must be the sides of the object it constructively represents).” But in such case most of the scientific hypotheses are no better than “phantoms of the mind”; they are unverifiable, except on inference, and have been adopted merely to answer scientific necessities. Furthermore, the ideal triangle—“as the abstract idea of a triangular body, and, therefore, as the type of an abstract idea”—accomplished and carried out to perfection the double symbolism intended. As an emblem applicable to the objective idea, the simple triangle became a solid. When repeated in stone on the four cardinal points, it assumed the shape of the Pyramid—the symbol of the phenomenal merging into the noumenal Universe of thought—at the apex of the four triangles; and, as an “imaginary figure constructed of three mathematical lines,” it symbolized the subjective spheres—those lines “enclosing a mathematical space—which is equal to nothing enclosing nothing.” Because, to the senses and the untrained consciousness of profane and scientist, everything beyond the line of differentiated matter—i.e., outside of, and beyond the realm of even the most spiritual substance—has to remain for ever equal to nothing. It is the Ain-Soph—the No–thing.

Yet these “phantoms of the mind” are in truth no greater abstractions than the abstract ideas in general upon evolution and physical development—e.g., Gravity, Matter, Force, etc.—on which the exact sciences are based. Our most eminent chemists and physicists are earnestly pursuing the not hopeless attempt of finally tracing to its hiding-place the protyle, or the basic line of the Pythagorean triangle. The latter is, as said, the grandest conception imaginable, as it symbolizes both the ideal and the visible universes.⁶⁵² For if “the possible unit is only a possibility as an actuality of nature, as an individual of any kind,” and as every individual natural object is capable of division, and by division loses its unity, or ceases to be a unit,⁶⁵³ it is so only in the realm of exact sciences in a world as deceptive as it is illusive. In the realm of the Esoteric sciences the unit divided ad infinitum, instead of losing its unity, approaches with every division the planes of the only eternal Reality. The eye of the Seer can follow and behold it in all its pregenetic glory. This same idea of the reality of the subjective, and the unreality of the objective universes, is found at the bottom of the Pythagorean and Platonic teachings—limited to the Elect alone; for

 

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618 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Porphyry, speaking of the Monad and the Duad, says that the former only was considered substantial and real, “that most simple Being, the cause of all unity and the measure of all things.”

But the Duad, although the origin of Evil, or Matter—thence unreal in philosophy—is still Substance during Manvantara, and is often called the third monad, in Occultism, and the connecting line as between two Points, . . . or Numbers which proceeded from that, “which was before all Numbers,” as expressed by Rabbi Barahiel. And from this Duad proceeded all the Scintillas of the three upper and the four lower worlds or planes—which are in constant interaction and correspondence. This is a teaching which the Kabala has in common with Eastern Occultism. For in the occult philosophy there are the “One Cause” and the “Primal Cause,” which latter thus becomes, paradoxically, the second, as clearly expressed by the author of the “Qabbalah, from the philosophical writings of Ibn Gabirol,”—“in the treatment of the Primal cause, two things must be considered, the Primal Cause per se, and the relation and connection of the Primal Cause with the visible and unseen universe.” Thus he shows the early Hebrews following in the steps of the Oriental philosophy—Chaldean, Persian, Hindu, Arabic, etc. Their Primal Cause was designated at first “by the triadic Shaddaï, the (triune) Almighty, subsequently by the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, symbol of the Past, Present, and Future,” and, let us add, of the eternal Is, or the I Am. Moreover, in the Kabala the name YHVH (or Jehovah) expresses a He and a She, male and female, two in one, or Hokhmah and Binah, and his, or rather their Shekinah or synthesizing spirit (grace), which makes again of the Duad a Triad. This is demonstrated in the Jewish Liturgy for Pentecost, and the prayer, “In the name of Unity, of the Holy and Blessed Hû (He), and His Shekinah, the Hidden and Concealed Hû, blessed be YHVH (the Quaternary) for ever.” “Hû is said to be masculine and YAH feminine, together they make the יהוה אחד i.e., one YHVH. One, but of a male-female nature. The Shekinah is always considered in the Qabbalah as feminine” (p. 175). And so it is considered in the exoteric Purânas, for Shekinah is no more than Sakti—the female double or lining of any god, in such case. And so it was with the early Christians whose Holy Spirit was feminine, as Sophia was with the Gnostics. But in the transcendental Chaldean Kabala or “Book of Numbers,” “Shekinah” is sexless, and the purest abstraction, a State, like Nirvana, not subject or object or anything except an absolute Presence.

Thus it is only in the anthromorphised systems (such as the Kabala has now greatly become) that Shekinah-Sakti is feminine. As such she becomes the Duad of Pythagoras, the two straight lines of the symbol that can never meet, which therefore form no geometrical figure and are

619 THE MONAD OF LEIBNITZ.

the symbol of matter. Out of this Duad, when united in one basic line of the triangle on the lower plane (the upper Triangle of the Sephirothal Tree), emerge the Elohim, or Deity in Cosmic Nature, with the true Kabalists the lowest designation, translated in the Bible “God” (see the same work and page).⁶⁵⁴ Out of these issue the Scintillas.

The Scintillas are the “Souls,” and these Souls appear in the three-fold form of Monads (units), atoms and gods—according to our teaching. “Every atom becomes a visible complex unit (a molecule), and once attracted into the sphere of terrestrial activity, the Monadic Essence, passing through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, becomes man.” (Esot. Catechism.) Again, “God, Monad, and Atom are the correspondences of Spirit, Mind, and Body (Atma, Manas and Sthula Sarira) in man.” In their septenary aggregation they are the “Heavenly Man” (see Kabala for the latter term); thus, terrestrial man is the provisional reflection of the Heavenly. . . . . “The Monads (Jivas) are the Souls of the Atoms, both are the fabric in which the Chohans (Dhyanis, gods) cloth themselves when a form is needed.” (Esot. Cat.)

This relates to Cosmic and sub-planetary Monads, not to the Super-Cosmic Monas (the Pythagorean Monad) as called, in its synthetic character, by the Pantheistical Peripatetics. The Monads of the present dissertation are treated from the standpoint of their individuality, as atomic Souls, before these atoms descend into pure terrestrial form. For this descent into concrete matter marks the medial point of their own individual pilgrimage. Here, losing in the mineral kingdom their individuality, they begin to ascend through the seven states of terrestrial evolution to that point where a correspondence is firmly established between the human and Deva (divine) consciousness. At present, however, we are not concerned with their terrestrial metamorphoses and tribulations, but with their life and behaviour in Space, on planes wherein the eye of the most intuitional chemist and physicist cannot reach them—unless, indeed, he develops in himself highly clairvoyant faculties.

It is well known that Leibnitz came several times very near the truth, but defined monadic evolution incorrectly, which is not to be wondered at, since he was not an Initiate, nor even a Mystic, only a

 

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620 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

very intuitional philosopher. Yet no psycho-physicist ever came nearer than he has to the esoteric general outline of evolution. This evolution—viewed from its several standpoints—i.e., as the universal and the individualized Monad; and the chief aspects of the Evolving Energy, after differentiation—the purely Spiritual, the Intellectual, the Psychic and the Physical—may be thus formulated as an invariable law; a descent of Spirit into Matter, equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a re-ascent from the depths of materiality towards its status quo ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete form and substance up to the Laya state, or what Science calls “the zero-point,” and beyond.

These states—once the spirit of Esoteric philosophy is grasped—become absolutely necessary from simple logical and analogical considerations. Physical Science having now ascertained, through its department of Chemistry, the invariable law of this evolution of atoms—from their “protylean” state down to that of a physical and then a chemical particle (or molecule)—cannot well reject the same as a general law. And once it is forced by its enemies—Metaphysics and Psychology⁶⁵⁵—out of its alleged impregnable strongholds, it will find it more difficult than it now appears to refuse room in the Spaces of Space to Planetary Spirits (gods), Elementals, and even the Elementary Spooks or Ghosts, and others. Already Figuier and Paul D’Assier, two Positivists and Materialists, have succumbed before this logical necessity. Other and still greater Scientists will follow in that “intellectual Fall.” They will be driven out of their position not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily and will still be opening before them, as one discovery follows the other, until they are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense.

Here is an example: Prof. W. Crookes’ latest discovery of what he has named protyle. In the “Notes on the Bhagavat Gita,” by one of the best metaphysicians and Vedantic scholars in India,⁶⁵⁶ the lecturer, referring cautiously to “things occult” in that great Indian esoteric work, makes a remark as suggestive as it is strictly correct. “. . . Into the details of the evolution of the solar system itself,” he says, “it is not necessary for me to enter. You may gather some idea as to the way in which the various elements start into existence from these three principles into which Mulaprakriti is differentiated (the Pythagorean triangle), by

 

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621 THE CHEMISTRY OF THE FUTURE.

examining the lecture delivered by Professor Crookes a short time ago upon the so-called elements of modern chemistry. This lecture will give you some idea of the way in which these Elements spring from Vishwanara,⁶⁵⁷ the most objective of these three principles, which seems to stand in the place of the protyle mentioned in that lecture. Except in a few particulars, this lecture seems to give the outlines of the theory of physical evolution on the plane of Vishwanara, and is, so far as I know, the nearest approach made by modern investigators to the real occult theory on the subject.”

These words will be re-echoed and approved by every Eastern Occultist. Much from the lectures by Prof. Crookes has already been quoted in § XII. of these Addenda. Since then, there has been another lecture delivered, as remarkable as the first one, on the “Genesis of the Elements,”⁶⁵⁸ and also a third one. Here we have almost a corroboration of the teachings of Esoteric philosophy concerning the mode of primeval evolution. It is, indeed, as near an approach, made by a great scholar and specialist in chemistry,⁶⁵⁹ to the Secret Doctrine, as could be made apart from the application of the monads and atoms to the dogmas of pure transcendental metaphysics, and their connection and correlation with “Gods and intelligent Conscious Monads.” But Chemistry is now on its ascending plane, thanks to one of its highest European representatives. It is impossible for it to go back to that day when materialism regarded its sub-elements as absolutely simple and homogeneous bodies, which it had raised, in its blindness, to the rank of elements. The mask has been snatched off by too clever a hand for there to be any fear of a new disguise. And after years of pseudology, of bastard molecules parading under the name of elements, behind and beyond which there could be nought but void, a great professor of chemistry asks once more: “What are these elements, whence do they come, what is their signification? . . . . These elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us—mocking, mystifying, and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities.” (Gen. of Elem., p. 1.)

 

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622 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Those who are heirs to primeval revelations have taught these “possibilities” in every century, but have never found a fair hearing. The truths inspired to Kepler, Leibnitz, Gassendi, Swedenborg, etc., were ever alloyed with their own speculations in one or another predetermined direction—hence distorted. But now one of the great truths has dawned upon an eminent professor of modern exact science, and he fearlessly proclaims as a fundamental axiom that Science has not made itself acquainted, so far, with real simple elements. For Prof. Crookes tells his audience:

“If I venture to say that our commonly received elements are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance or have not been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matters—or perhaps, indeed, from one sole kind of matter—I do but give formal utterance to an idea which has been, so to speak, for some time ‘in the air’ of science. Chemists, physicists, philosophers of the highest merit, declare explicitly their belief that the seventy (or thereabouts) elements of our text-books are not the pillars of Hercules which we must never hope to pass.” . . . “Philosophers in the present as in the past—men who certainly have not worked in the laboratory—have reached the same view from another side.” Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer records his conviction that ‘the chemical atoms are produced from the true or physical atoms by processes of evolution under conditions which chemistry has not yet been able to produce.’ . . . “And the poet has forestalled the philosopher. Milton (‘Paradise Lost,’ Book V.) makes the Archangel Raphael say to Adam, instinct with the evolutionary idea, that the Almighty had created

. . . ‘One first matter, all
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance.’”

Nevertheless, the idea would have remained crystallized “in the air of Science,” and never have descended into the thick atmosphere of materialism and profane mortals for years to come, perhaps, had not Professor Crookes bravely and fearlessly reduced it to its simple elements, and thus publicly forced it on Scientific notice. “An idea,” says Plutarch, “is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of the manifestation.” (De Placit. Philos.) The revolution produced in old chemistry by Avogadro was the first page in the Volume of New Chemistry. Mr. Crookes has now turned the second page, and is boldly pointing to what may be the last. For once protyle accepted and recognized—as invisible Ether was, both being logical and scientific necessities—Chemistry will have virtually ceased to live: it will reappear in its reincarnation as New Alchemy, or Metachemistry. The discoverer of

623 THE GENESIS OF ATOMS.

radiant matter will have vindicated in time the Archaic Aryan works on Occultism and even the Vedas and Purânas. For what are the manifested “Mother,” the “Father-Son-Husband” (Aditi and Daksha, a form of Brahmâ, as Creators) and the “Son,”—the three “First-born”—but simply Hydrogen, Oxygen, and that which in its terrestrial manifestation is called nitrogen. Even the exoteric descriptions of the “First Born” triad give all the characteristics of these three gases. Priestley, the “discoverer” of Oxygen, or that which was known in the highest antiquity!

Yet all the ancient, mediæval, and modern poets and philosophers have been anticipated even in the exoteric Hindu books. Descartes’ plenum of matter differentiated into particles; Leibnitz’s Ethereal Fluid and Kant’s “primitive fluid” dissolved into its elements; Kepler’s Solar Vortex and Systemic Vortices; in short, from the Elemental Vortices inaugurated by the universal mind—through Anaxagoras, down to Galileo, Torricelli, and Swedenborg, and after them to the latest speculations by European mystics—all this is found in the Hindu hymns and Mantras to the “Gods, Monads, and Atoms,” in their fulness, for they are inseparable. In esoteric teachings, the most transcendental conceptions of the universe and its mysteries, as the most (seemingly) materialistic speculations are found reconciled, because those sciences embrace the whole scope of evolution from Spirit to matter. As declared by an American Theosophist, “The Monads (of Leibnitz) may from one point of view be called force, from another matter. To occult Science, force and matter are only two sides of the same substance.” (“Path,” No. 10, p. 297.)

Let the reader remember these “Monads” of Leibnitz, every one of which is a living mirror of the universe, every monad reflecting every other, and compare this view and definition with certain Sanskrit stanzas (Slokas) translated by Sir William Jones, in which it is said that the creative source of the Divine Mind, . . . “Hidden in a veil of thick darkness, formed mirrors of the atoms of the world, and cast reflection from its own face on every atom. . . . .”

When, therefore, Professor Crookes declares that “If we can show how the so-called chemical elements might have been generated we shall be able to fill up a formidable gap in our knowledge of the universe, . . .” the answer is ready. The theoretical knowledge is contained in the esoteric meaning of every Hindu cosmogony in the Purânas; the practical demonstration thereof—is in the hands of those who will not be recognised in this century, save by the very few. The scientific possibilities of various discoveries, that must inexorably lead exact Science into the acceptation of Eastern Occult views, which contain all the requisite material for the filling of those “gaps,” are, so far, at the mercy of modern materialism. It is only by working in the direction

624 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

taken by Professor Crookes that there is any hope for the recognition of a few, hitherto Occult, truths.

Meanwhile, one thirsting to have a glimpse at a practical diagram of the evolution of primordial matter, which, separating and differentiating under the impulse of cyclic law, divides itself into a septenary gradation of Substance (from a general view), can do no better than examine the plates attached to Mr. Crookes’ lecture: “Genesis of the Elements,” and ponder well over some passages of the text. In one place (p. 11) he says:

“. . . . Our notions of a chemical element have expanded. Hitherto the molecule has been regarded as an aggregate of two or more atoms, and no account has been taken of the architectural design on which these atoms have been joined. We may consider that the structure of a chemical element is more complicated than has hitherto been supposed. Between the molecules we are accustomed to deal with in chemical reactions and ultimate atoms as first created, come smaller molecules or aggregates of physical atoms; then sub-molecules differ one from the other, according to the position they occupied in the yttrium edifice.”

“Perhaps this hypothesis can be simplified if we imagine yttrium to be represented by a five-shilling piece. By chemical fractionation I have divided it into five separate shillings, and find that these shillings are not counterparts, but like the carbon atoms in the benzol ring, have the impress of their position, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, stamped on them. . . . If I throw my shillings into the melting-pot or dissolve them chemically, the mint stamp disappears and they all turn out to be silver.” . . .

This will be the case with all the atoms and molecules when they have separated from their compound forms and bodies—when pralaya sets in. Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new manvantara. The pure “silver” of the absorbed material will once more separate into substance, which will generate “Divine Essences” whose “principles”⁶⁶⁰ are the primary elements, the sub-elements, the physical energies and subjective and objective matter; or, as these are epitomised—gods, monads, and atoms. If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the question,—dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and intelligent beings and entities believed in by the Kabalists and Christians—we turn to the atomical theory of evolution, the occult teachings are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, as far, at least, as regards the supposed “simple” elements, now suddenly

 

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625 HERMES OR HUXLEY?

degraded into poor and distant relatives—not even second cousins to the latter. For we are told by Prof. Crookes that:

“Hitherto, it has been considered that if the atomic weight of a metal, determined by different observers, setting out from different compounds, was always found to be constant . . . then such metal must rightly take rank among the simple or elementary bodies. We learn . . . that this is no longer the case. Again, we have here wheels within wheels. Gadolinium is not an element but a compound. . . We have shown that yttrium is a complex of five or more new constituents. And who shall venture to gainsay that each of these constituents, if attacked in some different manner, and if the result were submitted to a test more delicate and searching than the radiant-matter test, might not be still further divisible? Where, then, is the actual ultimate element? As we advance it recedes like the tantalizing mirage lakes and groves seen by the tired and thirsty traveller in the desert. Are we in our quest for truth to be thus deluded and baulked? The very idea of an element, as something absolutely primary and ultimate, seems to be growing less and less distinct. . .” (p. 16).

On page 429 of Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., we said that “the mystery of first creation, which was ever the despair of Science, is unfathomable unless they (the Scientists) accept the doctrine of Hermes. They will have to follow in the footsteps of the Hermetists.” Our prophecy begins to assert itself.

But between Hermes and Huxley there is a middle course and point. Let the men of Science only throw a bridge half-way, and think seriously over the theories of Leibnitz. We have shown our theories with regard to atomic evolution—their last formation into compound chemical molecules being produced within our terrestrial workshops in the earth’s atmosphere and not elsewhere—as strangely agreeing with the evolution of atoms shown on Mr. Crookes’ plates. Several times already it was stated in this volume that Mârttânda (the Sun) had evolved and aggregated, together with his smaller seven Brothers, from his Mother’s (Aditi’s) bosom, that bosom being prima mater-ia—the lecturer’s primordial protyle. Esoteric doctrines teach the existence of “an antecedent form of energy having periodic cycles of ebb and swell, rest and activity” (p. 21)—and behold a great scholar in Science now asking the world to accept this as one of the postulates. We have shown the “Mother,” fiery and hot, becoming gradually cool and radiant, and that same Scientist claims as his second postulate, a scientific necessity, it would seem—“an internal action akin to cooling, operating slowly in the protyle.” Occult Science teaches that “Mother” lies stretched in infinity (during Pralaya) as the great Deep, the “dry Waters of Space,” according to the quaint expression in the Catechism, and becomes wet

626 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

only after the separation and the moving over its face of Narayana, the “Spirit which is invisible Flame, which never burns, but sets on fire all that it touches, and gives it life and generation.”⁶⁶¹ And now Science tells us that “the first-born element . . . most nearly allied to protyle” . . . would be “hydrogen . . . which for some time would be the only existing form of matter” in the Universe. What says Old Science? It answers: Just so; but we would call hydrogen and oxygen (which instils the fire of life into the “Mother” by incubation) in the pregenetic and even pre-geological ages—the Spirit, the noumenon of that which becomes in its grossest form oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen on Earth—nitrogen being of no divine origin, but merely an earth-born cement to unite other gases and fluids, and serve as a sponge to carry in itself the breath of life—pure air.⁶⁶² Before these gases and fluids become what they are in our atmosphere, they are interstellar Ether; still earlier and on a deeper plane—something else, and so on in infinitum The eminent and learned gentleman must pardon an Occultist for quoting him at such length; but such is the penalty of a Fellow of the Royal Society who approaches so near the precincts of the Sacred Adytum of Occult mysteries as virtually to overstep the forbidden boundaries.

But it is time to leave modern physical science and turn to the psychological and metaphysical side of the question. We would only remark that to the “two very reasonable postulates” required by the eminent lecturer, “to get a glimpse of some few of the secrets so darkly hidden” behind “the door of the Unknown”—a third should be added⁶⁶³—lest no battering at it should avail; the postulate that Leibnitz, in his speculations, stood on a firm groundwork of fact and truth. The admirable and thoughtful synopsis of these speculations—as given by John Theodore Merz in his “Leibnitz”—shows how nearly he has brushed the hidden secrets of esoteric Theogony in his Monadologie. And yet that philosopher has hardly risen in his speculations above the first planes, the lower principles of the Cosmic Great Body. His theory soars to no loftier heights than those of the manifested life, self-consciousness and intelligence, leaving the regions of the earlier post-genetic mysteries untouched, as his ethereal fluid is post-planetary.

But this third postulate will hardly be accepted by the modern men

 

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627 LEIBNITZ AND OCCULTISM.

of Science; and, like Descartes, they will prefer keeping to the properties of external things, which, like extension, are incapable of explaining the phenomenon of motion, rather than accept the latter as an independent Force. They will never become anti-Cartesian in this generation; nor will they admit that “this property of inertia is not a purely geometrical property, that it points to the existence of something in external bodies which is not extension merely.” This is Leibnitz’s idea as analyzed by Mertz, who adds that he called this something Force, and maintained that external things were endowed with Force, and that in order to be the bearers of this force they must have a substance, for they are not lifeless and inert masses, but the centres and bearers of form, a purely esoteric claim, since force was with Leibnitz an active principle, the division between mind and matter disappearing by this conclusion. But—

“The mathematical and dynamical inquiries of Leibnitz would not have led to the same result in the mind of a purely scientific inquirer. But Leibnitz was not a scientific man in the modern sense of the word. Had he been so, he might have worked out the conception of energy, defined mathematically the ideas of force and mechanical work, and arrived at the conclusion that even for purely scientific purposes it is desirable to look upon force, not as a primary quantity, but as a quantity derived from some other value.”

But, luckily for truth—

“Leibnitz was a philosopher; and as such he had certain primary principles, which biassed him in favour of certain conclusions, and his discovery that external things were substances endowed with force was at once used for the purpose of applying these principles. One of these principles was the law of continuity, the conviction that all the world was connected, that there were no gaps and chasms which could not be bridged over. The contrast of extended thinking substances was unbearable to him. The definition of the extended substances had already become untenable: it was natural that a similar inquiry was made into the definition of mind, the thinking substance. . .”

The divisions made by Leibnitz, however incomplete and faulty from the standpoint of Occultism, show a spirit of metaphysical intuition to which no man of science, not Descartes—not even Kant—has ever reached. With him there existed ever an infinite gradation of thought. Only a small portion of the contents of our thoughts, he said, rises into the clearness of apperception, “into the light of perfect consciousness.” Many remain in a confused or obscure state, in the state of “perceptions”; but they are there; . . . Descartes denied soul to the animal, Leibnitz endowed, as the Occultists do, “the whole creation with mental life, this being, according to him, capable of infinite gradations.” And

628 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

this, as Mertz justly observes, “at once widened the realm of mental life, destroying the contrast of animate and inanimate matter; it did yet more—it reacted on the conception of matter, of the extended substance. For it became evident that external or material things presented the property of extension to our senses only, not to our thinking faculties. The mathematician, in order to calculate geometrical figures, had been obliged to divide them into an infinite number of infinitely small parts, and the physicist saw no limit to the divisibility of matter into atoms. The bulk through which external things seemed to fill space was a property which they acquired only through the coarseness of our senses. . . . Leibnitz followed these arguments to some extent, but he could not rest content in assuming that matter was composed of a finite number of very small parts. His mathematical mind forced him to carry out the argument in infinitum And what became of the atoms then? They lost their extension and they retained only their property of resistance; they were the centres of force. They were reduced to mathematical points . . . but if their extension in space was nothing, so much fuller was their inner life. Assuming that inner existence, such as that of the human mind, is a new dimension, not a geometrical but a metaphysical dimension . . . having reduced the geometrical extension of the atoms to nothing, Leibnitz endowed them with an infinite extension in the direction of their metaphysical dimension. After having lost sight of them in the world of space, the mind has, as it were, to dive into a metaphysical world to find and grasp the real essence of what appears in space merely as a mathematical point. . . . As a cone stands on its point, or a perpendicular straight line cuts a horizontal plane only in one mathematical point, but may extend infinitely in height and depth, so the essences of things real have only a punctual existence in this physical world of space; but have an infinite depth of inner life in the metaphysical world of thought . . .” (p. 144).

This is the spirit, the very root of occult doctrine and thought. The “Spirit-Matter” and “Matter-Spirit” extend infinitely in depth, and like “the essence of things” of Leibnitz, our essence of things real is at the seventh depth; while the unreal and gross matter of Science and the external world, is at the lowest end of our perceptive senses. The Occultist knows the worth or worthlessness of the latter.

The student must now be shown the fundamental distinction between the system of Leibnitz⁶⁶⁴ and that of occult philosophy, on the question of the Monads, and this may be done with his Monadology before us. It may be correctly stated that were Leibnitz’s and Spinoza’s systems

 

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629 SPINOZA AND LEIBNITZ.

reconciled, the essence and Spirit of esoteric philosophy would be made to appear. From the shock of the two—as opposed to the Cartesian system—emerge the truths of the Archaic doctrine. Both opposed the metaphysics of Descartes. His idea of the contrast of two substances—Extension and Thought—radically differing from each other and mutually irreducible, was too arbitrary and too unphilosophical for them. Thus Leibnitz made of the two Cartesian substances two attributes of one universal unity, in which he saw God. Spinoza recognised but one universal indivisible substance and absolute all, like Parabrahmam. Leibnitz, on the contrary perceived the existence of a plurality of substances. There was but one for Spinoza; for Leibnitz an infinitude of Beings, from, and in, the One. Hence, though both admitted but one real Entity, while Spinoza made it impersonal and indivisible, Leibnitz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine and semi-divine Beings. Spinoza was a subjective, Leibnitz an objective Pantheist, yet both were great philosophers in their intuitive perceptions.

Now, if these two teachings were blended together and each corrected by the other,—and foremost of all the One Reality weeded of its personality—there would remain as sum total a true spirit of esoteric philosophy in them; the impersonal, attributeless, absolute divine essence which is no “Being,” but the root of all being. Draw a deep line in your thought between that ever-incognizable essence, and the, as invisible, yet comprehensible Presence (Mulaprakriti), or Schekinah, from beyond and through which vibrates the Sound of the Verbum, and from which evolve the numberless hierarchies of intelligent Egos, of conscious as of semi-conscious, perceptive and apperceptive Beings, whose essence is spiritual Force, whose Substance is the Elements and whose Bodies (when needed) are the atoms—and our doctrine is there. For, says Leibnitz, “the primitive Element of every material body being Force, which has none of the characteristics of (objective) matter—it can be conceived but can never be the object of any imaginative representation.” That which was for him the primordial and ultimate element in every body and object was thus not the material atoms, or molecules, necessarily more or less extended, as those of Epicurus and Gassendi, but, as Mertz shows, immaterial and metaphysical atoms, ‘mathematical points’; or real souls,—as explained by Henri Lachelier (Professeur agrégé de Philosophie), his French biographer. “That which exists outside of us in an absolute manner, are Souls whose essence is force,” (Monadologie, Introd.).

Thus, reality in the manifested world is composed of a unity of units, so to say, immaterial (from our stand-point) and infinite. This Leibnitz calls “Monads,” Eastern philosophy “Jivas” —and Occultism gives it, with the Kabalists and all the Christians, a variety of names.

630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

They are with us, as with Leibnitz—“the expression of the universe,”⁶⁶⁵ and every physical point is but the phenomenal expression of the noumenal, metaphysical point. His distinction between perception and apperception, is the philosophical though dim expression of the Esoteric teachings. His “reduced universes,” of which “there are as many as there are Monads”—is the chaotic representation of our Septenary System with its divisions and sub-divisions.

As to the relation his Monads bear to our Dhyan-Chohans, Cosmic Spirits, Devas and Elementals, we may reproduce briefly the opinion of a learned and thoughtful theosophist, Mr. H. A. Bjerregaard, on the subject. In an excellent paper “On the Elementals, the Elementary Spirits, and the relationship between them and Human Beings,” read by him before the “Aryan Theosophical Society of New York” (see Path, Nos. 10 and 11, of Jan. and Feb. 1887), Mr. Bjerregaard formulates distinctly his opinion. . . . . “To Spinoza, substance is dead and inactive, but to Leibnitz’s penetrating mind everything is living activity and active energy. In holding this view, he comes infinitely nearer the Orient than any other thinker of his day, or after him. His discovery that an active energy forms the essence of Substance is a principle that places him in direct relationship to the Seers of the East.”

And the lecturer proceeds to show that to Leibnitz atoms and elements are centres of force, or rather “spiritual beings whose very nature is to act,” for the elementary particles are not acting mechanically, but from an internal principle. They are incorporeal spiritual units (“substantial,” however, but not immaterial in our sense) inaccessible to all changes from without, and indestructible by any external force. Leibnitz’s monads, adds the lecturer, “differ from atoms in the following particulars, which are very important for us to remember, otherwise we shall not be able to see the difference between elementals and mere matter.” . . . . “Atoms are not distinguished from each other, they are qualitatively alike; but one monad differs from every other monad qualitatively; and every one is a peculiar world to itself. Not so with atoms; they are absolutely alike quantitatively and qualitatively, and possess no individuality of their own.⁶⁶⁶ Again, the atoms (molecules,

 

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631 MAYA AND MAHAMAYA.

rather) of materialistic philosophy can be considered as extended and divisible, while the monads are mere mathematical points and indivisible. Finally, and this is a point where these monads of Leibnitz closely resemble the elementals of mystic philosophy—these monads are representative Beings. Every monad reflects every other. Every monad is a living mirror of the Universe within its own sphere. And mark this, for upon it depends the power possessed by these monads, and upon this depends the work they can do for us; in mirroring the world, the monads are not mere passive reflective agents, but spontaneously self-active; they produce the images spontaneously, as the soul does a dream. In every monad, therefore, the adept may read everything, even the future. Every monad or Elemental is a looking-glass that can speak. . .” It is at this point that Leibnitz’s philosophy breaks down. There is no provision made, nor any distinction established, between the “Elemental” monad and that of a high Planetary Spirit, or even the human monad or Soul. He even goes so far as to sometimes doubt whether “God has ever made anything but Monads or substances without extension.” (Examen des Principes du P. Malebranche.) He draws a distinction between Monads and Atoms,⁶⁶⁷ because, as he repeatedly states, “bodies with all their qualities are only phenomenal, like the rainbow. . . . Corpora omnia cum omnibus qualitatibus suis non sunt aliud quam phenomena bene fundata, ut Iris” (Letter to Father Desbosses, Correspondence, letter xviii.)—but soon after he finds a provision for this in a substantial correspondence, a certain metaphysical bond between the monads—vinculum substantiale. Esoteric philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism—though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Maya, temporary illusion—draws a practical distinction between collective illusion, Mahamaya, from the purely metaphysical stand-point, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts. The adept, therefore, may read the future in an Elemental Monad, but he has to draw for this object a great number of them, as each monad represents only a portion of the Kingdom it belongs to. “It is not in the object, but in the modification of the cognition of the object that the Monads are limited. They all go confusedly to the infinite, to the all, but they are all limited and distinguished by the

 

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632 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

degrees of distinct perceptions.” (§ 60, Monadologie.)⁶⁶⁸ And as Leibnitz explains, “All the portions of the Universe are distinctly represented in the Monads, but some are reflected in one monad, some in another”; but a number of monads could represent simultaneously the thoughts of the two millions of inhabitants of Paris.

But what say the Occult Sciences to this, and what do they add?

They say that what is called collectively Monads by Leibnitz—roughly viewed, and leaving every subdivision out of calculation, for the present⁶⁶⁹—may be separated into three distinct Hosts, which, counted from the highest planes, are, firstly, “gods,” or conscious, spiritual Egos; the intelligent architects, who work after the plan in the Divine Mind. Then come the Elementals, or Monads, who form collectively and unconsciously the grand Universal Mirrors of everything connected with their respective realms. Lastly, the atoms, or material molecules, which are informed in their turn by their apperceptive monads, just as every cell in a human body is so informed. (See the closing pages of Book I.) There are shoals of such informed atoms which, in their turn, inform the molecules; an infinitude of monads, or Elementals proper, and countless spiritual Forces—Monadless, for they are pure incorporealities,⁶⁷⁰ except under certain laws, when they assume a form—not necessarily human. Whence the substance that clothes them—the apparent organism they evolve around their centres? The Formless (“Arupa”) Radiations, existing in the harmony of Universal Will, and being what we term the collective or the aggregate of Cosmic Will on the plane of the subjective Universe, unite together an infinitude of monads—each the mirror of its own Universe—and thus individualize

 

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633 THE WHEELS OF LIFE.

for the time being an independent mind, omniscient and universal; and by the same process of magnetic aggregation they create for themselves objective, visible bodies, out of the interstellar atoms. For atoms and Monads, associated or dissociated, simple or complex, are, from the moment of the first differentiation, but the principles, corporeal, psychic and Spiritual, of the “Gods,”—themselves the Radiations of primordial nature. Thus, to the eye of the Seer, the higher Planetary Powers appear under two aspects: the subjective—as infl, and the objective—as mystic forms, which, under Karmic law, become a Presence, Spirit and Matter being One, as repeatedly stated. Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is Spirit—on the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both—are Maya.

Atoms are called “Vibrations” in Occultism; also “Sound”—collectively. This does not interfere with Mr. Tyndall’s scientific discovery. He traced, on the lower rung of the ladder of monadic being, the whole course of the atmospheric vibrations—and this constitutes the objective part of the process in nature. He has traced and recorded the rapidity of their motion and transmission; the force of their impact; their setting up vibrations in the tympanum and their transmission of these to the stolithes, etc., etc., till the vibration of the auditory nerve commences—and a new phenomenon now takes place: the subjective side of the process or the sensation of Sound. Does he perceive or see it? No; for his speciality is to discover the behaviour of matter. But why should not a psychic see it, a spiritual seer, whose inner Eye is opened, and who can see through the veil of matter? The waves and undulations of Science are all produced by atoms propelling their molecules into activity from within. Atoms fill the immensity of Space, and by their continuous vibration are that motion which keeps the wheels of Life perpetually going. It is that inner work that produces the natural phenomena called the correlation of Forces. Only, at the origin of every such “force,” there stands the conscious guiding noumenon thereof—Angel or God, Spirit or Demon—ruling powers, yet the same.

As described by Seers—those who can see the motion of the interstellar shoals, and follow them in their evolution clairvoyantly—they are dazzling, like specks of virgin snow in radiant sunlight. Their velocity is swifter than thought, quicker than any mortal physical eye could follow, and, as well as can be judged from the tremendous rapidity of their course, the motion is circular. . . . . Standing on an open plain, on a mountain summit especially, and gazing into the vast vault above and the spacial infinitudes around, the whole atmosphere seems ablaze with them, the air soaked through with these dazzling coruscations. At times, the intensity of their motion produces flashes

634‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

like the Northern lights during the Aurora Borealis. The sight is so marvellous, that, as the Seer gazes into this inner world, and feels the scintillating points shoot past him, he is filled with awe at the thought of other, still greater mysteries, that lie beyond, and within, this radiant ocean. . . . .

However imperfect and incomplete this explanation on “Gods, Monads and Atoms,” it is hoped that some students and theosophists, at least, will feel that there may be indeed a close relation between materialistic Science, and Occultism, which is the complement and missing soul of the former.

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§ XVI. CYCLIC EVOLUTION AND KARMA.

It is the Spiritual evolution of the inner, immortal man that forms the fundamental tenet in the Occult Sciences. To realize even distantly such a process, the student has to believe (a) in the one Universal Life, independent of matter (or what Science regards as matter); and (b) in the individual intelligences that animate the various manifestations of this Principle. Mr. Huxley does not believe in “Vital Force,” others do. Dr. J. H. Hutchinson Sterling’s work “Concerning Protoplasm” has made no small havoc of this dogmatic negation. Professor Beale’s decision is also in favour of a Vital Principle; and Dr.

B. W. Richardson’s lectures on the “Nervous Ether,” have been sufficiently quoted from. Thus, opinions are divided.

The one life is closely related to the one law which governs the World of Being—Karma. Exoterically, this is simply and literally “action,” or rather an “effect-producing cause.” Esoterically it is quite a different thing in its far-fetching moral effects. It is the unerring Law of Retribution. To say to those ignorant of the real significance, characteristics and awful importance of this eternal immutable law, that no theological definition of a personal deity can give an idea of this impersonal, yet ever present and active Principle, is to speak in vain. Nor can it be called Providence. For Providence, with the Theists (the Christian Protestants, at any rate), rejoices in a personal male gender, while with the Roman Catholics it is a female potency, “Divine Providence tempers His blessings to secure their better effects,” Wogan tells us. Indeed “He” tempers them, which Karma—a sexless principle—does not.

Throughout the first two Parts, it was shown that, at the first flutter

635 THE ROOTS AND CAUSES.

of renascent life, Svâbhâvat, “the mutable radiance of the Immutable Darkness unconscious in Eternity,” passes, at every new rebirth of Kosmos, from an inactive state into one of intense activity; that it differentiates, and then begins its work through that differentiation. This work is Karma.

The Cycles are also subservient to the effects produced by this activity. “The one Cosmic atom becomes seven atoms on the plane of matter, and each is transformed into a centre of energy; that same atom becomes seven rays on the plane of spirit, and the seven creative forces of nature, radiating from the root-essence . . . . follow, one the right, the other the left path, separate till the end of the Kalpa, and yet are in close embrace. What unites them? Karma.” The atoms emanated from the Central Point emanate in their turn new centres of energy, which, under the potential breath of Fohat, begin their work from within without, and multiply other minor centres. These, in the course of evolution and involution, form in their turn the roots or developing causes of new effects, from worlds and “man-bearing” globes, down to the genera, species, and classes of all the seven kingdoms⁶⁷¹ (of which we know only four). For “the blessed workers have received the Thyan-kam, in the eternity” (Book of “The Aphorisms of Tson-ka-pa”).

“Thyan-kam” is the power or knowledge of guiding the impulses of cosmic energy in the right direction.

The true Buddhist, recognising no “personal god,” nor any “Father” and “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” still believes in an absolute consciousness, “Adi-Buddhi”; and the Buddhist philosopher knows that there are Planetary Spirits, the “Dhyan Chohans.” But though he admits of “spiritual lives,” yet, as they are temporary in eternity, even they, according to his philosophy, are “the maya of the day,” the illusion of a “day of Brahmâ,” a short manvantara of 4,320,000,000 years. The “Yin-Sin” is not for the speculations of men, for the Lord Buddha has strongly prohibited all such inquiry. If the Dhyan Chohans and all the invisible Beings—the Seven Centres and their direct Emanations, the minor centres of Energy—are the direct reflex of the One Light, yet men are far removed from these, since the whole of the visible Kosmos consists of “self-produced beings, the creatures of Karma.” Thus regarding a personal God “as only a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the imagination of ignorant men,”⁶⁷² they teach that only “two things are (objectively) eternal, namely Akâsa and Nirvana”; and that these are one in reality, and but a maya when divided. “Buddhists deny creation and cannot conceive of a Creator.” “Everything has come out of Akâsa (or Svâbhâvat

 

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636 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

on our earth) in obedience to a law of motion inherent in it, and after a certain existence passes away. Nothing ever came out of nothing.” (Buddhist Catechism.)

If a Vedantic Brahmin of the Adwaita Sect, when asked whether he believes in the existence of God, is always likely to answer, as Jacolliot was answered—“I am myself ‘God’”; a Buddhist (a Sinhalese especially) would simply laugh, and say in reply, “There is no God; no Creation.” Yet the root philosophy of both Adwaita and Buddhist scholars is identical, and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that every creature on earth, however small and humble, “is an immortal portion of the immortal matter”—for matter with them has quite another significance than it has with either Christian or materialist—and that every creature is subject to Karma.

The answer of the Brahmin is one which would suggest itself to every ancient philosopher, Kabalist, and Gnostic of the early days. It contains the very spirit of the Delphic and Kabalistic commandments, for esoteric philosophy solved, ages ago, the problem of what man was, is, and will be; of man’s origin, life-cycle—interminable in its duration of successive incarnations or rebirths—and finally of his absorption into the source from which he started.

But it is not physical Science that we can ever ask to read man for us, as the riddle of the Past, or that of the Future; since no philosopher is able to tell us even what man is, as he is known both to physiology and psychology. In doubt whether man was “a god or beast,” he is now connected with the latter and derived from an animal. No doubt that the care of analyzing and classifying the human being as a terrestrial animal may be left to Science, which occultists—of all men—regard with veneration and respect. They recognize its ground and the wonderful work done by it, the progress achieved in physiology, and even—to a degree—in biology. But man’s inner, spiritual, psychic, or even moral, nature cannot be left to the tender mercies of an ingrained materialism; for not even the higher psychological philosophy of the West is able, in its present incompleteness and tendency towards a decided agnosticism, to do justice to the inner; especially to his higher capacities and perceptions, and those states of consciousness, across the road to which such authorities as Mill draw a strong line, saying “So far, and no farther shalt thou go.”

No Occultist would deny that man—no less than the elephant and the microbe, the crocodile and the lizard, the blade of grass or the crystal—is, in his physical formation, the simple product of the evolutionary forces of nature through a numberless series of transformations; but he puts the case differently.

It is not against zoological and anthropological discoveries, based on

637 THE SWING OF KARMA.

the fossils of man and animal, that every mystic and believer in a divine soul inwardly revolts, but only against the uncalled-for conclusions built on preconceived theories and made to fit in with certain prejudices. Their premises may or may not be always true; and as some of these theories live but a short life, the deductions therefrom must ever be one-sided with materialistic evolutionists. Yet it is on the strength of such very ephemeral authority, that most of the men of science frequently receive undue honours where they deserve them the least.⁶⁷³

To make the working of Karma, in the periodical renovations of the Universe, more evident and intelligible to the student when he arrives at the origin and evolution of man, he has now to examine with us the esoteric bearing of the Karmic Cycles upon Universal Ethics. The question is, do those mysterious divisions of time, called Yugas and Kalpas by the Hindus, and so very graphically—Κύκλος—“cycle,” ring or circle, by the Greeks, have any bearing upon, or any direct connection with, human life? Even exoteric philosophy explains that these perpetual circles of time are ever returning on themselves, periodically, and

 

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638 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

intelligently in Space and Eternity. There are “Cycles of matter”⁶⁷⁴ and there are “Cycles of Spiritual evolution.” Racial, national, and individual cycles. May not esoteric speculation allow us a still deeper insight into the workings of these?

This idea is beautifully expressed in a very clever scientific work:

“The possibility of rising to a comprehension of a system of co-ordination so far outreaching in time and space all reach of human observations, is a circumstance which signalizes the power of man to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent matter, and assert his superiority over all unstable and perishable forms of being. There is a method in the succession of events, and in the relation of co-existent things, which the mind of man seizes hold of; and by means of this as a clue, he runs back or forward over æons of material history of which human experience can never testify. Events germinate and unfold. They have a past which is connected with their present, and we feel a well-justified confidence that a future is appointed which will be similarly connected with the present and the past. This continuity and unity of history repeat themselves before our eyes in all conceivable stages of progress. The phenomena furnish us the grounds for the generalization of two laws which are truly principles of scientific divination, by which alone the human mind penetrates the sealed records of the past and the unopened pages of the future. The first of these is the law of evolution, or, to phrase it for our purpose, the law of correlated successiveness or organized history in the individual, illustrated in the changing phases of every single maturing system of results. . . . These thoughts summon into our immediate presence the measureless past and the measureless future of material history. They seem almost to open vistas through infinity, and to endow the human intellect with an existence and a vision exempt from the limitations of time and space and finite causation, and lift it up toward a sublime apprehension of the Supreme Intelligence whose dwelling place is Eternity.” (“World-Life,” p. 535 and 548.)

According to the teachings, Maya, or the illusive appearance of the marshalling of events and actions on this earth, changes, varying with nations and places. But the chief features of one’s life are always in accordance with the “Constellation” one is born under, or, we should say, with the characteristics of its animating principle or the deity that presides over it, whether we call it a Dhyan Chohan, as in Asia, or an Archangel, as with the Greek and Latin churches. In ancient Symbolism it was always the Sun (though the Spiritual, not the visible, Sun was meant), that was supposed to send forth the chief Saviours and Avatars. Hence the connecting link between the Buddhas, the Avatars, and so many other incarnations of the highest Seven. The closer the approach to one’s Prototype, “in Heaven,” the better for the mortal whose personality was chosen, by his own personal deity (the seventh principle), as its terrestrial abode. For, with every effort of will toward purification and unity

 

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639 THE NETWORK OF DESTINY.

with that “Self-god,” one of the lower rays breaks and the spiritual entity of man is drawn higher and ever higher to the ray that supersedes the first, until, from ray to ray, the inner man is drawn into the one and highest beam of the Parent-Sun. Thus, “the events of humanity do run co-ordinately with the number forms,” since the single units of that humanity proceed one and all from the same source—the central and its shadow, the visible Sun. For the equinoxes and solstices, the periods and various phases of the Solar course, astronomically and numerically expressed, are only the concrete symbols of the eternally living verity, though they do seem abstract ideas to uninitiated mortals. And this explains the extraordinary numerical coincidences with geometrical relations, as shown by several authors.

Yes; “our destiny is written in the stars!” Only, the closer the union between the mortal reflection man and his celestial prototype, the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reincarnations—which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of all is it Fatalism. The latter implies a blind course of some still blinder power, and man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot escape his ruling Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead him in that direction, and he can reach the goal of misery—if such is decreed to him, either in the snowy white robes of the Martyr, or in the soiled garments of a volunteer in the iniquitous course; for, there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two. Those who believe in Karma have to believe in destiny, which, from birth to death, every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the invisible prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate astral, or inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable law of compensation steps in and takes its course, faithfully following the fluctuations. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the net-work of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions, and this is—Karma.

A materialist, treating upon the periodical creations of our globe, has expressed it in one sentence. “The whole past of the Earth is nothing but an unfolded present.” This was Büchner, who little suspected that he was repeating an axiom of the Occultists. It is quite true also, as Burmeister (quoted in “Force and matter”) remarks, that

640 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“the historical investigation of the development of the Earth has proved that now and then rest upon the same base; that the past has been developed in the same manner as the present rolls on; and that the Forces which were in action ever remained the same.”

The “Forces”—their noumena rather—are the same, of course; therefore, the phenomenal Forces must be the same also. But how can any one feel so sure that the attributes of matter have not altered under the hand of Protean Evolution? How can any materialist assert with such confidence, as is done by Rossmassler, that “this eternal conformity in the essence of phenomena renders it certain that fire and water possessed at all times the same powers and ever will possess them?” Who are they “that darken counsel with words without knowledge,” and where were the Huxleys and Büchners when the foundations of the earth were laid by the great Law? It is a fundamental principle of the Occult philosophy, this same homogeneity of matter and immutability of natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by materialism; but that unity rests upon the inseparability of Spirit from matter, and, if the two are once divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into chaos and non-being. Therefore, it is absolutely false, and but an additional demonstration of the great conceit of our age, to assert (as men of science do) that all the great geological changes and terrible convulsions have been produced by ordinary and known physical forces. For these forces were but the tools and final means for the accomplishment of certain purposes, acting periodically, and apparently mechanically, through an inward impulse mixed up with, but beyond their material nature. There is a purpose in every important act of Nature, whose acts are all cyclic and periodical. But spiritual Forces having been usually confused with the purely physical, the former are denied by, and therefore, have to remain unknown to Science, because left unexamined.⁶⁷⁵

“The history of the World begins with its general aim,” says Hegel; “the realization of the Idea of Spirit—only in an implicit form (an sich), that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden unconscious instinct, and the whole process of History . . . is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one. Thus appearing in the form of merely natural existence, natural will—that which has been called the subjective side—physical craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and subjective conception—spontaneously present themselves at the very commencement. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities constitute the instruments and means of the world

 

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641 CYCLIC WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.

spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness and realising it. And this aim is none other than finding itself—coming to itself—and contemplating itself in concrete actuality. But that those manifestations of vitality on the part of individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are at the same time the means and instruments of a higher power, of a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing—which they realise unconsciously—might be made a matter of question; rather has been questioned . . . on this point I announced my view at the very outset, and asserted our hypothesis . . . and our belief that Reason governs the World and has consequently governed its history. In relation to this independently universal and substantial existence—all else is subordinate, subservient to it, and the means for its development.”⁶⁷⁶

No metaphysician or theosophist could demur to these truths, which are all embodied in esoteric teachings. There is a predestination in the geological life of our globe, as in the history, past and future, of races and nations. This is closely connected with what we call Karma and Western Pantheists, “Nemesis” and “Cycles.” The law of evolution is now carrying us along the ascending arc of our cycle, when the effects will be once more re-merged into, and re-become the (now neutralized) causes, and all things affected by the former will have regained their original harmony. This will be the cycle of our special “Round,” a moment in the duration of the great cycle, or the Mahayuga.

The fine philosophical remarks of Hegel are found to have their application in the teachings of Occult Science, which shows nature ever acting with a given purpose, whose results are always dual. This was stated in our first Occult volumes, in Isis Unveiled, p. 268, Vol. II., in the following words:

As our planet revolves once every year around the sun, and at the same time turns once in every twenty-four hours upon its own axis, thus traversing minor circles within a larger one, so is the work of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced, within the Great Saros.

The revolution of the physical world, according to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding in cycles, like the physical one.

Thus we see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the lowest point, humanity reasserts itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which it had before descended.

But these cycles—wheels within wheels, so comprehensively and ingeniously symbolized by the various Manus and Rishis in India, and by the Kabiri in the West⁶⁷⁷—do not affect all mankind at one and the same

 

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642 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

time—as explained in the Racial division of Cycles (See sub-section 6.) Hence, as we see, the difficulty of comprehending, and discriminating between them, with regard to their physical and spiritual effects, without having thoroughly mastered their relations with, and action upon the respective positions of nations and races, in their destiny and evolution. This system cannot be comprehended if the spiritual action of these periods—pre-ordained, so to say, by Karmic law—is separated from their physical course. The calculations of the best astrologers would fail, or at any rate remain imperfect, unless this dual action is thoroughly taken into consideration and dealt with upon these lines. And this mastery can be achieved only through initiation.

The Grand Cycle includes the progress of mankind from the appearance of primordial man of ethereal form. It runs through the inner cycles of his (man’s) progressive evolution from the ethereal down to the semi-ethereal and purely physical: down to the redemption of man from his coat of skin and matter, after which it continues running its course downward and then upward again, to meet at the culmination of a Round, when the manvantaric “Serpent swallows its tail” and seven minor cycles are passed. These are the great Racial Cycles which affect equally all the nations and tribes included in that special Race; but there are minor and national as well as tribal cycles within those, which run independently of each other. They are called in the Eastern esotericism the Karmic cycles. In the West, since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from and been developed by the dark powers supposed to be at constant war and in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah—the full and awful significance of the Greek Nemesis (or Karma) has been entirely forgotten. Otherwise Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is without attributes; that while the dreaded goddess is absolute and immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who propel her to action and give the impulse to its direction. Karma-Nemesis is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who make of her either a fury or a rewarding Angel. Yea—

“Wise are they who worship Nemesis”⁶⁷⁸

 

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643 KARMA-NEMESIS.

—as the chorus tells Prometheus. And as unwise they, who believe that the goddess may be propitiated by whatever sacrifices and prayers, or have her wheel diverted from the path it has once taken. “The triform Fates and ever mindful Furies” are her attributes only on earth, and begotten by ourselves. There is no return from the paths she cycles over; yet those paths are of our own making, for it is we, collectively or individually, who prepare them. Karma-Nemesis is the synonym of Providence, minus design, goodness, and every other finite attribute and qualification, so unphilosophically attributed to the latter. An Occultist or a philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying it with Karma-Nemesis, he will teach that nevertheless it guards the good and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer—aye, even to his seventh rebirth. So long, in short, as the effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in the Infinite World of harmony, has not been finally readjusted. For the only decree of Karma—an eternal and immutable decree—is absolute Harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or—break them.

Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate; while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism; and a third, simple chance, with neither gods nor devils to guide them—would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all these to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbours will no more work to hurt us than we would think of harming them, the two-thirds of the World’s evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the “ways of Providence.” We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our lives,

644 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. If one breaks the laws of Harmony, or, as a theosophical writer expresses it, “the laws of life,” one must be prepared to fall into the chaos one has oneself produced. For, according to the same writer, “the only conclusion one can come to is that these laws of life are their own avengers; and consequently that every avenging Angel is only a typified representation of their re-action.” Therefore, if any one is helpless before these immutable laws, it is not ourselves, the artificers of our destinies, but rather those angels, the guardians of harmony. Karma-Nemesis is no more than the (spiritual) dynamical effect of causes produced and forces awakened into activity by our own actions. It is a law of occult dynamics that “a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective plane of existence.”

This state will last till man’s spiritual intuitions are fully opened, which will not happen before we fairly cast off our thick coats of matter; until we begin acting from within, instead of ever following impulses from without; namely, those produced by our physical senses and gross selfish body. Until then the only palliative to the evils of life is union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu, and altruism not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but a variety of bad effects. And if a Brotherhood or even a number of Brotherhoods may not be able to prevent nations from occasionally cutting each other’s throats—still unity in thought and action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will always prevent some, while trying to comprehend that which has hitherto remained to them a riddle, from creating additional causes in a world already so full of woe and evil. Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if—

“. . . . virtue in distress, and vice in triumph
Make atheists of mankind,”⁶⁷⁹

it is only because that mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour as his own destroyer. That he need not accuse Heaven and the gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat this bit of Grecian wisdom, which warns man to forbear accusing That which—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Just, though mysterious, leads us on unerring
Through ways unmark’d from guilt to punishment . . .”

—which are now the ways and the high road on which move onward the great European nations. The Western Aryans had, every nation

 

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645 ANCIENT AND MODERN PROPHECIES.

and tribe, like their Eastern brethren of the Fifth Race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while now, several of them have reached their Iron Age, the Kali-Yuga, an age Black with Horrors. . . . .

It is true, on the other hand, that the exoteric cycles of every nation have been correctly made to be derived from, and depend on, sidereal motions. The latter are inseparably blended with the destinies of nations and men. But in their purely physical sense, Europe knows of no other cycles than the astronomical, and makes its computations accordingly. Nor will it hear of any other than imaginary circles or circuits in the starry heavens that gird them—

“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb . . .”

But with the pagans, with whom, as Coleridge has it—“. . . . . Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the Deity . .” that “Deity” manifesting co-ordinately with, and only through Karma, and being that karma-nemesis itself, the cycles meant something more than a mere succession of events, or a periodical space of time of more or less prolonged duration. For they were generally marked with recurrences of a more varied and intellectual character than are exhibited in the periodical return of seasons or of certain constellations. Modern wisdom is satisfied with astronomical computations and prophecies based on unerring mathematical laws. Ancient Wisdom added to the cold shell of astronomy the vivifying elements of its soul and spirit—astrology. And, as the sidereal motions do regulate and determine other events on Earth—besides potatoes and the periodical disease of that useful vegetable—(a statement which, not being amenable to scientific explanation, is merely derided, while accepted)—those events have to be allowed to find themselves predetermined by even simple astronomical computations. Believers in astrology will understand our meaning, sceptics will laugh at the belief and mock the idea. Thus they shut their eyes, ostrich-like, to their own fate. . . . . . .⁶⁸⁰

 

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646 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

This because their little historical period, so called, allows them no margin for comparison. Sidereal heaven is before them; and though their spiritual vision is still unopened and the atmospheric dust of terrestrial origin seals their sight and chains it to the limits of physical systems, still they do not fail to perceive the movements and note the behaviour of meteors and comets. They record the periodical advents of those wanderers and “flaming messengers,” and prophesy, in consequence, earthquakes, meteoric showers, the apparition of certain stars, comets, etc., etc. Are they soothsayers for all that? No, they are learned astronomers.

Why, then, should occultists and astrologers, as learned, be disbelieved, when they prophesy the return of some cyclic event on the same mathematical principle? Why should the claim that they know it be ridiculed? Their forefathers and predecessors, having recorded the recurrence of such events in their time and day, throughout a period embracing hundreds of thousands of years, the conjunction of the same constellations must necessarily produce, if not quite the same, at any rate, similar effects. Are the prophecies derided, because of the claim of the hundreds of thousands of years of observation, and the millions of years of the human races? In its turn modern Science is laughed at for its far more modest geological and anthropological figures, by those who hold to Biblical chronology. Thus Karma adjusts even human laughter at the mutual expense of sects, learned societies, and individuals. Yet in the prognostication of such future events, at any rate, all foretold on the authority of cyclic recurrences, there is no psychic phenomenon involved. It is neither prevision, nor prophecy; no more than is the signalling of a comet or star, several years before its appearance. It is simply knowledge and mathematically correct computations which enable the Wise Men of the East to foretell, for instance, that England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe; France, nearing such a point of her cycle, and Europe in general threatened with, or rather, on the eve of, a cataclysm, which her own cycle of racial Karma has led her to. The reliability of the information depends, of course, on the acceptation or rejection of the claim for a tremendous period of historical observation. Eastern Initiates maintain that they have preserved records of the racial development and of events of universal import ever since the beginning of the Fourth Race—that which preceded being traditional. Moreover, those who believe in Seership and Occult

647 ASTROLOGY A SCIENCE.‌

powers will have no difficulty in crediting the general character, at least, of the information given, even if traditional, once the latter is checked and corrected by the corroboration of clairvoyance and esoteric knowledge. But in the present case no such metaphysical belief is claimed as our chief dependence, but a proof is given on what, to every Occultist, is quite scientific evidence—the records preserved through the Zodiac for incalculable ages.

It is now amply proved that even horoscopes and judiciary astrology are not quite based on a fiction, and that stars and constellations, consequently, have an occult and mysterious influence on, and connection with, individuals. And if with the latter, why not with nations, races, and mankind in bulk? This, again, is a claim made on the authority of the Zodiacal records. We shall examine then, if you please, how far the Zodiac was known to the ancients, and how far it is forgotten by the moderns.

———

§ XVII. “THE ZODIAC AND ITS ANTIQUITY.”

“All men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understanding, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess,” said Jordan, justly adding to this—“and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions.”

This becomes doubly true in the matter of scientific opinions upon hypotheses offered for consideration—the prejudice and preconceptions of “authorities,” so called, often deciding upon questions of the most vital importance for history. There are several such predetermined opinions among our learned Orientalists, yet few are more unjust or illogical than the general error with regard to the antiquity of the Zodiac. Thanks to the hobby of some German Orientalists, English and American Sanskritists have accepted Professor Weber’s opinion that the peoples of India had no idea or knowledge of the Zodiac prior to the Macedonian invasion, and that it is from the Greeks that the ancient Hindus imported it into their country. We are further told, by several other “authorities,” that no Eastern nation knew of the Zodiac before the Hellenes kindly acquainted their neighbours with their invention. This, in the face of the Book of Job, declared, even by themselves, to be the oldest in the Hebrew canon, certainly prior to Moses, and which speaks of the making “of Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades (Ash, Kesil, and

648 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Cimah) and the chambers of the South” (ix. 9); of Scorpio and the Mazzaroths—the twelve signs (xxxviii., 31,32), which words, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabic tribes. The Book of Job, they say, precedes Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years—the two Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the Christian era (!!). One who prefers, by the bye, to believe Plato, who shows Homer flourishing far earlier, could point to a number of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the Orphic poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some modern critics to the effect that neither Orpheus, nor yet Homer and Hesiod, ever existed, it would seem time lost to mention these Archaic authors at all. The Arabian Job will suffice; unless, indeed, his volume of lamentations, along with the poems of the two Greeks, adding to them those of Linus, should now be also declared to be the patriotic forgery of the Jew Aristobulus. But if the Zodiac was known in the days of Job, how could the civilized and philosophical Hindus have remained ignorant of it?

Risking the arrows of modern criticism—rather blunted by misuse—the reader may be made acquainted with Bailly’s learned opinion upon the subject. Inferred speculations may be shown to be erroneous. Mathematical calculations stand on more secure grounds. Taking as a starting point several astronomical references in Job, Bailly devised a very ingenious means of proving that the earliest founders of the science of the Zodiac belonged to an antediluvian, primitive people. The fact that he seems willing to see in Thoth, Seth, and in Fohi (of China), some of the Biblical patriarchs, does not interfere with the validity of his proof as to the antiquity of the Zodiac.⁶⁸¹ Even accepting, for argument’s sake, his cautious 3700 years b.c. as the correct age of the science, this date proves in the most irrefutable way that it was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries b.c.—not as an historical race admitted by the critics, at any rate. Bailly then calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job “sweet influences of the Pleiades”⁶⁸² (in Hebrew, Chimah, see Job xxxviii. 31); of the Cesil (Orion); and that of the desert rains with reference to Scorpio, the eighth constellation; and found that in presence the eternal conformity of those divisions of the zodiac and names of the planets applied in the same order everywhere and always; and in presence of the impossibility of attributing it all to chance and coincidence,

 

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649 THE ZODIAC IN THE BIBLE.

“which never creates such similarities,” there must be allowed for the zodiac a great antiquity indeed. (See Astronomie Antique, pp. 63 to 74.)

Again, if the Bible is supposed to be an authority on any matter (and there are some who still believe so, whether from Christian or Kabalistical considerations), then the zodiac is clearly mentioned in II Kings, xxiii. 5. Before the “book of the law” was “found” by Hilkiah, the high priest (xxii.), the signs of the zodiac were known and worshipped. They were held in the same adoration as the sun and moon, since the “priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense . . . unto Baal, to the sun, moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven,” or the twelve signs or constellations, as the marginal note in the English Bible explains (see II. Kings xxiii. 5), had followed the injunction for centuries. They were stopped in their idolatry only by King Josiah, 624 years b.c.

The Old Testament is full of allusions to the twelve zodiacal signs, and the whole scheme is built upon it—heroes, personages, and events. Thus in the dream of Joseph, who saw eleven “stars” bowing to the twelfth, which was his “star,” the zodiac is meant. The Roman Catholics have discovered in it, moreover, a prophecy of Christ, who is that twelfth star, they say, and the eleven apostles; the absence of the twelfth being also regarded as a prophetic allusion to the treachery of Judas. The twelve sons of Jacob are again a reference to the same, as justly pointed out by Villalpandus (Temple de Jerusalem [Ezechielem explanationes], Vol. 2, Part 2, Chap. 30.). Sir John Malcolm, in his History of Persia, 1815, chap. 7, shows the Dabistan echoing all such traditions about the Zodiac. He traces the invention of it to the palmy days of the golden age of Iran, remarking that one of the said traditions maintains that the genii of the planets are represented under the same shapes and figures they had assumed, when they showed themselves to several holy prophets, and have thus led to the establishment of the rites based on the Zodiac.

Pythagoras, and after him Philo Judæus, held the number 12 as very sacred. “The dodecahedron is a perfect number.” It is the one among the signs of the Zodiac, Philo adds, that the suns visits in twelve months, and it is to honour that sign that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes, established the twelve cakes (Levit. xxiv., 5) of the shewbread, and placed twelve precious stones around the ephod of the pontiffs. (See De Profugis.)

According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the time fixed by him for the conflagration of the world (pralaya), and another for a deluge, is found to answer to the time given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. It comes at every renewal of the cycle of the sidereal year of 25,868 years. The names of the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the

650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

names of the signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians themselves are far earlier than the Chaldæans. Mr. Proctor shows, in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, that the ancient astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate astronomy 2,400 years b.c.; the Hindus date their Kali Yug from a great periodical conjunction of the planets thirty-one centuries b.c.; and, withal, it is the Greeks belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were the instructors of the Aryan Hindus in astronomy!

Whether the origin of the Zodiac is Aryan or Egyptian, it is still of an immense antiquity. Simplicius (VIth cent. a.d.) writes that he had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and records for the last 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten Mr. G. Massey, who remarks on this in his Natural Genesis (Vol. 2, p. 318) that “if we read this number of years by the month which Eudoxus said the Egyptians termed a year, that would still yield the length of two cycles of precession (or 51,736 years). Diogenes Laertius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, “Proem,” 2). Martianus Capella corroborates the same by telling posterity that the Egyptians had secretly studied astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted their knowledge to the world (Astronomy of the Ancients, Lewis, p. 264).

Several valuable quotations are made in the Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author’s theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla, saying: “One day when the sky was serene . . . a sound was heard in it . . . of a trumpet, so loud, shrill and mournful, that it affrighted . . . the world. The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all being different in life and manners, and that Heaven had allotted each its time, which was limited by the circuit of the great year” (25,868 years).

This reminds one strongly of our seven races of men, and of the eighth—the “animal man”—descended from the later Third Race; as also of the successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally disposed of almost the entire bulk of that race.

“The Assyrians,” says Iamblichus, “have not only preserved the memorials of seven and twenty myriads of years (270,000 years) as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the seven rulers of the world.” (Proclus, in Timæus, b. I.) This is the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine, as approximately as it can be. For 1,000,000 of years are allowed for our present Root-race (the Fifth), and about 850,000 years since the submersion of the last large island (part of the Continent), the Ruta of the Fourth Race, or the Atlanteans;

651 THE JEWISH PATRIARCHS ZODIACAL SIGNS.

while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the glacial period or thereabouts (vide Book II.). But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the divine kings belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity. Wherever twelve are mentioned, these are invariably the 12 signs of the zodiac.

So patent is the fact, that the Roman Catholic writers—especially among the French Ultramontanes—have tacitly agreed to connect the twelve Jewish Patriarchs with the signs of the Zodiac. This is done in a kind of prophetico-mystic way, which would sound to pious and ignorant ears like a portentous sign, a tacit divine recognition of the “chosen people of God,” whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. For instance, these writers (De Mirville among others) recognise curiously enough all the characteristics of the 12 signs of the Zodiac, in the words addressed by the dying Jacob to his Sons, and in his definitions of the future of each Tribe. (Vide Genesis, ch. xlix.) Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are claimed to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the signs, repeated in the 12 stones of the Urim and Thummim, and on the 12 wings of the cherub. Leaving the proof of exactitude in the alleged correspondence to the said mystics, it is as follows: Man, or the Aquarius, is in the sphere of Reuben, who is declared as “unstable as water” (the Vulgate has it, to be “rushing like water”); Gemini, in the strong fraternal association of Simeon and Levi; Leo, in that of Judah, “the strong Lion” of his tribe, “the lion’s whelp”; the Pisces, in Zabulon, who “shall dwell at the haven of the sea”; Taurus, in Issachar, because he is “a strong ass couching down,” etc., and therefore associated with the stables; Virgo-Scorpio, in Dan, who is described as “a serpent, an adder in the path that biteth,” etc.; Capricornus in Naphtali, who is “a hind (a deer) let loose”; Cancer, in Benjamin, for he is “ravenous”; Libra, the “Balance,” in Asher, whose “bread shall be fat”; Saggitarius in Joseph, because “his bow abode in strength.” To make up for the twelfth sign, Virgo, made independent of Scorpio, is Dina, the only daughter of Jacob. (See Genesis xlix.) Tradition shows the alleged tribes carrying the 12 signs on their banners. But the Bible is, besides these, full of theo-cosmological and astronomical symbols and personifications. It remains to wonder, and query—if the actual, living Patriarch’s destiny was so indissolubly wound up with the Zodiac—how it is that after the loss of the ten tribes, ten signs out of the twelve have not also miraculously disappeared from the sidereal fields? But this is of no great concern. Let us rather busy ourselves with the history of the Zodiac itself.

652 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Now the reader may be reminded of some opinions expressed on the subject by several of the highest authorities in Science.

Newton believed the invention of the Zodiac could be traced as far back as the expedition of the Argonauts; and Dulaure fixed its origin at 6,500 years b.c., just 2,496 years before the creation of the World according to the Bible chronology.

Creuzer believes it very easy to show that most of the theogonies are intimately connected with religious calendars, and point to the Zodiac as their prime origin—if not identical with the Zodiac known to us now, then something very analogous to it. He feels certain that the Zodiac and its mystic relations are at the bottom of all the mythologies, under one form or the other, and that it had existed in the old form for ages before; owing to some singular co-ordination of events, it was brought out in the present defined astronomical garb. (Frédéric Creuzer, Religions de l’Antiquité, Vol. 1, Part 2, p. 930.)

Whether “the genii of the planets” (our Dhyan Chohans of supramundane spheres) showed themselves to “holy prophets” or not, as claimed in the Dabistan, it would seem that great laymen and warriors were favoured in the same way in days of old, when astrological magic and theophania went hand in hand in Chaldea. For Xenophon, no ordinary man, narrates of Cyrus, that at the moment of his death that king was giving ardent thanks to gods and heroes, for having so often instructed him themselves about the signs in heaven, ὲν οὐρανίοις σημείοις (Cyropédie,” Ant. du Zodiaque.”)

Unless the science of the zodiac is supposed to be of the highest antiquity and universality, how account for its signs being traced in the oldest theogonies? Laplace is said to have felt struck with amazement at the idea of the days of Mercury (Wednesday), Venus (Friday), Jupiter (Thursday), Saturn (Saturday), and others being related to the days of the week in the same order and with the same names in India as in Northern Europe. “Try, if you can, with the present system of autochthonous civilizations, so much in fashion in our day, to explain how nations with no ancestry, no traditions or birthplace in common, could have succeeded in inventing a kind of celestial phantasmagoria, a veritable imbroglio of sidereal denominations, without sequence or object, having no figurative relation with the constellations they represent, and still less, apparently, with the phases of our terrestrial life they are made to signify,” had there not been a general intention and a universal cause and belief, at the root of all this? (Pneumatologie, Vol. IV., p. 61.) Most truly has Dupuis asserted the same: “Il est impossible de découvrir le moindre trait de ressemblance entre les parties du ciel et les figures que les astronomes y ont arbitrairement tracées, et de l’autre côté; le hazard est impossible,” he says. (Origine des Cultes, “Zodiaque.”)

653 THE SIGN OF JONAS.

Most certainly chance is “impossible.” There is no “chance” in Nature, wherein everything is mathematically co-ordinate and mutually related in its units. “Chance,” says Coleridge, “is but the pseudonym of God (or Nature), for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His sign manual.” Replace the word “God” by that of Karma and it will become an Eastern axiom. Therefore, the sidereal “prophecies” of the zodiac, as they are called by Christian mystics, never point to any one particular event, however solemn and sacred it may be for some one portion of humanity, but to ever-recurrent, periodical laws in nature, understood but by the Initiates of the sidereal gods themselves.

No occultist, no astrologer of Eastern birth, will ever agree with Christian mystics, or even with Kepler’s mystical astronomy, his great science and erudition notwithstanding; simply because, if his premises are quite correct, his deductions therefrom are one-sided and biassed by Christian preconceptions. Where the latter finds a prophecy directly pointing at the Saviour, other nations see a symbol of an eternal law decreed for the actual manvantara. Why see in the Pisces a direct reference to Christ—one of the several world-reformers, a Saviour but for his direct followers, but only a great and glorious Initiate for all the rest—when that constellation shines as a symbol of all the past, present, and future Spiritual Saviours who dispense light and dispel mental darkness? Christian symbologists have tried to prove that it was that of Ephraim (Joseph’s son), the elect of Jacob, that therefore, it was at the moment of the Sun entering into the sign of the Fish (Pisces) that “the Elect Messiah, the ᾽Ιχθὺς of the first Christians, had to be born.” But, if Jesus of Nazareth was that Messiah—was he really born at that “moment,” or was he made to be so born by the adaptation of theologians, who sought only to make their preconceived ideas fit in with sidereal facts and popular belief? Everyone knows that the real time and year of the birth of Jesus are totally unknown. And it is the Jews, whose forefathers have made the word Dag signify both “fish” and “Messiah,” who, during the forced development of their rabbinical language, are the first to deny this Christian claim. And what of the further facts that Brahmins also connect their “Messiah,” the eternal Avatar Vishnu, with a fish and the Deluge, and that the Babylonians made of their Dag-On, equally a fish and a Messiah, the Man-Fish and Prophet?

There are those learned iconoclasts among Egyptologists, who say that “when the Pharisees sought a ‘sign from heaven’ Jesus said, ‘there shall no sign be given but the sign of Jonas’ (Mat. xvi. 4). . . . . The sign of Jonas is that of the Oan or fishman of Nineveh. . . . . Assuredly there was no other sign than that of the Sun reborn in Pisces. The

654 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

voice of the Secret Wisdom says those who are looking for signs can have no other than that of the returning fish-man Ichthys, Oannes, or Jonas—who could not be made flesh.”

It would appear that Kepler maintained it as a positive fact that, at the moment of the “incarnation,” all the planets were in conjunction in the sign of Pisces, called by the Jews (the Kabalists) the “constellation of the Messiah.” “It is this constellation,” he averred, “that was placed the star of the Magi.” This statement, quoted by Dr. Sepp (Vie de nôtre Seigneur Jésus Christ, Vol. I. p. 9), emboldened him to remark that “all the Jewish traditions while announcing that star, that many nations have seen,” (!)⁶⁸³ added that “it would absorb the seventy planets that preside over the destinies of various nations on this globe.”⁶⁸⁴ “In virtue of those natural prophecies,” explains Dr. Sepp, “it was written in the stars of the firmament that the Messiah would be born in the lunar year of the world 4320, in that memorable year when the entire choir of the planets would be feasting its jubilee.”

There was indeed a rage, at the beginning of the present century, for claiming from the Hindus restoration of an alleged robbery from the Jews of their “gods,” patriarchs, and chronology. It was Wilford who had recognized Noah in Prithee and in Satyavrata, Enos in Dhruva, and even Assur in Iswara. Yet, after being residents for so many years in India, some Orientalists, at least, ought to have known that it was not the Hindus alone who had these figures, or who had divided their great age into four minor ages. Nevertheless writers in the Asiatic Researches indulged in the most extravagant speculations.

“Christian theologians think it their duty to write against the long periods of Hindu chronology,” argues very pertinently S. A. Mackey, the Norwich “philosopher, astronomer, and shoemaker.” “But when a man of learning crucifies the names and numbers of the ancients, and wrings and twists them into a form which means something quite foreign to the intention of the ancient authors; but which, so mutilated, fits in with the birth of some maggot pre-existing in his own brain with so much exactness that he pretends to be amazed at the discovery, I cannot think him quite so pardonable” (Key of Urania).

This is intended to apply to Captain (later Colonel) Wilford, but the

 

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655 CHALDEO-JUDEAN GODS.

words may fit more than one of our modern Orientalists. The former was the first to crown his unlucky speculations in Hindu chronology and the Purânas by connecting the 4,320,000 years with biblical chronology, simply dwarfing the figures to 4,320 years (the supposed lunar year of the Nativity), and Dr. Sepp has simply plagiarized the idea from this gallant officer. Moreover, he persisted in seeing in them Jewish property, as well as a Christian prophecy, thus accusing the Aryans of having helped themselves to Semitic revelation, whereas it was the reverse. The Jews, moreover, need not be accused of despoiling the Hindus, of whose figures Ezra probably knew nothing. They had evidently and undeniably borrowed them from the Chaldeans, along with their gods. Of the 432,000 years of the Chaldean divine Dynasties⁶⁸⁵ they made 4,320 lunar years from the world’s creation to the Christian era; as to the Babylonian and Egyptian Gods, they transformed them as quietly and modestly into Patriarchs. Every nation was more or less guilty of such refashioning and adaptation of a Pantheon (common once to all) of universal, into national, tribal gods and Heroes. It was their property in its new Pentateuchal garb, and no one of the Israelites has ever forced it upon any other nation—least of all upon Europeans.

Without stopping to notice this very unscientific chronology more than is necessary, we may make a few remarks that may be found to the point. These figures of 4,320 lunar years of the world (in the Bible the solar years are used) are not fanciful, as such, even if their application is quite erroneous; for they are only the distorted echo of the primitive esoteric, and later on Brahminical doctrine concerning the Yugas. A “Day” of Brahmâ equals 4,320,000,000 years, as also a “Night” of Brahmâ, or the duration of Pralaya, after which a new Sun rises trium-

 

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656 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

phantly over a new manvantara, for the septenary chain it illuminates. The teaching had penetrated into Palestine and Europe centuries before the Christian era (see Isis Unveiled II. 132), and was present in the minds of the Mosaic Jews, who based upon it their small cycle, though it received full expression only through the Christian chronologers of the Bible, who adopted it, as also the 25th of December, the day on which all the solar gods were said to have been incarnated. What wonder, then, that the Messiah was made to be born “the lunar year of the world 4,320?” The “Son of Righteousness and Salvation” had once more arisen and had dispelled pralayic darkness of chaos and non-being on the plane of our objective little globe and chain. Once the subject of the adoration was settled upon, it was easy to make the supposed events of his birth, life, and death, fit in with the Zodiacal exigencies and old traditions, though they had to be somewhat remodelled for the occasion.

Thus what Kepler said, as a great astronomer, becomes comprehensible. He recognised the grand and universal importance of all such planetary conjunctions, “each of which”—as he has well said—“is a climacteric year of Humanity.”⁶⁸⁶ The rare conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars has its significance and importance on account of its certain great results—in India and China as much as it has in Europe for the respective mystics of all those countries. And it is certainly no better now than a mere assumption to maintain that nature had only Christ in view, when building her (to the profane) fantastic and meaningless constellations. If it is claimed that it was no hazard that could lead the archaic architects of the Zodiac, thousands of years ago, to mark with the asterisk (a) the figure of Taurus, with no better or more valid proof of it being prophetic of the Verbum or Christ than that the aleph of Taurus means “the one” and the first, and that Christ was also the alpha or the one, then this “proof” may be shown strangely invalidated in more than one way. To begin with, the Zodiac existed before the Christian era, at all events; further, all the Sun-gods had been mystically connected with that constellation (Taurus)—Osiris, for instance—and were all called by their respective votaries “the First.” Then the compilers of the mystical epithets given to the Christian Saviour, were all more or less acquainted with

 

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657 THE DRAGON AND THE BULL.

the significance of the Zodiacal signs; and it is easier to suppose that they should have arranged their claims so as to answer the mystic signs, than that the latter should have shone as a prophecy for one portion of humanity, for millions of years, taking no heed of the numberless generations that had gone before, and those to be born hereafter.

“It is not simple chance,” we are told, “that has placed in certain spheres, on a throne, the head of that bull (Taurus), trying to push away with the ansated cross on its horns, a Dragon; the more so, since this constellation of Taurus was called ‘the great city of God and the mother of revelations,’ and also ‘the interpreter of the divine voice,’ the Apis pacis of Hermoutis, in Egypt, which (as the patristic fathers would assure the world) preferred oracles that related to the birth of the Saviour” (Pneumatologie, iv., 71).

To this theological assumption there are several answers. Firstly, the ansated Egyptian cross, or tau, the Jaina cross, or Swastica, and the Christian cross have all the same meaning. Secondly, no peoples or nations except the Christians gave the significance to the Dragon that is given to it now. The serpent was the symbol of Wisdom; and the Bull (Taurus) the symbol of physical or terrestrial generation. Thus the latter, pushing off the Dragon, or spiritual, Divine Wisdom, with the Tau, or Cross—which is esoterically “the foundation and framework of all construction”—would have an entirely phallic, physiological meaning, had it not still another significance unknown to our Biblical scholars and symbologists. At any rate, it shows no special reference to the Verbum of St. John, except, perhaps, in a general sense. The taurus (which, by the way, is no lamb, but a bull) was sacred in every Cosmogony, with the Hindus as with the Zoroastrians, with the Chaldees as with the Egyptians. So much, every schoolboy knows.

It may perhaps help to refresh the memory of our Theosophists by referring them to what was said of the Virgin and the Dragon, and the universality of periodical births and re-births of World-Saviours—solar gods—in Isis, II., 490, with reference to certain passages in Revelations. In 1853, the savant known as Erard-Mollien read before the Institute of France a paper tending to prove the antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in the signs of which were found the root and philosophy of all the most important religious festivals of that country, the origin of which religious ceremonies goes back into the night of time at least 3,000 b.c., as the lecturer tried to demonstrate. The Zodiac of the Hindus, he thought, was far anterior to the Zodiac of the Greeks, and differed from it in some particulars vastly. In it one sees the Dragon on a tree, at the foot of which the “Virgin,” Kanya-Durga, one of the most ancient goddesses, is placed on a lion dragging after him the solar car. “This is the reason why,” he added, “this Virgin Durga is not the simple memento of

658 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

an astronomical fact, but verily the most ancient divinity of the Indian Olympus. She is evidently the same of whom all the Sibylline books spoke, those works that have been the source of the inspiration of Virgil; the virgin whose return was prophesied as a sign of universal renovation. . . . . And why,” he added, “when we see to this day, the months named after the deity-names of this solar Zodiac by the Malayalim-speaking people of southern India—why should that people have abandoned their ancestral Zodiac to burden themselves with that of the Greeks? Everything proves, on the contrary, that these zodiacal figures have been transmitted to the Greeks by the Chaldees, who got them from the Brahmans.” (See Recueil de l’Académie des Inscriptions, 1853.)

But all this is very poor testimony. Let us remember, however, also that which was said and accepted by the contemporaries of Volney, who, in his “Ruins of Empires,” p. 360, remarks that as Aries was in its fifteenth 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 1,790 years since Christ, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac.

Dr. Schlegel, moreover, in his Uranographie Chinoise assigns to the Chinese Astronomical Sphere an antiquity of 18,000 years. (Vide pp. 54, 196, et seq.)

Nevertheless, as opinions quoted without adequate proofs are of little avail, it may be more useful to turn to scientific evidence. J. S. Bailly, the famous French astronomer of the last century, Member of the Academy, etc., etc., asserts that the Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from them the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived their knowledge. In support of these views he says—

“The astronomers who preceded the epoch 1,491 are, first, the Alexandrian Greeks; Hipparchus, who flourished 125 years before our era, and Ptolemy, 260 years after Hipparchus. Following these were the Arabs, who revived the study of astronomy in the ninth century. These were succeeded by the Persians and the Tartars, to whom we owe the tables of Massireddin in 1269, and those of Ulug-beg in 1437. Such is the succession of events in Asia as known prior to the Indian epoch 1491. What, then, is an epoch? It is the observation of the longitude of a star at a given moment, the place in the sky where it was seen, and which serves as a point of reference, a starting-point from which to calculate both the past and future positions of the star from its observed motion. But an epoch is useless unless the motion of the star has been determined. A people, new to science and obliged to borrow a foreign astronomy, finds no difficulty in fixing an epoch, since

659 BAILLY’S CONCLUSIONS.

the only observation needed is one which can be made at any moment. But what it needs above all, what it is obliged to borrow, are those elements which depend on accurate determination, and which require continuous observation; above all, those motions which depend on time, and which can only be accurately determined by centuries of observation. These motions, then, must be borrowed from a nation which has made such observations, and has behind it the labours of centuries. We conclude, therefore, that a new people will not borrow the epochs of an ancient one, without also borrowing from them the ‘average motions.’ Starting from this principle we shall find that the Hindu epochs 1491 and 3102 could not have been derived from those of either Ptolemy or Ulug-beg.

“There remains the supposition that the Hindus, comparing their observations in 1491 with those previously made by Ulug-beg and Ptolemy, used the intervals between these observations to determine the ‘average motions.’ The date of Ulug-beg is too recent for such a determination; while those of Ptolemy and Hipparchus were barely remote enough. But if the Hindu motions had been determined from these comparisons, the epochs would be connected together. Starting from the epochs of Ulug-beg and Ptolemy we should arrive at all those of the Hindus. But this is not the case. Hence foreign epochs were either unknown or useless to the Hindus.⁶⁸⁷

“We may add to this another important consideration. When a nation is obliged to borrow from its neighbours the methods or the average motions of its astronomical tables, it has even greater need to borrow, besides these, the knowledge of the inequalities of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the motions of the apogee, of the nodes, and of the inclination of the ecliptic; in short, all those elements the determination of which requires the art of observing, some instrumental appliances, and great industry. All these astronomical elements, differing more or less with the Greeks of Alexandria, the Arabs, the Persians and the Tartars, exhibit no resemblance whatever with those of the Hindus. The latter, therefore, borrowed nothing from their neighbours.”

Condensing Bailly’s remarks, he comes to the following conclusions:

“If the Hindus did not borrow their epoch, they must have possessed a real one of their own, based on their own observations; and this must be either the epoch of the year 1491 after, or that of the year 3102 before our era, the latter preceding by 4592 years the epoch 1491. We have to choose between these two epochs and to decide which of them is based on observation. But before stating the arguments which can and must

 

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660 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

decide the question, we may be permitted to make a few remarks to those who may be inclined to believe that it is modern observations and calculations which have enabled the Hindus to determine the past positions of the heavenly bodies. It is far from easy to determine the celestial movements with sufficient accuracy to ascend the stream of time for 4592 years, and to describe the phenomena which must have occurred at that period.

“We possess today excellent instruments; exact observations have been made for some two or three centuries, which already permit us to calculate with considerable accuracy the average motions of the planets; we have the observations of the Chaldeans, of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy, which, owing to their remoteness from the present time, permit us to fix these motions with greater certainty. Still we cannot undertake to represent with invariable accuracy the observations throughout the long period intervening between the Chaldeans and ourselves; and still less can we undertake to determine with exactitude events occurring 4592 years before our day. Cassini and Maier have each determined the secular motion of the moon, and they differ by 3m. 43s. This difference would give rise in forty-six centuries to an uncertainty of nearly three degrees in the moon’s place. Doubtless one of these determinations is more accurate than the other; and it is for observations of very great antiquity to decide between them. But in very remote periods, where observations are lacking, it follows that we are uncertain as to the phenomena. How, then, could the Hindus have calculated back from the year 1491 a.d. to the year 3102 before our era, if they were only recent students of astronomy?

“The Orientals have never been what we are. However high an opinion of their knowledge we may form from the examination of their Astronomy, we cannot suppose them ever to have possessed that great array of instruments which distinguishes our modern observatories, and which is the product of simultaneous progress in various arts, nor could they have possessed that genius for discovery, which has hitherto seemed to belong exclusively to Europe, and which, supplying the place of time, causes the rapid progress of science and of human intelligence. If the Asiatics have been powerful, learned and wise, it is power and time which have produced their merit and success of all kinds. Power has founded or destroyed their empires; now it has erected edifices imposing by their bulk, now it has reduced them to venerable ruins; and while these vicissitudes alternated with each other, patience accumulated knowledge; and prolonged experience produced wisdom. It is the antiquity of the nations of the East which has erected their scientific fame.

“If the Hindus possessed in 1491 a knowledge of the heavenly motions

661 THE BEGINNING OF KALI-YUG.

sufficiently accurate to enable them to calculate backwards for 4,592 years, it follows that they could only have obtained this knowledge from very ancient observations. To grant them such knowledge, while refusing them the observations from which it is derived, is to suppose an impossibility; it would be equivalent to assuming that at the outset of their career they had already reaped the harvest of time and experience. While on the other hand, if their epoch of 3102 is assumed to be real, it would follow that the Hindus had simply kept pace with successive centuries down to the year 1491 of our era. Thus, time itself was their teacher; they knew the motions of the heavenly bodies during these periods, because they had seen them; and the duration of the Hindu people on earth is the cause of the fidelity of its records and the accuracy of its calculations.

“It would seem that the problem as to which of the two epochs of 3102 and 1491 is the real one ought to be solved by one consideration, viz., that the ancients in general, and particularly the Hindus, calculated, and therefore observed, eclipses only.”

Says Bailly:

“Now, there was no eclipse of the sun at the moment of the epoch 1491; and no eclipse of the moon either 14 days before or after that moment. Therefore the epoch 1491 is not based on an observation. As regards the epoch 3102, the Brahmins of Tirvalour place it at sunrise on February 18th. The sun was then in the first point of the Zodiac according to its true longitude. The other tables show that at the preceding midnight the moon was in the same place, but according to its average longitude. The Brahmins tell us also that this first point, the origin of their Zodiac, was, in the year 3102, 54 degrees behind the equinox. It follows that the origin—the first point of their Zodiac—was therefore in the sixth degree of Aquarius.

“There occurred, therefore, about this time and place an average conjunction; ‘and indeed this conjunction is given in our best tables: La Caille’s for the sun and Maier’s for the moon.’ There was no eclipse of the sun, the moon being too distant from her node; but fourteen days later, the moon having approached the node, must have been eclipsed. Maier’s tables, used without correction for acceleration, give this eclipse; but they place it during the day when it could not have been observed in India. Cassini’s tables give it as occurring at night, which shows that Maier’s motions are too rapid for distant centuries, when the acceleration is not allowed for; and which also proves that in spite of the improvement of our knowledge we can still be uncertain as to the actual aspect of the heavens in past times.

“Therefore we believe that as between the two Hindu epochs, the real one is the year 3102, because it was accompanied by an eclipse which could be observed, and which must have served to determine it. This

662 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

is a first proof of the truth of the longitude assigned by the Hindus to the sun and the moon at this instant; and this proof would perhaps be sufficient, were it not that this ancient determination becomes of the greatest importance for the verification of the motions of these bodies, and must therefore be borne out by every possible proof of its authenticity.

“We notice, first, that the Hindus seem to have combined two epochs together into the year 3102. The Tirvalour Brahmins reckon primarily from the first moment of the Kali-Yug; but they have a second epoch placed 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s. later. The latter is the true astronomical epoch, while the former seems to be a civil era. But if this epoch of the Kali-Yug had no reality, and was the mere result of a calculation, why should it be thus divided? Their calculated astronomical epoch would have become that of the Kali-Yug, which would have been placed at the conjunction of the sun and the moon, as is the case with the epochs of the three other tables. They must have had some reason for distinguishing between the two; and this reason can only be due to the circumstances and the time of the epoch; which therefore could not be the result of calculation. This is not all; starting from the solar epoch determined by the rising of the sun on February 18th, 3102, and tracing back events 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s., we come to 2h. 27m. 30s. a.m. of February 16th, which is the instant of the beginning of Kali-Yuga. It is curious that this age has not been made to commence at one of the four great divisions of the day. It might be suspected that the epoch should be midnight, and that the 2h. 27m. 30s. are a meridian correction. But whatever may have been the reason for fixing on this moment, it is plain that were this epoch the result of calculation, it would have been just as easy to carry it back to midnight, so as to make the epoch correspond to one of the chief divisions of the day, instead of placing it at a moment fixed by the fraction of a day.

“2nd. The Hindus assert that at the first moment of Kali-Yug there was a conjunction of all the planets; and their tables show this conjunction while ours indicate that it might actually have occurred. Jupiter and Mercury were in exactly the same degree of the ecliptic; Mars being 8° and Saturn 17° distant from it. It follows that about this time, or some fourteen days after the commencement of Kali-Yug, the Hindus saw four planets emerge successively from the Sun’s rays; first Saturn, then Mars, then Jupiter and Mercury, and these planets appeared united in a somewhat small space. Although Venus was not among them, the taste for the marvellous caused it to be called a general conjunction of all the planets. The testimony of the Brahmins here coincides with that of our tables; and this evidence, the result of a tradition, must be founded on actual observation.

663 THE EYE OF TAURUS.

“3rd. We may remark that this phenomenon was visible about a fortnight after the epoch, and exactly at the time when the eclipse of the moon must have been observed, which served to fix the epoch. The two observations mutually confirm each other; and whoever made the one must have made the other also.

“4th. We may believe also that the Hindus made at the same time a determination of the place of the moon’s node; this seems indicated by their calculation. They give the longitude of this point of the lunar orbit for the time of their epoch, and to this they add as a constant 40m., which is the node’s motion in 12d. 14h. It is as if they stated that this determination was made 13 days after their epoch, and that to make it correspond to that epoch, we must add the 40m. through which the node has retrograded in the interval.

“This observation is, therefore, of the same date as that of the lunar eclipse; thus giving three observations, which are mutually confirmatory.

“5th. It appears from the description of the Hindu Zodiac given by Guillaume Le Gentil, that on it the places of the stars named ‘The Eye of Taurus’ and the ‘Wheat-ear of Virgo,’ can be determined for the commencement of the Kali-Yug.

“Now, comparing these places with the actual positions, reduced by our precession of the equinoxes to the moment in question, we see that the point of origin of the Hindu Zodiac must lie between the fifth and sixth degree of Aquarius. The Brahmins, therefore, were right in placing it in the sixth degree of that sign, the more so since this small difference may be due to the proper motion of the stars which is unknown.

“Thus it was yet another observation which guided the Hindus in this fairly accurate determination of the first point of their movable zodiac.

“It does not seem possible to doubt the existence in antiquity of observations of this date. The Persians say that four beautiful stars were placed as guardians at the four corners of the world. Now it so happens that at the commencement of Kali Yug, 3000 or 3100 years before our era, the ‘Eye of the Bull’ and the ‘Heart of the Scorpion’ were exactly at the equinoctial points, while the ‘Heart of the Lion’ and the ‘Southern Fish’ were pretty near the solstitial points. An observation of the rising of the Pleiades in the evening, seven days before the autumnal equinox, also belongs to the year 3000 before our era. This and similar observations collected in Ptolemy’s calendars, though he does not give their authors, these observations, which are older than those of the Chaldeans, may well be the work of the Hindus. They are well acquainted with the constellation of the Pleiades, and while we call it vulgarly the ‘Poussinière’ they name it: Pillaloo-codi—the ‘Hen and chickens.’ This name has therefore, passed from people to

664 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

people, and comes to us from the most ancient nations of Asia. We see that the Hindus must have observed the rising of the Pleiades, and have made use of it to regulate their years and their months; for this constellation is also called Krittika. Now they have a month of the same name, and this coincidence can only be due to the fact that this month was announced by the rising or setting of the constellation in question. But what is even more decisive as showing that the Hindus observed the stars, and in the same way that we do, marking their position by their longitude, is a fact mentioned by Augustinus Riccius that, according to observations attributed to Hermes, and made 1,985 years before Ptolemy, the brilliant star in the Lyre and that in the Heart of the Hydra were each seven degrees in advance of their respective positions as determined by Ptolemy.

“This determination seems very extraordinary. The stars advance regularly with respect to the equinox; and Ptolemy ought to have found the longitudes 28 degrees in excess of what they were 1985 years before his time. Besides, there is a remarkable peculiarity about this fact; the same error or difference being found in the positions of both stars; therefore the error was due to some cause affecting both stars equally. It was to explain this peculiarity that the Arab Thebith imagined the stars to have an oscillatory movement, causing them to advance and recede alternately.

“This hypothesis was easily disproved; but the observations attributed to Hermes remained unexplained. Their explanation, however, is found in Hindu Astronomy. At the date fixed for these observations, 1985 years before Ptolemy, the first point of the Hindu Zodiac was 35 degrees in advance of the equinox; therefore the longitudes reckoned for this point are 35 degrees in excess of those reckoned from the equinox. But after the lapse of 1985 years the stars would have advanced 28 degrees, and there would remain a difference of only 7 degrees between the longitudes of Hermes and those of Ptolemy, and the difference would be the same for the two stars, since it is due to the difference between the starting-points of the Hindu Zodiac and that of Ptolemy, which reckons from the equinox. This explanation is so simple and natural that it must be true. We do not know whether Hermes, so celebrated in antiquity, was a Hindu, but we see that the observations attributed to him are reckoned in the Hindu manner, and we conclude that they were made by the Hindus, who, therefore, were able to make all the observations we have enumerated, and which we find noted in their tables.

“6th. The observation of the year 3102, which seems to have fixed their epoch, was not a difficult one. We see that the Hindus, having once determined the moon’s daily motion of 13deg. 10m. 35sec., made

665 HINDU ASTRONOMICAL METHODS.

use of it to divide the Zodiac into 27 constellations, related to the period of the moon, which takes about 27 days to describe it.

“It was by this method that they determined the positions of the stars in this Zodiac; it was thus they found that a certain star of the Lyre was in 8h. 24m., the Heart of the Hydra in 4d. 7h., longitudes which are ascribed to Hermes, but which are calculated on the Hindu Zodiac. Similarly, they discovered that the “Wheatear of Virgo” forms the commencement of their fifteenth constellation, and the “Eye of Taurus” the end of the fourth; these stars being the one in 6d. 6h. 40m., the other in 1d. 23h. 20min. of the Hindu Zodiac. This being so, the eclipse of Moon which occurred 14 days after the Kali Yug epoch, took place at a point between the “Wheat Ear” of Virgo and the star θ of the same constellation. These stars are very approximately a constellation apart, the one beginning the fifteenth, the other the sixteenth. Thus it would not be difficult to determine the moon’s place by measuring her distance from one of these stars; from this they deduced the position of the sun, which is opposite to the moon, and then, knowing their average motions, they calculated that the moon was at the first point of the Zodiac according to her average longitude at midnight on the 17th-18th February of the year 3,102 before our era, and that the sun occupied the same place six hours later according to his true longitude; an event which fixes the commencement of the Hindu year.

“7th. The Hindus state that 20,400 years before the age of Kali Yug, the first point of their Zodiac coincided with the vernal equinox, and that the sun and moon were in conjunction there. This epoch is obviously fictitious;⁶⁸⁸ but we may inquire from what point, from what epoch, the Hindus set out in establishing it. Taking the Hindu values for the revolution of the sun and moon, viz., 365d. 6h. 12m. 30s., and 27d. 7h. 43m. 13s., we have—

“20,400 revolutions of the sun = 7,451,277d. 2h.

“272,724 revolutions of the moon = 7,451,277d. 7h.

“Such is the result obtained by starting from the Kali Yuga epoch; and the assertion of the Hindus, that there was a conjunction at the time stated, is founded on their tables; but if, using the same elements, we start from the era of the year 1491, or from another placed in the year 1282, of which we shall speak later, there will always be a difference of almost one or two days. It is both just and natural, in verifying the Hindu calculations, to take those among their elements which give the same result as they had themselves arrived at, and to set out from that one among their epochs which enables us to arrive at

 

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666 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the fictitious epoch in question. Hence, since to make this calculation they must have set out from their real epoch, the one which was founded on an observation and not from any of those which were derived by this very calculation from the former, it follows that their real epoch was that of the year 3102 before our era.

“8th. The Tiravalore Brahmins give the Moon’s motion as 7d. 2h. 8m. on the movable Zodiac, and as 9d. 7h. 45m. 1s. as referred to the equinox in a great period of 1,600,984 days, or 4,386 years and 94 days. We believe this motion to have been determined by observation; and we must state at the outset that this period is of an extent which renders it but ill suited to the calculation of the mean motions.

“In their astronomical calculations the Hindus make use of periods of 248, 3,031, and 12,372 days; but, apart from the fact that these periods, though much too short, do not present the inconvenience of the former, they contain an exact number of revolutions of the moon referred to its apogee. They are in reality mean motions. The great period of 1,600,984 is not a sum of accumulated revolutions; there is no reason why it should contain 1,600,984 rather than 1,600,985 days. It would seem that observation alone must have fixed the number of days and marked the beginning and end of the period. This period ends on the 21st of May, 1282, of our era at 5h. 15m. 30s. at Benares. The moon was then in apogee, according to the Hindus, and her longitude was … 7d. 13h. 45m. 1s.

“Maier gives the longitude as … 7d. 13h. 53m. 48s.

“And places the apogee at … 7d. 14h. 6m. 54s.

“The determination of the moon’s place by the Brahmins thus differs only by nine minutes from ours, and that of the apogee by twenty-two minutes, and it is very evident that they could only have obtained this agreement with our best tables and this exactitude in the celestial positions by observation. If then, observation fixed the end of this period, there is every reason to believe that it determined its commencement. But then this motion, determined directly, and from nature, would of necessity be in close agreement with the true motions of the heavenly bodies.

“And in fact the Hindu motion during this long period of 4,883 years, does not differ by a minute from that of Cassini, and agrees equally with that of Maier. Thus two peoples, the Hindus and the Europeans, placed at the two extremities of the world, and perhaps as distant by their institutions, have obtained precisely the same results as regards the moon’s motions; and an agreement which would be inconceivable, if it were not based on the observation and mutual imitation of nature. We must remark that the four tables of the Hindus are all copies of the same Astronomy. It cannot be denied that the Siamese tables existed

667 THE ARYAN HINDUS VINDICATED.

in 1687, when they were brought from India by M. de la Loubère. At that time the tables of Cassini and Maier were not in existence, and thus the Hindus were already in possession of the exact motion contained in these tables, while we did not yet possess it.⁶⁸⁹ It must, therefore, be admitted that the accuracy of this Hindu motion is the point of observation. It is exact throughout this period of 4,383 years, because it was taken from the sky itself; and if observation determined its close, it fixed its commencement also. It is the longest period which has been observed and of which the recollection is preserved in the annals of Astronomy. It has its origin in the epoch of the year 3102, b.c., and it is a demonstrative proof of the reality of that epoch.”

Bailly is referred to at such length, as he is one of the few scientific men who have tried to do full justice to the Astronomy of the Aryans. From John Bentley down to Burgess’ “Sûrya-Siddhânta,” not one astronomer has been fair enough to the most learned people of Antiquity. However distorted and misunderstood the Hindu Symbology, no Occultist can fail to do it justice once that he knows something of the Secret Sciences; nor will he turn away from their metaphysical and mystical

 

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668‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

interpretation of the Zodiac, even though the whole Pleiades of Royal Astronomical Societies rise in arms against their mathematical rendering of it. The descent and re-ascent of the Monad or Soul cannot be disconnected from the Zodiacal signs, and it looks more natural, in the sense of the fitness of things, to believe in a mysterious sympathy between the metaphysical soul and the bright constellations, and in the influence of the latter on the former, than in the absurd notion that the creators of Heaven and Earth have placed in heaven the types of twelve vicious Jews. And if, as the author of The Gnostics asserts, the aim of all the Gnostic schools and the later Platonists “was to accommodate the old faith to the influence of Buddhistic theosophy, the very essence of which was that the innumerable gods of the Hindu mythology were but names for the Energies of the First Triad in its successive AVATARS or manifestations unto man,” whither can we turn to trace these theosophic ideas to their very root—better than to old Indian wisdom? We say it again: archaic Occultism would remain incomprehensible to all, if it were rendered otherwise than through the more familiar channels of Buddhism and Hinduism. For the former is the emanation of the latter; and both are children of one mother—ancient Lemuro-Atlantean Wisdom.

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§ XVIII. SUMMARY OF THE MUTUAL POSITION.

The reader has had the whole case presented to him from both sides, and it remains with him to decide whether its summary stands in our favour or not. If there were such a thing as void, a vacuum in Nature, one would find it produced, according to a physical law, in the minds of helpless admirers of the “lights” of science, who pass their time in mutually destroying their teachings. If ever the theory that “two lights make darkness” found its application it is in this case, when one half of the “lights” imposes its Forces and “modes of motion” on the belief of the faithful, and the other half opposes the very existence of the same. “Ether, Matter, Energy”—the sacred hypostatical trinity, the three principles of the truly unknown God of Science, called by them Physical Nature!

Theology is taken to task and ridiculed for believing in the union of three persons in one Godhead—one God as to substance, three persons as to individuality; and we are laughed at for our belief in unproved and unprovable doctrines, in Angels and Devils, Gods and Spirits. And,

669 THE EXACT SCIENCES OF—NEGATION.

indeed, that which made the Scientists win the day over Theology in the Great “Conflict between Religion and Science,” was precisely the argument that neither the identity of that substance, nor the triple individuality claimed, after having been conceived, invented, and worked out in the depths of Theological Consciousness, could be proved by any Scientific inductive process of reasoning, least of all on the evidence of our senses. Religion must perish, it is said, because it teaches mysteries. Mystery is the negation of Common Sense, and Science repels it. According to Mr. Tyndall, metaphysics is fiction, like poetry. The man of Science takes nothing on trust; rejects everything that is not proven to him, while the Theologian accepts everything on blind faith. The Theosophist and the Occultist, who take nothing on trust, not even exact Science, the Spiritualist who denies dogma but believes in Spirits and in invisible but potential infl, all share in the same contempt. Very well, then; what we have to do now, is to examine for the last time whether exact Science does not act precisely in the same way as Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Theology do.

In a work by Mr. S. Laing, considered a standard book on Science, “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” the author of which, according to the laudatory review of the Times, “exhibits with much power and effect the immense discoveries of Science, and its numerous victories over old opinions, whenever they have the rashness to challenge conclusions with it,” one reads in chapter III., “On Matter,” as follows:

“What is the material universe composed of? ETHER, MATTER, ENERGY” . . . . . is the answer.

We stop to ask, “What is Ether?” And Mr. Laing answers in the name of Science:

“Ether is not actually known to us by any test of which the senses can take cognizance, but is a sort of mathematical substance which we are compelled to assume in order to account for the phenomena of light and heat.”

And what is matter? Do you know more about it than you do about the “hypothetical” agent, Ether?

“In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigations can tell us. . . . nothing directly of the composition of living matter, and . . . . it is also in strictness true, that we know nothing about the composition of any (material) body whatever as it is.” (Lecture on Protoplasm; T. H. Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” Lay Sermons, 1870, p. 142.)

And Energy? Surely you can define the third person of the Trinity of your Material universe?

“The Energy is that which is only known to us by its effects.” (Books on Physics; e.g., A. Ganot, Elementary Treatise on Physics, tr. E. Atkinson, 1883, p. 3.)

Pray explain, for this is rather hazy.

“In mechanics there is actual and potential energy: work

670 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

actually performed, and the capacity for performing it. As to the nature of molecular Energy or Forces, the various phenomena which bodies present show that their molecules are under the influence of two contrary forces—one which tends to bring them together, the other to separate them. . . . . The first is molecular attraction, the second force is due to vis viva, or moving force.” . . . . (A. Ganot, Elementary Treatise on Physics, tr. E. Atkinson, 1883; see “On Matter, Force and Motion” and p. 68 “Nature of Molecular Forces.”)

Just so: it is the nature of this moving force, the vis viva that we want to know. What is it? . . . . .

“WE DO NOT KNOW!” is the invariable answer. “It is an empty shadow of my imagination,” explains Mr. Huxley in his Physical Basis of Life.

Thus the whole structure of Modern Science is built on a kind of “mathematical abstraction,” on a Protean “Substance which eludes the senses,” (Emil du Bois-Reymond), and on eff, the shadowy and illusive will-o’-the-wisps of a something entirely unknown to and beyond the reach of Science, “Self-moving” atoms! Self-moving Suns, planets, and stars! But who, then, or what are they all, if they are self-endowed with motion? Why then should you, physicists, laugh and deride our “Self-moving ARCHÆUS”? Mystery is rejected and scorned by Science, and “MYSTERY is the fatality of Science,” as Father Felix has truly said. . . . . “Science cannot escape it!” The language of the French preacher is ours, and we quote it in “Isis Unveiled” (Vide Vol. I. 338-9). Who—he asks—who of you, men of Science:

“. . . . has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there, I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? Who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science, she has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution; she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: ‘Shall I divide thee infinitesimally?’ Then suspended over this abyss, science hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and in despair says: I DO NOT KNOW.”

“But if you are so fatally ignorant of the genesis and hidden nature of a grain of sand, how should you have an intuition as to the generation of a single living being? Whence in the living being does life come? Where does it commence? What is the life principle?”⁶⁹⁰

Do the men of science deny all these charges? Not at all, for here is a confession of Tyndall, which shows how powerless is science, even over the world of matter.

“The first marshalling of the atoms, on which all subsequent action depends,

 

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671 NO VOID POSSIBLE.

baffles a keener power than that of the microscope.” “Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect, the most refined and disciplined imagination, retires in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem. We are struck dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting not only the power of our instrument, but even whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.”

How little is known of the material universe, indeed, has now been suspected for years, on the very admissions of these men of science themselves. And now there are some materialists who would even make away with Ether—or whatever Science calls the infinite Substance, the noumenon of which the Buddhists call Swâbhâvat—as well as with atoms, too dangerous both on account of their ancient philosophical and their present Christian and theological associations. From the earliest philosophers whose records passed to posterity, down to our present age, which, if it denies “invisible Beings” in Space, can never be so insane as to deny a plenum of some sort—the fulness of the universe was an accepted belief. And what it was said to contain, one learns from Hermes Trismegistus (in Mrs. Kingsford’s able rendering)—who is made to say:

“Concerning the void . . . my judgment is that it does not exist, that it never existed, and that it never will exist, for all the various parts of the universe are filled, as the earth also is complete and full of bodies, differing in quality and in form, having their species and their magnitude, one larger, one smaller, one solid, one tenuous. The larger . . . are easily perceived; the smaller . . . are difficult to apprehend, or altogether invisible. We know only of their existence by the sensation of feeling, wherefore many persons deny such entities to be bodies, and regard them as simply spaces,⁶⁹¹ but it is impossible there should be such spaces. For if indeed there should be anything outside the universe . . . then it would be a space occupied by intelligent beings analogous to its (the universe’s) divinity . . . . . . I speak of the genii, for I hold they dwell with us, and of the heroes who dwell above us, between the earth and the highest airs; wherein are neither clouds nor any tempest” (p. 84).

And we “hold” it too. Only, as already remarked, no Eastern Initiate would speak of spheres “above us, between the earth and the

 

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672 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

airs,” even the highest, as there is no such division or measurement in occult speech, no “above” as no “below,” but an eternal “within,” within two other withins, or the planes of subjectivity merging gradually into that of terrestrial objectivity—this being for man the last one, his own plane. This necessary explanation may be closed here by giving, in the words of Hermes, the belief on this particular point of the whole world of mystics:

“There are many orders of the gods; and in all there is an intelligent part. It is not to be supposed they do not come within the range of our senses; on the contrary, we perceive them, better even than those which are called visible. . . There are then gods, superior to all appearances; after them come the gods whose principle is spiritual; these gods being sensible, in conformity with their double origin, manifest all things by a sensible nature, each of them illuminating his works one by another.⁶⁹² The Supreme Being of Heaven, or of all that is comprehended under this name, is Zeus, for it is by Heaven that Zeus gives life to all things. The Supreme Being of the Sun is Light, for it is by the disk of the Sun that we receive the benefit of the light. The thirty-six horoscopes of the fixed stars have for supreme Being or Prince, him whose name is Pantomorphos, or having all forms, because he gives divine forms to divers types. The seven planets, or wandering spheres, have for Supreme Spirits Fortune and Destiny, who uphold the eternal stability of the laws of nature throughout incessant transformation and perpetual agitation. The ether is the instrument or medium by which all is produced.”

This is quite philosophical and in accordance with the spirit of Eastern esotericism: for all the Forces, such as Light, Heat, Electricity, etc., etc., are called the “Gods”—esoterically.

It must be so, since the esoteric teachings in Egypt and India were identical. And, therefore, the personification of Fohat synthesizing all the manifesting forces in nature is a legitimate result. Moreover, as will be shown in the division that follows this one, the real and Occult forces in nature only now begin to be known—and even in this case, by heterodox, not orthodox, Science (See also § X., The Coming Force), though their existence, in one instance at any rate, is corroborated, and certified to by an immense number of educated people and even by some official men of science.

This sentence, moreover, in Stanza VI., “Fohat sets in motion the primordial World-germs, or the aggregation of Cosmic atoms and matter, some one way, some another, in the opposite direction”—looks orthodox and Scientific enough. For there is, at all events, one fact in support of this position fully recognized by Science, and it is this. The meteoric showers (periodical in November and August) belong to

 

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673 THE ALIASES OF FOHAT.

a system moving in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The aphelion of this ring is 1,732 millions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune, its plane is inclined to the Earth’s orbit at an angle of 64° 3′, and the direction of the meteoric swarm moving round this orbit is contrary to that of the Earth’s revolution.

This fact, recognized only in 1833, shows it to be the modern rediscovery of what was very anciently known. Fohat turns with his two hands in contrary directions the “seed” and “the curds,” or Cosmic matter; is turning, in clearer language, particles in a highly attenuated condition, and nebulæ.

Outside the boundaries of the solar system, it is other Suns, and especially the mysterious “central Sun” (the “Abode of the invisible deity” as some reverend gentlemen have called it) that determines the motion of bodies and their direction. That motion serves also to differentiate the homogeneous matter, round and between the several bodies, into elements and sub-elements unknown to our earth, which are regarded by modern Science as distinct individual elements, whereas they are merely temporary appearances, changing with every small cycle within the Manvantara, some Esoteric works calling them “Kalpic Masks.”

Fohat is the key in Occultism which opens and unriddles the multiform symbols and respective allegories in the so-called mythology of every nation; demonstrating the wonderful philosophy and the deep insight into the mysteries of nature, in the Egyptian and Chaldean as well as in the Aryan religions. Fohat, shown in his true character, proves how deeply versed were all those prehistoric nations in every science of nature, now called physical and chemical branches of natural philosophy. In India, Fohat is the scientific aspect of both Vishnu and Indra, the latter older and more important in the Rig Veda than his sectarian successor; while in Egypt Fohat was known as Toum issued of Noot,⁶⁹³ or Osiris in his character of a primordial god, creator of heaven and of beings (see chapter xvii., “Book of the Dead”). For Toum is spoken of as the Protean god who generates other gods and gives himself the form he likes; the “master of life” “giving their vigour to the gods” (chapter lxxix.) He is the overseer of the gods, and he “who creates spirits and gives them shape and life”; he is “the north wind and the spirit of the west”; and finally the “Setting Sun of Life,” or the vital electric force that leaves the body at death, wherefore the defunct begs that Toum should give him the breath from his right nostril (positive elec-

 

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674 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

tricity) that he might live in his second form. Both the hieroglyph, and the text of chapter lxii. in the Book of the Dead, show the identity of Toum with Fohat. The former represents a man standing erect with the hieroglyph of the breaths in his hands. The latter says:

“I open to the chief of An (Heliopolis), I am Toum. I cross the water spilt by Thot-Hapi, the lord of the horizon, and am the divider of the earth” (Fohat divides Space and, with his Sons, the earth into seven zones) . . . .

. . . . “I cross the heavens, and am the two Lions. I am Ra, I am Aam, I ate my heir.⁶⁹⁴ . . . . I glide on the soil of the field of Aanroo,⁶⁹⁵ given me by the master of limitless eternity. I am the germ of eternity. I am Toum, to whom eternity is accorded. . . .”

The very words used by Fohat in the XIth Book, and the very titles given him. In the Egyptian Papyri the whole Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine is found scattered about in isolated sentences, even in the Book of the Dead. Number seven is quite as much insisted upon and emphasized therein as in the Book of Dzyan. “The Great Water (the Deep or Chaos) is said to be seven cubits deep”—“cubits” standing here of course for divisions, zones, and principles. Therein, “in the great mother, all the Gods, and the seven great ones are born.” (See chapter cviii., 4, Book of the Dead and Egyptian Pantheon). Both Fohat and Toum are addressed as the “Great ones of the Seven Magic Forces,” who, “conquer the Serpent Apap” or Matter.

No student of occultism, however, ought to be betrayed, by the usual phraseology used in the translations of Hermetic Works, into believing that the ancient Egyptians or Greeks spoke of, and referred, monk-like, at every moment in conversation, to a Supreme Being, God, the “One Father and Creator of all,” etc., as found on every page of such translations. No such thing indeed; and those texts are not the original Egyptian texts. They are Greek compilations, the earliest of which does not go beyond the early period of Neo-Platonism. No Hermetic

 

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675 THE GODS OF EGYPT.

work written by Egyptians (vide “Book of the Dead”) would speak of the one universal God of the Monotheistic systems; the one Absolute cause of all, was as unnameable and unpronounceable in the mind of the ancient philosopher of Egypt, as it is for ever Unknowable in the conception of Mr. Herbert Spencer. As for the Egyptian in general, as

Gaston Maspero well remarks, whenever he “arrived at the notion of divine Unity, the God One was never ‘God,’ simply.” And Lepage Renouf very justly observed that the word Nouter, nouti, “god” had never ceased being a generic name with the Egyptians, nor has it ever become a personal pronoun. Every God was the “one living and unique God” with them. Their “monotheism was purely geographical. If the Egyptian of Memphis proclaimed the unity of Phtah to the exclusion of Ammon, the Thebeian Egyptian proclaimed the unity of Ammon to the exclusion of Phtah,” as we now see done in India in the case of the Saivas and the Vaishnavas. “Ra, the ‘One God’ at Heliopolis is not the same as Osiris, the ‘One God’ at Abydos, and can be worshipped side by side with him, without being absorbed by his neighbour. The one god is but the god of the nome or the city, noutir, noutti, and does not exclude the existence of the one god of that town or of the neighbouring nome. In short, whenever speaking of Egyptian Monotheism, one ought to speak of the Gods ‘One’ of Egypt, and not of the one god” Gaston Maspero, Guide du Visiteur au Musée de Boulaq, 1883, p. 152). It is by this feature, pre-eminently Egyptian, that the authenticity of the various so-called Hermetic Books, ought to be tested; and it is totally absent from the Greek fragments known as such. This proves that a Greek Neo-Platonic, or even a Christian hand, had no small share in the editing of such works. Of course the fundamental philosophy is there, and in many a place—intact. But the style has been altered and smoothed in a monotheistic direction, as much, if not more than that of the Hebrew Genesis in its Greek and Latin translations. They may be Hermetic works, but not works written by either of the two Hermes—or rather, by Thot (Hermes) the directing intelligence of the Universe (See ch. xciv., Book of the Dead), or by Thot, his terrestrial incarnation called Trismegistus, of the Rosetta stone.

But all is doubt, negation, iconoclasm and brutal indifference, in our age of the hundred “isms” and no religion. Every idol is broken save the Golden Calf.

Unfortunately, no nation or nations can escape their Karmic fate any more than units and individuals do. History itself is dealt with by the so-called historians as unscrupulously as legendary lore. For this, Augustin Thierry has made the amende honorable, if one may believe his biographers. He deplored the erroneous principle that made them all (the would-be historiographers) lose their way, and each presume to

676 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

correct tradition, “that vox populi which nine times out of ten is vox Dei”; and he finally admitted that in legend alone rests real history; for “legend,” he adds, “is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call History.”⁶⁹⁶

While Materialists deny everything in the universe, save matter, Archæologists are trying to dwarf antiquity, and seek to destroy every claim to ancient Wisdom by tampering with Chronology. Our present-day Orientalists and Historical writers are to ancient History that which the white ants are to the buildings in India. More dangerous even than those Termites, the modern Archæologists—the “authorities” of the future in the matter of Universal History—are preparing for the History of past nations the fate of certain edifices in tropical countries: “History will tumble down and break into atoms in the lap of the twentieth century, devoured to its foundations by her annalists,” said Michelet. Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under impassable virgin forests. Historical facts will remain as concealed from view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and scepticism. But very happily actual History repeats herself, for she proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts and events deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism will ascend once more and reappear on the surface. . . .

In our Book II. the very fact that a work with pretensions to philosophy, and which is an exposition of the most abstruse problems, has to be commenced by tracing the evolution of mankind from what are regarded as supernatural beings—Spirits—will arouse the most malevolent criticism. Believers in, and the defenders of, the Secret Doctrine, however, will have to bear the accusation of madness and worse, as philosophically as for long years already the writer has done. Whenever a Theosophist is taxed with insanity, he ought to reply by quoting from Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes: “By opening so freely their lunatic asylums to their supposed madmen, men only seek to assure each other that they are not themselves mad.” [Montesquieu, “Letter LXV (65),” Lettres Persanes, Vol 2, 1721, p. 23; or “Letter LXXVIII (78),” Lettres Persanes, Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, Vol. 1, 1875, p. 263.]

End of Vol. I.

 

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VOLUME II

THE SECRET DOCTRINE

THE SYNTHESIS

OF

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY.

BY

H. P. BLAVATSKY

सत्यात् नास्ति परो धर्मः ।

[satyāt nāsti paro dharmaḥ]

“There is no Religion higher than Truth.”

Vol. II.—ANTHROPOGENESIS.

VI

This Work
I Dedicate to all True Theosophists,
In every Country,
And of every Race,
For they called it forth, and for them it was recorded.

VII

[Skip Contents]

XV

῾Η ἐμὴ διδαχὴ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμή, ἀλλὰ τοῦ πέμφαντός με.

“My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.”—John vii. 16.

XVI

Modern science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human reason and the “Secret Doctrine,” and the idea is corroborated by the ancient legends and myths, and even by the Bible itself when it is read between the lines. We see a flower slowly developing from a bud, and the bud from its seed. But whence the latter, with all its predetermined programme of physical transformation, and its invisible, therefore spiritual forces which gradually develop its form, colour, and odour? The word evolution speaks for itself. The germ of the present human race must have preëxisted in the parent of this race, as the seed, in which lies hidden the flower of next summer, was developed in the capsule of its parent flower; the parent may be but slightly different, but it still differs from its future progeny. The antediluvian ancestors of the present elephant and lizard were, perhaps, the mammoth and the plesiosaurus; why should not the progenitors of our human race have been the “giants” of the Vedas, the Völuspa, and the Book of Genesis? While it is positively absurd to believe the “transformation of species” to have taken place according to some of the more materialistic views of the evolutionists, it is but natural to think that each genus, beginning with the molluscs and ending with man, had modified its own primordial and distinctive forms.—“Isis Unveiled,” Vol. I., p. 153.

1

PRELIMINARY NOTES.

—————

ON THE ARCHAIC STANZAS, AND THE FOUR PRE-HISTORIC CONTINENTS.

“Facies totius Universi, quamvis infinitis modis variet, Manet tamen semper eadem.”—Spinoza.

The Stanzas, with the Commentaries thereon, in this Book, the second, are drawn from the same Archaic Records as the Stanzas on Cosmogony in Book I. As far as possible a verbatim translation is given; but some of the Stanzas were too obscure to be understood without explanation. Hence, as was done in Book I., while they are first given in full as they stand, when taken verse by verse with their Commentaries an attempt is made to make them clearer, by words added in brackets, in anticipation of the fuller explanation of the Commentary.

As regards the evolution of mankind, the Secret Doctrine postulates three new propositions, which stand in direct antagonism to modern science as well as to current religious dogmas: it teaches (a) the simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on seven different portions of our globe; (b) the birth of the astral, before the physical body: the former being a model for the latter; and (c) that man, in this Round, preceded every mammalian—the anthropoids included—in the animal kingdom.⁶⁹⁷

 

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2 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The Secret Doctrine is not alone in speaking of primeval men born simultaneously on the seven divisions of our Globe. In the Divine “Pymander” of Hermes we find the same Seven primeval men⁶⁹⁸ evolving from Nature and “Heavenly Man,” in the collective sense of the word, namely, from the Creative Spirits; and in the fragments (collected by George Smith) of Chaldean tablets on which is inscribed the Babylonian Legend of Creation, in the first column of the Cutha tablet, seven human beings with the faces of ravens (black, swarthy complexions), whom “the (Seven) great gods created,” are mentioned. Or, as explained in lines 16 and 18—“In the midst of the Earth they grew up and became great . . . . Seven kings, brothers of the same family.” These are the Seven Kings of Edom to whom reference is made in the Kabala; the first race, which was imperfect, i.e., was born before the “balance” (sexes) existed, and which was therefore destroyed (Zōhar: Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā, 2:176b; Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā 3:292b; see Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, p. 246 & Adolphe Franck, La Kabbale [Qabbālāh], 1843, p. 205). “Seven Kings, brethren, appeared and begat children, 6,000 in number were their peoples (A. H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 1887, Hibbert Lectures Series, p. 373). “The god Nērəgal (death) destroyed them.” “How did he destroy them?” “By bringing into equilibrium (or balance) those who did not yet exist” (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b). They were “destroyed,” as a race, by being merged in their own progeny (by exudation); that is to say, the sexless race reincarnated in the bisexual

 

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3 THE LEMNOS-BORN KABIRI.

(potentially); the latter in the Androgynes; these again in the sexual, the later third Race; (for further explanation, vide infra). Were the tablets less mutilated, they would be found to contain word for word the same account as given in the archaic records and in Hermes, at least as regards the fundamental facts, if not as regards minute details; for Hermes is a good deal disfigured by mistranslations. It is quite certain that the seeming supernaturalism of these teachings, although allegorical, is so diametrically opposed to the dead-letter statements of the Bible⁶⁹⁹ as well as to the latest hypotheses of science, that it will evoke passionate denial. The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty. Besides, we have the Egyptian “Books of Thoth,” and “Book of the Dead,” and the Hindu Purânas with the seven Manus, as well as the Chaldeo-Assyrian accounts, whose tiles mention seven primitive men, or Adams, the real meaning of which name may be ascertained through the Kabala. Those who know anything of the Samothracian mysteries will also remember that the generic name of the Kabiri was the “Holy Fires,” which created on seven localities of the island of Electria (or Samothrace) the “Kabir born of the Holy Lemnos” (the island sacred to Vulcan).

According to Pindar (See “Philosophomena,” Miller’s edition, p. 98), this Kabir, whose name was Adamas, was, in the traditions of Lemnos, the type of the primitive man born from the bosom of the Earth. He was the Archetype of the first males in the order of generation, and was one of the seven autochthonous ancestors or progenitors of mankind (ibid, p. 108). If, while coupling with this the fact that Samothrace was colonised by the Phoenicians, and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, one remembers also the identity of the mystery gods of the Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and Israelites, it will be easy to discover whence came also the confused account of the Noachian deluge. It has become undeniable of late that the Jews, who obtained their primitive ideas about creation from Moses, who had them from

 

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4 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Egyptians, compiled their Genesis and first Cosmogonic traditions—when these were rewritten by Ezra and others—from the Chaldeo-Akkadian account. It is, therefore, sufficient to examine the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform and other inscriptions to find also therein, scattered here and there, not only the original meaning of the name Adam, Admi, or Adami,⁷⁰⁰ but also the creation of seven Adams or roots of men, born of Mother Earth, physically, and of the divine fire of the progenitors, spiritually or astrally. The Assyriologists, ignorant of the esoteric teachings, could hardly be expected to pay any greater attention to the mysterious and ever-recurring number seven on the Babylonian cylinders, than they paid to it on finding the same in Genesis and the Bible. Yet the number of the ancestral spirits and their seven groups of human progeny are there, notwithstanding the dilapidated condition of the fragments, as plainly as they are to be found in “Pymander” and in the Book of the Concealed Mystery [Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā] of the Kabala. In the latter Adam Kadmon is the Sephirothal tree, as also the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” And that “Tree,” says verse 32, “hath around it seven columns,” or palaces, of the seven creative Angels operating in the spheres of the seven planets on our Globe. As Adam Kadmon is a collective name, so also is the name of the man Adam. Says George Smith in his “Chaldean Account of Genesis”:

“The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is evidently not a proper name, but is only used as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in Genesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the Assyrian word” (p. 86).

Moreover, neither the Chaldean nor the Biblical deluge (the stories of Xisuthrus and Noah) is based on the universal or even on the Atlantean deluges, recorded in the Indian allegory of Vaivaswata Manu. They are the exoteric allegories based on the esoteric mysteries of Samothrace. If the older Chaldees knew the esoteric truth concealed in the Purânic legends, the other nations were aware only of the Samothracian mystery, and allegorised it. They adapted it to their astronomical and anthropological, or rather phallic, notions. Samothrace is known historically to have been famous in antiquity for a deluge, which submerged the country and reached the top of the highest mountains; an event which happened before the age of the Argonauts. It was overflowed very

 

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5 THE SECRETS OF KOYUNCUK.

suddenly by the waters of the Euxine, regarded up to that time as a lake.⁷⁰¹ But the Israelites had, moreover, another legend upon which to base their allegory: the “deluge,” that transformed the present Gobi Desert into a sea for the last time, some 10 or 12,000 years ago, and which drove many Noahs and their families on to the surrounding mountains. As the Babylonian accounts are now only restored from hundreds of thousands of broken fragments (the mound of Koyuncuk alone having yielded to Layard’s excavations over twenty thousand fragments of inscriptions), the proofs here cited are comparatively scanty; yet such as they are, they corroborate almost every one of our teachings, certainly three, at least. These are:

(1.) That the race which was the first to fall into generation was a dark Race (Zalmat Gaguadi), which they call the Adami or dark Race, and that Sarku, or the light Race, remained pure for a long while subsequently.

(2.) That the Babylonians recognised two principal Races at the time of the Fall, the Race of the Gods (the Ethereal doubles of the Pitris), having preceded these two. This is Sir H. Rawlinson’s opinion. These “Races” are our second and third Root-races.

(3) That these seven Gods, each of whom created a man, or group of men, were “the gods imprisoned or incarnated.” These gods were: the god Zi; the god Ziku (noble life, Director of purity); the god Mirku (noble crown) “Saviour from death of the gods” (later on) imprisoned, and the creator of “the dark Race which his hand has made”; the god Libzu “wise among the gods”; the god Nissi . . . . and the god Suhhab; and Hea or Sa, their synthesis, the god of wisdom and of the Deep, identified with Oannes-Dagon, at the time of the fall, and called (collectively) the Demiurge, or Creator. (See Chaldean Account Genesis, p. 82.)

There are two “Creations” so called, in the Babylonian fragments, and Genesis having adhered to this, one finds its first two chapters distinguished as the Elohite and the Jehovite creations. Their proper order, however, is not preserved in these or in any other exoteric accounts. Now these “Creations,” according to the occult teachings, refer respectively to the formation of the primordial seven men by the progenitors (the Pitris, or Elohim): and to that of the human groups after the fall.

 

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6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

All this will be examined in the light of science and comparisons drawn from the scriptures of all the ancient nations, the Bible included, as we proceed. Meanwhile, before we turn to the Anthropogenesis of the prehistoric Races, it may be useful to agree upon the names to be given to the Continents on which the four great Races, which preceded our Adamic Race, were born, lived, and died. Their archaic and esoteric names were many, and varied with the language of the nationality which mentioned them in its annals and scriptures. That which in the Vendidad, for instance, is referred to as Airyanəm Vaēǰō (Bundahišnīh 29:12) wherein was born the original Zoroaster,⁷⁰² is called in the Purânic literature “Sveta-Dwipa,” “Mount Meru,” the abode of Vishnu, etc., etc.; and in the Secret Doctrine is simply named the land of the “Gods” under their chiefs the “Spirits of this Planet.”

Therefore, in view of the possible, and even very probable confusion, that may arise, it is considered more convenient to adopt, for each of the four Continents constantly referred to, a name more familiar to the cultured reader. It is proposed, then, to call the first continent, or rather the first terra firma on which the first Race was evolved by the divine progenitors:

I. “The Imperishable Sacred Land.”

The reasons for this name are explained as follows: This “Sacred Land”—of which more later on—is stated never to have shared the fate of the other continents; because it is the only one whose destiny it is to last from the beginning to the end of the Manvantara throughout each Round. It is the cradle of the first man and the dwelling of the last divine mortal, chosen as a Sishta for the future seed of humanity. Of this mysterious and sacred land very little can be said, except, perhaps, according to a poetical expression in one of the Commentaries, that the “pole-star has its watchful eye upon it, from the dawn to the close of the twilight of ‘a day’ of the great breath.”⁷⁰³

 

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7 HYPERBOREAS AND LEMURIA.

II. The “Hyperborean” will be the name chosen for the Second Continent, the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia. Such was the name given by the oldest Greeks to the far-off and mysterious region, whither their tradition made Apollo the “Hyperborean” travel every year. Astronomically, Apollo is of course the Sun, who, abandoning his Hellenic sanctuaries, loved to visit annually his far-away country, where the Sun was said never to set for one half of the year. Εγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματός εἰσι κέλευθοι, says a verse in the Odyssey (x. 86).

But historically, or better, perhaps, ethnologically and geologically, the meaning is different. The land of the Hyperboreans, the country that extended beyond Boreas, the frozen-hearted god of snows and hurricanes, who loved to slumber heavily on the chain of Mount Riphaeus, was neither an ideal country, as surmised by the mythologists, nor yet a land in the neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube.⁷⁰⁴ It was a real Continent, a bonâ-fide land which knew no winter in those early days, nor have its sorry remains more than one night and day during the year, even now. The nocturnal shadows never fall upon it, said the Greeks; for it is the land of the Gods, the favourite abode of Apollo, the god of light, and its inhabitants are his beloved priests and servants. This may be regarded as poetised fiction now; but it was poetised truth then.

III. The third Continent, we propose to call “Lemuria.” The name is an invention, or an idea, of Mr. P. L. Sclater, who asserted, between 1850 and 1860, on zoological grounds the actual existence, in prehistoric times, of a Continent which he showed to have extended from Madagascar to Ceylon and Sumatra. It included some portions of what is now Africa; but otherwise this gigantic Continent, which stretched from the Indian ocean to Australia, has now wholly disappeared beneath the waters of the Pacific, leaving here and there only some of its highland tops which are now islands. Mr. A. R. Wallace, the naturalist, “extends the Australia of tertiary periods to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and perhaps to Fiji”; and from its Marsupial types he infers “a connection with the Northern Continent during the

 

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8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Secondary period,” writes Mr. C. Gould in “Mythical Monsters,” p. 47. The subject is treated at length elsewhere.⁷⁰⁵

IV. “Atlantis” is the Fourth Continent. It would be the first historical land, were the traditions of the ancients to receive more attention than they have hitherto. The famous island of Plato of that name was but a fragment of this great Continent. (See “Esoteric Buddhism.”)

V. The Fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Antipodes, it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval with it, which are generally referred to by the Indo-Aryan Occultists as the fifth. If their teaching followed the appearance of the Continents in their geological and geographical order, then this classification would have to be altered. But as the sequence of the Continents is made to follow the order of evolution of the Races, from the first to the fifth, our Aryan Root-race, Europe must be called the fifth great Continent. The Secret Doctrine takes no account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern geographical distribution of land and sea. Since the day of its earliest teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the earth has changed more than once. There was a time when the delta of Egypt and Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of Gibraltar, and a further upheaval of the continent, changed entirely the face of the map of Europe. The last serious change occurred some 12,000 years ago,⁷⁰⁶

 

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9 PRE-TERTIARY GIANTS.

and was followed by the submersion of Plato’s little Atlantic island, which he calls Atlantis after its parent continent. Geography was part of the mysteries, in days of old. Says the Zōhar (3:10a.7) “These secrets (of land and sea) were divulged to the men of the secret science, but not to the geographers.”

The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre-tertiary giant, and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear preposterous to admirers of, and believers in, modern learning. The whole posse comitatus of biologists will turn away from the conception of this third race Titan of the Secondary age, a being fit to fight as successfully with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and land, as his forefathers—the ethereal prototype of the Atlantean—had little need to fear that which could not hurt him. The modern anthropologist is quite welcome to laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as the theologian laughs at his pithecoid ancestor. The Occultists and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually squared their accounts by this time. Occult sciences claim less and give more, at all events, than either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical Theology.

Nor ought the Esoteric Chronology to frighten any one; for, with regard to figures, the greatest authorities of the day are as fickle and as uncertain as the Mediterranean wave. As regards the duration of the geological periods alone, the learned men of the Royal Society are all hopelessly at sea, and jump from one million to five hundred millions of years with the utmost ease, as will be seen more than once during this comparison.

Take one instance for our present purpose—the calculations of Mr. Croll. Whether, according to this authority, 2,500,000 years represent the time since the beginning of the tertiary age, or the Eocene period, as an American geologist makes him say;⁷⁰⁷ or whether again Mr. Croll “allows fifteen millions since the beginning of the Eocene period,” as quoted by an English geologist,⁷⁰⁸ both sets of figures cover the claims

 

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10 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

made by the Secret Doctrine.⁷⁰⁹ For assigning as the latter does from four to five million years between the incipient and the final evolution of the Fourth Root-Race, on the Lemuro-Atlantean Continents; one million years for the Fifth, or Aryan Race, to the present date; and about 850,000 since the submersion of the last large peninsula of the great Atlantis—all this may have easily taken place within the 15,000,000 years conceded by Mr. Croll to the Tertiary Age. But, chronologically speaking, the duration of the period is of secondary importance, as we have, after all, certain American scientists to fall back upon. These gentlemen, unmoved by the fact that their assertions are called not only dubious but absurd, yet maintain that man existed so far back as in the Secondary Age. They have found human footprints on rocks of that formation; and furthermore, M. de Quatrefages finds no valid scientific reason why man should not have existed during the Secondary Age.

The “Ages” and periods in geology are, in sober truth, purely conventional terms, as they are still hardly delineated, and, moreover,

 

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11 THE TROPICS AT THE POLE.

no two geologists or naturalists agree as to the figures. Thus, there is a wide margin for choice offered to the Occultist by the learned fraternity. Shall we take for one of our supports Mr. T. Mellard Reade? This gentleman, in a paper on “Limestone as an Index of Geological Time,” read by him in 1878 before the Royal Society, claims that the minimum time required for the formation of the sedimentary strata and the elimination of the calcareous matter is in round numbers 600 million years (See Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 28 (1879), p. 281); or shall we ask support for our chronology from Mr. Darwin’s works, wherein he demands for the organic transformations according to his theory from 300 to 500 million years? Sir C. Lyell and Prof. Houghton were satisfied with placing the beginning of the Cambrian Age at 200 and 240 millions of years back respectively. Geologists and zoologists claim the maximum time, though Mr. Huxley, at one time, placed the beginning of the incrustation of the earth 1,000 million years ago, and would not surrender a millennium of it.

But the main point for us lies not in the agreement or disagreement of the Naturalists as to the duration of geological periods, but rather in their perfect accord on one point, for a wonder, and this a very important one. They all agree that during “The Miocene Age”—whether one or ten million years ago—Greenland and even Spitzbergen, the remnants of our Second or Hyperborean Continent, “had almost a tropical climate.” Now the pre-Homeric Greeks had preserved a vivid tradition of this “Land of the Eternal Sun,” whither their Apollo journeyed yearly. “During the Miocene Age, Greenland (in N. Lat. 70°) developed an abundance of trees, such as the Yew, the Redwood, the Sequoia, allied to the Californian species, Beeches, Planes, Willows, Oaks, Poplars and Walnuts, as well as a Magnolia and a Zamia,” says Science; in short Greenland had Southern plants unknown to Northern regions.

And now this natural question rises. If the Greeks knew, in the days of Homer, of a Hyperborean land, i.e., a blessed land beyond the reach of Boreas, the god of winter and of the hurricane, an ideal region which the later Greeks and their classics have vainly tried to locate by searching for it beyond Scythia, a country where nights were short and days long, and beyond that land a country where the sun never set and the palm grew freely—if they knew of all this, who then told them of it? In

12 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

their day, and for ages previously, Greenland must certainly have been already covered with perpetual snows, with never-thawing ice, just as it is now. Everything tends to show that the land of the short nights and the long days was Norway or Scandinavia, beyond which was the blessed land of eternal light and summer; and to know of this, their tradition must have descended to the Greeks from some people more ancient than themselves, who were acquainted with those climatic details of which the Greeks themselves could know nothing. Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green. The archaic teachings, and likewise the Purânas—for one who understands the allegories of the latter—contain the same statements. Suffice, then, to us the strong probability that a people, now unknown to history, lived during the Miocene period of modern science, at a time when Greenland was an almost tropical land.

———

Note. The reader is requested to bear in mind that the first and the following sections are not strictly consecutive in order of time. In the first Section the Stanzas which form the skeleton of the exposition are given, and certain important points commented upon and explained. In the subsequent sections various additional details are gathered, and a fuller explanation of the subject is attempted.

13

BOOK II., PART I.

ANTHROPOGENESIS.

—————

STANZAS TRANSLATED WITH COMMENTARIES

from the

SECRET BOOK OF DZYAN.

14

STANZAS FROM THE BOOK OF DZYAN. 15‌

ANTHROPOGENESIS IN THE SECRET VOLUME.

(VERBATIM EXTRACTS.⁷¹⁰)

STANZA I.

1. The Lha which turns the fourth is subservient to the Lha of the Seven, they who revolve driving their chariots around their Lord, the One Eye. His breath gave life to the Seven; it gave life to the first.

2. Said the Earth:—“Lord of the Shining Face; my house is empty . . . . send thy sons to people this wheel. Thou hast sent thy seven sons to the Lord of Wisdom. Seven times doth he see thee nearer to himself, seven times more doth he feel thee. Thou hast forbidden thy servants, the small rings, to catch thy light and heat, thy great bounty to intercept on its passage. Send now to thy servant the same.”

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, for his sons . . . . thy people shall be under the rule of the Fathers. Thy men shall be mortals. The men of the Lord of Wisdom, not the Lunar Sons, are immortal. Cease thy complaints. Thy seven skins are yet on thee . . . . thou art not ready. Thy men are not ready.”

4. After great throes she cast off her old three and put on her new seven skins, and stood in her first one.

———

STANZA II.

5. The wheel whirled for thirty crores more. It constructed rupas: soft stones that hardened; hard plants that softened. Visible from invisible, insects and small lives. She shook them off her back whenever they overran the mother.

 

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16 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

. . . . After thirty crores she turned round. She lay 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.

6. The water-men terrible and bad she herself created from the remains of others, from the dross and slime of her first, second, and third, she formed them. The Dhyani came and looked—The Dhyani from the bright Father-mother, from the white regions they came, from the abodes of the immortal mortals.

7. Displeased they were. Our flesh is not there. No fit rupas for our brothers of the fifth. No dwellings for the lives. Pure waters, not turbid, they must drink. Let us dry them.

8. The flames came. The fires with the sparks; the night fires and the day fires. They dried out the turbid dark waters. With their heat they quenched them. The Lhas of the High, the Lhamayin of below, came. 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.

9. Mother-water, the great sea, wept. She arose, she disappeared in the moon which had lifted her, which had given her birth.

10. When they were destroyed, Mother-earth remained bare. She asked to be dried.

———

STANZA III.

11. The Lord of the Lords came. From her body he separated the waters, and that was Heaven above, the first Heaven.

12. The great Chohans called the Lords of the Moon, of the airy bodies. “Bring forth men, men of your nature. Give them their forms within. She will build coverings without. Males-females will they be. Lords of the Flame also . . . .”

13. They went each on his allotted land: seven of them each on his lot. The Lords of the Flame remain behind. They would not go, they would not create.

17 THE SLOKAS OF “DZYAN.”

STANZA IV.

14. The Seven Hosts, the “Will-born Lords,” propelled by the Spirit of Life-giving, separate men from themselves, each on his own zone.

15. Seven times seven Shadows of future men were born, each of his own colour and kind. Each inferior to his father. The fathers, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny were Bhûta, with neither form nor mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya.

16. How are the Manushya born? The Manus with minds, how are they made? The fathers called to their help their own fire; which is the fire that burns in Earth. The Spirit of the Earth called to his help the Solar Fire. These three produced in their joint efforts a good Rupa. It could stand walk, run, recline, or fly. Yet it was still but a Chhaya, a shadow with no sense . . . .

17. The breath 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; “We gave it our own,” said the Dhyanis. The Breath needed a Vehicle of Desires; “It has it,” said the Drainer of Waters. But 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 Fire . . . . Man remained an empty senseless Bhûta . . . . Thus have the boneless given life to those who became men with bones in the third.

———

STANZA V.

18. The first were the sons of Yoga. Their sons the children of the Yellow Father and the White Mother.

19. The Second Race was the product by budding and

18 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

expansion, the A-Sexual from the Sexless.⁷¹¹ Thus was, O Lanoo, the Second Race produced.

20. Their fathers were the self-born. The self-born, the Chhaya from the brilliant bodies of the Lords, the Fathers, the Sons of Twilight.

21. When the Race became old, the old waters mixed with the fresher waters. When its 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. The old Wing became the new Shadow, and the Shadow of the Wing.

———

STANZA VI.

22. Then the second evolved the Egg-born, the third. 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 overshadowed the big drop. The egg of the future race, the Man-swan of the later third. First male-female, then man and woman.

23. The self-born were the Chhayas: the Shadows from the bodies of the Sons of Twilight.

———

STANZA VII.

24. The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down, they saw the vile forms of the First Third, “We can choose,” said the Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some entered the Chhaya. Some projected the Spark. Some deferred till the Fourth. From their own Rupa they filled the Kama. Those who entered became Arhats. Those who received but a spark, remained destitute of knowledge; the spark burned low. The third remained mind-less. Their Jivas were not

 

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19 THE SLOKAS OF “DZYAN.”

ready. These were set apart among the Seven. They became narrow-headed. The Third were ready. “In these shall we dwell,” said the Lords of the Flame.

25. How did the Manâsa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They rejected the Self-born. They are not ready. They spurned the Sweat-born. They are not quite ready. They would not enter the first Egg-born.

26. When the Sweat-born produced the Egg-born, the twofold and the mighty, the powerful with bones, the Lords of Wisdom said: “Now shall we create.”

27. The Third Race became the Vahan of the Lords of Wisdom. It created “Sons of Will and Yoga,” by Kriyasakti it created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. .

———

STANZA VIII.

28. From the drops of sweat; from the residue of the sub stance; matter from dead bodies of men and animals of the wheel before; and from cast-off dust, the first animals were produced.

29. Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying Sarpas 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.

30. During the third Race the boneless animals grew and changed: they became animals with bones, their Chhayas became solid.

31. The animals separated the first. They began to breed. The two-fold man separated also. He said: “Let us as they; let us unite and make creatures.” They did.

32. And those which had no spark took huge she-animals unto them. They begat upon them dumb Races. Dumb they were themselves. But their tongues untied. 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.

20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA IX.

33. Seeing which, the Lhas who had not built men, wept, saying:—

34. “The Amanâsa have defiled our future abodes. This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen. They did . . . .

35. Then all men became endowed with Manas. They saw the sin of the mindless.

36. The Fourth Race developed speech.

37. The One became Two; also all the living and creeping things that were still one, giant fish-birds and serpents with shell-heads.

———

STANZA X.

38. Thus two by two on the seven zones, the Third Race gave birth to the Fourth-Race men; the gods became no-gods; the sura became a-sura.

39. The first, on every zone, was moon-coloured; 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. The next seven began mixing.

40. Then the Fourth became tall with pride. We are the kings, it was said; we are the gods.

41. They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the narrow-headed. They bred monsters. Wicked demons, male and female, also Khado (dakini), with little minds.

42. They built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped. Then the Third Eye acted no longer.

———

STANZA XI.

43. They built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built, and out of the fires vomited, out of the white stone of

21 THE SLOKAS OF “DZYAN.”

the mountains and of the black stone, they cut their own images in their size and likeness, and worshipped them.

44. They built great images nine yatis high, the size of their bodies. Inner fires had destroyed the land of their fathers. The water threatened the fourth.

45. The first great waters came. They swallowed the seven great islands.

46. All Holy saved, the Unholy destroyed. With them most of the huge animals, produced from the sweat of the earth.

———

STANZA XII.

47. Few men remained: some yellow, some brown and black, and some red remained. The Moon-coloured were gone forever.

48. The fifth produced from the Holy stock remained; it was ruled over by the first divine Kings.

49. . . . . Who re-descended, who made peace with the fifth, who taught and instructed it. . . . . .

22 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

COMMENTARIES

STANZA I.⁷¹² BEGINNINGS OF SENTIENT LIFE.

———

§§ (1) The Lha, or Spirit of the Earth. (2) Invocation of the Earth to the Sun. (3) What the Sun answers. (4) Transformation of the Earth.

——————

1. The Lha (a) which turns the fourth (Globe, or our Earth) is servant to the Lha(s) of the seven (the planetary Spirits) (b), they who revolve, driving their chariots around their Lord, the one eye (Loka-Chakshub) of our world. His breath gives life to the seven (gives light to the planets). It gave life to the first (c). “They are all dragons of Wisdom,” adds the Commentary (d).

(a) Lha is the ancient word in trans-Himalayan regions for “Spirit,” any celestial or superhuman Being, and it covers the whole series of heavenly hierarchies, from Archangel, or Dhyani, down to an angel of darkness, or terrestrial Spirit.

(b) This expression shows in plain language that the Spirit-Guardian of our globe, which is the fourth in the chain, is subordinate to the chief Spirit (or God) of the Seven Planetary Genii or Spirits. As already explained, the ancients had, in their Kyriel of gods, seven chief Mystery-gods, whose chief was, exoterically, the visible Sun, or the eighth, and, esoterically, the second Logos, the Demiurge. The seven (who have now become the “Seven Eyes of the Lord” in the Christian religion) were the regents of the seven chief planets; but these were not

 

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23 THE ACTION OF THE GREAT BREATH.

reckoned according to the enumeration devised later by people who had forgotten, or who had an inadequate notion of, the real Mysteries, and included neither the sun, the moon, nor the earth. The sun was the chief, exoterically, of the twelve great gods, or zodiacal constellations; and, esoterically, the Messiah, the Christos (the subject anointed by the Great Breath, or the One) surrounded by his twelve subordinate powers, also subordinate, in turn, to each of the seven “Mystery-gods” of the planets.

“The seven higher make the Seven Lhas create the world,” states a Commentary; which means that our Earth, leaving aside the rest, was created or fashioned by terrestrial spirits, the “Regents” being simply the supervisors. This is the first germ, the seed of that which grew later into the Tree of Astrology and Astrolatry. The Higher ones were the Kosmocratores, the fabricators of our solar system. This is borne out by all the ancient Cosmogonies: that of Hermes, of the Chaldees, of the Aryans, of the Egyptians, and even of the Jews. Heaven’s belt, the signs of the Zodiac (the Sacred animals), are as much the Bne’ Alhim (Sons of the Gods or the Elohim) as the Spirits of the Earth; but they are prior to them. Soma and Sin, Isis and Diana, are all lunar gods or goddesses, called the fathers and mothers of our Earth, which is subordinate to them. But these, in their turn, are subordinate to their “Fathers” and “Mothers”—the latter interchangeable and varying with each nation—the gods and their planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn Bel, Brihaspati, etc.

(c) “His breath gave life to the seven,” refers as much to the sun, who gives life to the Planets, as to the “High One,” the Spiritual Sun, who gives life to the whole Kosmos. The astronomical and astrological keys opening the gate leading to the mysteries of Theogony can be found only in the later glossaries, which accompany the Stanzas.

In the apocalyptic Slokas of the Archaic Records, the language is as symbolical, if less mythical, than in the Purânas. Without the help of the later commentaries, compiled by generations of adepts, it would be impossible to understand the meaning correctly. In the ancient Cosmogonies, the visible and the invisible worlds are the double links of one and the same chain. As the invisible Logos, with its seven hierarchies (represented or personified each by its chief angel or rector), form one power, the inner and the invisible; so, in the world of Forms, the Sun and the seven chief Planets constitute the visible and active potency; the latter “Hierarchy” being, so to speak, the visible and objective Logos of the invisible and (except in the lowest grades) ever-subjective angels.

Thus—to anticipate a little by way of illustration—every Race in its

24 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

evolution is said to be born under the direct influence of one of the Planets: Race the first receiving its breath of life from the Sun, as will be seen later on; while the third humanity—those who fell into generation, or from androgynes became separate entities, one male and the other female—are said to be under the direct influence of Venus, “the little sun in which the solar orb stores his light.”

The summation of the Stanzas in Book I. showed the genesis⁷¹³ of Gods and men taking rise in, and from, one and the same Point, which is the One Universal, Immutable, Eternal, and absolute Unity. In its primary manifested aspect we have seen it become: (1) in the sphere of objectivity and Physics, Primordial Substance and Force (centripetal and centrifugal, positive and negative, male and female, etc., etc.); (2) in the world of Metaphysics, the Spirit of the Universe, or Cosmic Ideation, called by some the Logos.

This Logos is the apex of the Pythagorean triangle. When the triangle is complete it becomes the Tetraktis, or the Triangle in the Square, and is the dual symbol of the four-lettered Tetragrammaton in the manifested Kosmos, and of its radical triple ray in the unmanifested, or its noumenon.

Put more metaphysically, the classification given here of Cosmic Ultimates, is more one of convenience than of absolute philosophical accuracy. At the commencement of a great Manvantara, Parabrahm manifests as Mulaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equivalent to the “Unconscious Universal Mind,” etc., of Western Pantheists. It constitutes the Basis of the subject-side of manifested Being, and is the source of all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mulaprakriti or Primordial Cosmic Substance, is the foundation of the object-side of things—the basis of all objective evolution and Cosmogenesis. Force, then, does not emerge with Primordial Substance from Parabrahmic Latency. It is the transformation into energy of the supra-conscious thought of the Logos, infused, so to speak, into the objectivation of the latter out of potential latency in the One Reality. Hence spring the wondrous laws of matter: hence the “primal impress” so vainly discussed by Bishop Temple. Force thus is not synchronous with the first objectivation of Mulaprakriti. But as, apart from it, the latter is absolutely and necessarily inert—a mere abstraction—it is unnecessary to weave too fine a cobweb of subtleties as to the order of succession of

 

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25 MAN, THE THIRD LOGOS.

the Cosmic Ultimates. Force succeeds Mulaprakriti; but, minus Force, Mulaprakriti is for all practical intents and purposes non-existent.⁷¹⁴

The “Heavenly Man” (Tetragrammaton) who is the Protogonos, Tikkoun, the firstborn from the passive deity and the first manifestation of that deity’s shadow, is the universal form and idea, which engenders the manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four-lettered symbol, in the Kabala, of the Universe itself, also called the second Logos. The second springs from the first and develops the third triangle (see the Sephirothal Tree); from the last of which (the lower host of Angels) men are generated. It is with this third aspect that we shall deal at present.

The reader must bear in mind that there is a great difference between the Logos and the Demiurgos, for one is Spirit and the other is Soul; or as Dr. Wilder has it: “Dianoia and Logos are synonymous, Nous being superior and closely in affinity with Τὸ ἄγαθον, one being the superior apprehending, the other the comprehending—one noetic and the other phrenic.”

Moreover, Man was regarded in several systems as the third Logos. The esoteric meaning of the word Logos (speech or word, Verbum) is the rendering in objective expression, as in a photograph, of the concealed thought. The Logos is the mirror reflecting divine mind, and the Universe is the mirror of the Logos, though the latter is the esse of that Universe. As the Logos reflects all in the Universe of Pleroma, so man reflects in himself all that he sees and finds in his Universe, the Earth. It is the three Heads of the Kabala: “Ūnum intrā alterum, et alterum super alterum” [“one within the other, and the other above the other”] (Zōhar: Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā 3:288a.9). “Every Universe (world or planet) has its own Logos,” says the doctrine. The Sun was always called by the Egyptians “the eye of Osiris,” and was himself the Logos, the first-begotten, or light made manifest to the world, “which is the Mind and divine intellect of the Concealed.” It is only by the sevenfold Ray of this light that we can become cognizant of the Logos through the Demiurge, regarding the latter as the creator of our planet and everything pertaining to it, and the former as the guiding Force of that “Creator”—good and bad at the same time, the origin of good and the origin of evil. This “Creator” is neither good nor bad per se, but its differentiated aspects in nature make it assume one or the other character. With the invisible and the unknown Universes disseminated through space, none of the sun-gods had anything to do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the “Books of Hermes,” and in every ancient folk lore. It is symbolised generally by the Dragon and the Serpent—the Dragon of Good and the Serpent of Evil, represented on Earth by

 

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26 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the right and the left-hand Magic. In the epic poem of Finland, the Kalewala,⁷¹⁵ the origin of the Serpent of Evil is given: it is born from the “spittle of Suoyatar . . . . and endowed with a living Soul by the Principle of Evil,” Hisi. A strife is described between the two, the “thing of Evil” (the Serpent or Sorcerer), and Ahti, the Dragon; Magic Lemminkainen.” The latter is one of the seven sons of Ilmatar, the virgin “daughter of the air,” she “who fell from heaven into the sea,” before Creation, i.e., Spirit transformed into the matter of sensuous life. There is a world of meaning and Occult thought in these few lines, admirably rendered by Dr. J. M. Crawford, of Cincinnati. The hero Lemminkainen, the good magician,

“Hews the wall with might of magic,
Breaks the palisade in pieces,
Hews to atoms seven pickets,
Chops the Serpent wall to fragments.
. . . . . .
When the monster little heeding,
. . . . . .
Pounces with his mouth of venom
At the head of Lemminkainen.
But the hero, quick recalling,
Speaks the Master words of Knowledge,
Words that came from distant ages,
Words his ancestors had taught him . . . .”

(d) In China the men of Fohi (or the “Heavenly Man”) are called the twelve Tien-Hoang, the twelve hierarchies of Dhyanis or Angels, with human Faces, and Dragon bodies; the dragon standing for divine Wisdom or Spirit;⁷¹⁶ and they create men by incarnating themselves in

 

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27 MAN’S DUAL AND TRIPLE NATURE.

seven figures of clay—earth and water—made in the shape of those Tien-hoang, a third allegory; (compare the “Symbols of the Bonzes”). The twelve Æsers of the Scandinavian Eddas do the same. In the Secret Catechism of the Druses of Syria—a legend which is repeated word for word by the oldest tribes about and around the Euphrates—men were created by the “Sons of God” descending on Earth, where, after culling seven Mandragoras, they animated these roots, which became forthwith men.⁷¹⁷

All these allegories point to one and the same origin—to the dual and the triple nature of man; dual, as male and female; triple—as being of spiritual and psychic essence within, and of a material fabric without.

———

2. Said the Earth, “Lord of the Shining Face (the Sun) my house is empty. . . . Send thy sons to people this wheel (Earth). Thou hast sent thy seven sons to the Lord of Wisdom (a). Seven times doth He see thee nearer to Himself; seven times more doth He feel thee. Thou hast forbidden Thy servants, the small rings, to catch Thy light and heat, Thy great Bounty to intercept on its passage (b). Send now to Thy servant the same!” (c).

(a) The “Lord of Wisdom” is Mercury, or Budha.

(b) The modern Commentary explains the words as a reference to a well-known astromical fact, “that Mercury receives seven times more

 

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28 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

light and heat from the Sun than Earth, or even the beautiful Venus, which receives but twice that amount more than our insignificant Globe.” Whether the fact was known in antiquity may be inferred from the prayer of the “Earth Spirit” to the Sun as given in the text.⁷¹⁸ The Sun, however, refuses to people the globe, as it is not ready to receive life as yet.

Mercury is, as an astrological planet, still more occult and mysterious than Venus. It is identical with the Mazdean Mithra, the genius, or god, “established between the Sun and the Moon, the perpetual companion of ‘Sun’ of Wisdom.” Pausanias shows him as having an altar in common with Jupiter (Book V). He had wings to express his attendance upon the Sun in its course; and he was called the Nuntis, or Sun-wolf, “solaris luminis particeps.” He was the leader of and the evocator of Souls, the “great Magician” and the Hierophant. Virgil depicts him as taking “his wand to evoke from Orcus the souls plunged therein”—tum virgam capit, hac animas ille evocat Orco. (See also the 21st Fargard of the Vendidad on the celestial militia.) He is the golden-coloured Mercury, the χρυσοφαὴς ῾Ερμῆς whom the Hierophants forbade to name. He is symbolised in Grecian mythology by one of the dogs (vigilance), which watch over the celestial flock (occult wisdom), or Hermes Anubis, or again Agathodæmon. He is the Argus watching over the Earth, and which the latter mistakes for the Sun itself. It is through the intercession of Mercury that the Emperor Julian prayed to the Occult Sun every night; for, as says Vossius: “All the theologians agree to say that Mercury and the Sun are one. . . . He was the most eloquent and the most wise of all the gods, which is not to be wondered at, since Mercury is in such close proximity to the Wisdom and the Word of God (the Sun) that he was confused with both.” (Idolatry, Vol. II., p. 373.) Vossius utters here a greater occult truth than he suspected. The Hermes-Sarameyas of the Greeks is closely related to the Hindu Saram and Sarameya, the divine watchman, “who watches over the golden flock of stars and solar rays.”

In the clearer words of the Commentary:

“The Globe, propelled onward by the Spirit of the Earth and his six assistants,

 

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29 THE CELESTIAL GOVERNORS OF HUMANITY.

gets all its vital forces, life, and powers through the medium of the seven planetary Dhyanis from the Spirit of the Sun. They are his messengers of Light and Life.”

“Like each of the seven regions of the Earth, each of the seven⁷¹⁹ First-born (the primordial human groups) receives its light and life from its own especial Dhyani—spiritually, and from the palace (house, the planet) of that Dhyani physically; so with the seven great Races to be born on it. The first is born under the Sun; the second under Brihaspati (Jupiter); the third under Lohitanga (the “fiery-bodied,” Venus, or Sukra); the fourth, under Soma (the Moon, our Globe also, the Fourth Sphere being born under and from the Moon) and Sani, Saturn⁷²⁰ the Krura-lochana (evil-eyed) and the Asita (the dark); the fifth, under Budha (Mercury).”

“So also with man and every ‘man’ in man (every principle). Each gets its specific quality from its primary (the planetary spirit), therefore every man is a septenate (or a combination of principles, each having its origin in a quality of that special Dhyani). Every active power or force of the earth comes to her from one of the seven Lords. Light comes through Sukra (Venus), who receives a triple supply, and gives one-third of it to the Earth. Therefore the two are called ‘Twin-sisters,’ but the Spirit of the Earth is subservient to the ‘Lord’ of Sukra. Our wise men represent the two Globes, one over, the other under the double Sign (the primeval Svastica bereft of its four arms, or the cross ).”⁷²¹

The “double sign” is, as every student of Occultism knows, the symbol of the male and the female principles in Nature, of the positive and the negative, for the Svastica or 卐 is all that and much more. All antiquity, ever since the birth of Astronomy—imparted to the Fourth Race by one of its divine kings of the Divine Dynasty—and

 

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30 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 deity⁷²²—is the son of Bhrigu, one of the Prajâpati and a Vedic sage, and is Daitya-Guru, or the priest-instructor of the primeval giants. The whole history of “Sukra” in the Purânas, 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 separated⁷²³ (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 had 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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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.⁷²⁴

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 Brahmâ 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 refl 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.⁷²⁵ It is owing to the fanciful interpretation of the

 

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32 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 year 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) Sukra⁷²⁶ 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,

 

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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.” ⁷²⁷

“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.” ⁷²⁸

“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, Jivâtma, or Pratyagâtma (said figuratively to issue from Paramâtma. 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

 

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34 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Range⁷²⁹ as the Manus, the Rishis, the Pitris⁷³⁰, the Prajâpati, and so on; and as Dhyani Buddhas, the Chohans, Melhas (fire-gods), Bodhisattvas,⁷³¹ 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’être. 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 ago⁷³²:

 

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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 Purânas, 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 caves⁷³³ 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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36 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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);⁷³⁴ 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 Cube on the creative plane. His symbol is the cube unfolded⁷³⁵ 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 Purânas, in the Bible, in the Sepher

 

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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.⁷³⁶ 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 Manifestation⁷³⁷ 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),

 

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38 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 unit one, 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.⁷³⁸ But this last ratio is but a modified form of light or 20612 to 6561, as a ‘π’ 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

 

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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 ‘π.’ 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 Alhim 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

40 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Rabbi⁷³⁹: “I wish now that thou wouldst 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: ספר ספר סיפור. 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 Oneness” (which as everyone knows is the mathematical function of “π” 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 ספר ספר ספור (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 Prajâpati mentioned in the Mahabhârata, 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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41 THE EMANATIONS OF AIN-SOPH.

“generation” god. (See Book 1, 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; coordinate 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

42 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 “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 Müller’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 Aramæan, “One” (Ad-ad, “the only one”); in Assyrian, “father” whence Ak-Ad or “father-creator.”⁷⁴⁰ 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,

 

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43 ADAM-ADAMI.

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 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 Aramæan 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, Ister, Mylitta, Eve, etc., etc., are identical with the Aditi and Vâch 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.⁷⁴¹ They are all Protogonoi (the first-born) and

 

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44 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,⁷⁴² 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 it is 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,” Brahmâ-Prajâpati creates Virâj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly called “the Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ”; 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.

———

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 Brahmâ 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

 

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45 THE FIRST WAR IN HEAVEN.

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 Purânic 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) then our modern physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the “first War in Heaven,” the Târaka-mâya, 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 Târâ (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.⁷⁴³

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

 

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46 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,⁷⁴⁴ 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 æons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which itself took place 18,000,000 years ago.⁷⁴⁵

Preliminary evolution is described in one of the Books of Dzyan and the Commentaries thereon 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:

———

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 (avikâra) immutable nature (Essence, sadaikarûpa) 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

 

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NARADA AND ASURAMAYA. 47‌

atoms, or aniyâmsam aniyâsam) became one and the many (ekanekárûpa); and producing the Universe produced also the Fourth Loka (our Earth) in the garland of the seven lotuses. The Achyuta then became the Chyuta.⁷⁴⁶

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 off, or is supposed to cast off, her old skins as the Serpent does: therefore she is called in the Aitareya-Brâhmana 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 Mahabhârata and the Purânas, Narada, the son of Brahmâ in Matsya Purâna, the progeny of Kasyapa and the daughter of Daksha

 

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48 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in the Vishnu Purâna, is the most mysterious. He is referred to by the honourable title of Deva Rishi (divine Rishi, more than a demi-god) by Parasâra, and yet he is cursed by Daksha and even by Brahmâ. 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 Purânas 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.⁷⁴⁷ 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-Kâraka,” strife-maker, “Kapi-vaktra,” monkey-faced, and even “Pisuna,” the spy, though elsewhere he is called Deva-Brahmâ. 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.”

 

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49 THE MIRROR OF FUTURITY.

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 Purânas, who visits the so-called nether or infernal regions, Pâtâla. Whether or not it was from his intercourse with the thousand-headed Sesha, the serpent who bears the seven Pâtâlas and the entire world like a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great teacher of astronomy,⁷⁴⁸ 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 Asuramâya, who is said to have based all his astronomical works upon those records, to have determined the duration of all the past geological and cosmical periods, and the length of 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

 

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50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Sun-god imparted the knowledge of the stars,” in propriâ personâ, 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 ‘Asuramâya’ 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.”⁷⁴⁹ The Maya is evident, since no Sanskritist among Europeans can tell where that locality of “Romakapura” 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 Purânas as the birth-place of Asuramâya, “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 think that the Hindus never knew of a Zodiac at all till “they had borrowed one from the Greeks.”⁷⁵⁰ 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 Asuramâya 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-

 

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51 WHAT THE EARTH-WHIRL PRODUCED.

tioned was compiled by two very learned Brahmins⁷⁵¹ 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.)

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52 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

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.

——————

5. The Wheel whirled for thirty crores (of years, or 300,000,000⁷⁵²). 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.

 

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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 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 Purânas, 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 Purânas, Brahmâ, the creator, is seen recommencing de novo several creations after as many failures; and two great creations are mentioned,⁷⁵³ the Padma and the Vârâha, the present, when the Earth was lifted out of the water by Brahmâ, in the shape of a boar, or “Vârâha Avatar.” Creation is shown as a sport, an amusement (Lîlâ) 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 Miḏrāš‎, Rabbī ʾAbbāhū explaining distinctly (in Bərēšīṯ Rabbāh, Pārāšāh [Chapter] 3:7) that “the Holy One” had successively created and de-

 

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54 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 A. H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 1887, Hibbert Lectures Series, p. 390); and as shown by the author [Isaac Myer] of Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], in the Zōhar: Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā, Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā 3:128a, etc., etc. the Qabbālāh 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 and darkness, wherein resided most hideous beings—men with wings, four and two-faced men, human beings with two heads, with the legs and horns of a goat (our “goat-men,”)⁷⁵⁴ 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 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” (Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, 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.

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55 UNAIDED PHYSICAL NATURE FAILS.

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,⁷⁵⁵ 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, which could fly as well as they could walk,⁷⁵⁶ 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 versâ, 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.⁷⁵⁷ 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

 

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56 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 any “Frankenstein” animal.⁷⁵⁸

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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.⁷⁵⁹ 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 letters⁷⁶⁰ (the Monad, called also ‘the Double Dragon’) descend from the spheres of expectation.⁷⁶¹ 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 forty-nine fires⁷⁶² to be perfect. It is those who have deserted the Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will,⁷⁶³ 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,⁷⁶⁴ 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—

 

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58 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânas. In the allegories of the latter, Brahmâ, 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 Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1:5:65-66; also Mānava Dharmaśāstra [Manusmṛti] 1:80). It is now proposed to examine the exoteric account in the Vishnu Purâna, 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 Purâna—which is certainly the earliest of all the scriptures of that name—we find, as in all the others, Brahmâ assuming as the male God, for purposes of creation, “four bodies invested by three qualities.”⁷⁶⁵ It is said: “In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsnâ (dawn), Râtri (night), Ahan (day), and Sandhyâ (evening twilight) are the four bodies of Brahmâ” . . (p. 81, Vol. I., Wilson’s translation). As Parasâra explains it, when Brahmâ 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), Demons⁷⁶⁶ (i.e., more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and men, “he collects Yoga-like (Yûyujè) 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 Pradhâna (primordial matter) as Vishnu Purâna says, but the first Cosmic aspect of Parabrahm or the esoteric sat, the Universal Soul,⁷⁶⁷ as Occultism

 

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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 Purânas.

“Having concentrated his mind into itself and the quality of darkness pervading Brahmâ’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 Brahmâ’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, Brahmâ assumes another form, that of the Day, and creates from his breath the gods, who are endowed with the quality of goodness (passivity)⁷⁶⁸. 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, “Brahmâ thought of himself (during the process) as the father of the world.”⁷⁶⁹ This is Kriya-sakti—the mysterious Yoga power

 

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60 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

explained elsewhere. This body of Brahmâ when cast off became the Sandhya (evening twilight), the interval between day and night.

Finally Brahmâ 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 Brahmâ stands esoterically for the Pitris. He is collectively the Pitar, “father.”

The true esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained. Brahmâ here symbolizes personally the collective creators of the World and Men—the universe with all its numberless productions of things movable and (seemingly) immovable.⁷⁷⁰ He is collectively the Prajâpatis, 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 Brahmâ.

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 Agathodæmon, the eldest benevolent Logos, became with theology the “Adversary” or Satan. But is this warranted by the correct interpretat ion of any old Scripture? The answer is, most certainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the

 

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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, 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

62 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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 fl 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

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 Târakâmaya) against the devas in Purânic 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 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

64 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁷⁷¹

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.”

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65 DIVINE WILL BECOMES EROS.

10. When they (the Rupas) were destroyed, Mother-earth remained bare,⁷⁷² she asked to be dried (a).⁷⁷³

(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),⁷⁷⁴ 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 , 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 Gæa), 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 Gæa, 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-Gæa 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,

 

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66 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

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.”⁷⁷⁵ 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

 

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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.” (Encyclopædia 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 Purânas—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 Tirukkaṇita Pañcāṅkam, compiled, as we are told, from, and in full accordance with, secret fragments of Asuramâya’s data. As Asuramâya 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. Asuramâya is said to have lived (see the tradition of Jhána-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 Asuramâya 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

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 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. “Romakúpas” means “hair-pores” in Sanskrit. In Mahâbhârata 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:

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.

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 Purânas 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 Asuramâya. The latter has the reputation of a giant and a sorcerer. But the 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 Médicis 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 “Encyclopædia Britannica” one finds, as the last word of science, that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over “tens of thou-

71 SCIENTIFIC SELF-COMPLACENCE.

sands of years.”⁷⁸¹ 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.”⁷⁸²

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 that⁷⁸³ “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—

“In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian period,⁷⁸⁴ 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

 

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72 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 a state of constant though slow progression for the last 50,000 years of a 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

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,⁷⁸⁵ but simply a “childish boasting,” it is nevertheless 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 Müller 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

 

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74 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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THE SECRET OF THE FALL OF THE ANGELS. 75‌

STANZA III. ATTEMPTS TO CREATE MAN.

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§§ (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 Purânas, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the first it is said: “He the Lord” (the god who has the form of Brahmâ) “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.

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12. 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—

76 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“But the vitalizing power of heaven lay chiefly with the moon. . . . It was the Hebrew יהוה (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 born⁷⁸⁶ or produced from the sea, Sri (Sarai, S-r-i, the wife of the Hebrew A-bram⁷⁸⁷). 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 increase⁷⁸⁸ . . .” 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 הגר, 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

 

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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, שרה, giving to her the property of this lunar influence.”⁷⁸⁹

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 Brahmâ 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 Brahmâ, 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.

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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,

 

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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.

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 Brahmâ, his first progeny, “were without desire or passion, inspired with the holy wisdom, estranged from the Universe and undesirous of progeny” (Vishnu Purâna, 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 Brahmâ is said to have felt wrathful when he saw that those “embodied spirits, produced from his limbs (gâtra), would not multiply themselves.” After which, in the allegory, he creates other seven mind-born Sons (see “Moksha-Darma” and “Mahabhârata”), 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 Prajâpati, 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,⁷⁹⁰ etc., etc. Yet it is they

 

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79 THE LIVING SPIRITUAL FIRE.

alone who could complete man, i.e., make of him a self-conscious, almost a divine being—a 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 Brahmâ (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 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:⁷⁹¹ 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-

 

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80 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 aëriform, 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 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 Brahmâ. 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 æons before, through the “Seven Circles,” and thus robbed them of the Sacred fire;

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 æons 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 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 Purânas, 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

82 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

are implied in the plural number of the Elohim.⁷⁹² “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 Brahmâ 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 Prajâpati (creators), brings forth 10,000 sons for the purpose of peopling the world, Narada—a son of Brahmâ, 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 Brahmâ 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 Purâna; Harivamsa, 170). Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same story, it is easy to see that Narada belongs to that class of Brahmâ’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 Brahmâ “a false teacher” for advising him to get married (“Narada-Pancha-Râtra”); nevertheless, he is referred to as one of the Prajâpati, “progenitors”! In Naradiya Purâna, 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

 

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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 [Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā], they are clearly enunciated, as also in the Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā 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 [Zōhar 3:292b.2]); 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 Lesser Holy Assembly [Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā, Zōhar 3:292b.3-4]:

(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.⁷⁹³

Now the following extract from the Zohar⁷⁹⁴ also deals with the same mystery:

“The Pre-Adamite Kings. ‘We have learned in the Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā: That the ʿAttīqā Ḏəʿattīqīn, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared his Form, built Kings, and engraved

 

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84 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Rēšā Ḥiwwārā, the White Head, the ʿAttīqā Ḏəʿattīqīn, 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.” (Zōhar: Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā 3:135a.7-10; see also Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā 3:292a.)

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” (Zōhar 3:292a.7; see also Genesis 36:31 et seq.). 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.⁷⁹⁵ So much so, that in the paragraph on “the Emanation of the Male and Female Principles” in the Zohar

 

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85 THE SON OF YAH.

(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 י (Yod) in the ה (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.⁷⁹⁶

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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86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.‌

STANZA IV. CREATION OF THE FIRST RACES.

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§§ (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.

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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 Brahmâ 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

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 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.”⁷⁹⁷ Between these two fallacies,⁷⁹⁸ 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

 

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88 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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” (pranidhâna). Therefore they of the fifth principle (Manas) seem to be connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogis who make of pranidhâna 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 Kumâras, 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;

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 Kumâras, 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 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 Brahmâ), and are the Pitris of the Gods (Manu again, Matsya and Padma Purânas and Kulluka in the Laws of the Manavas, III., 195).⁷⁹⁹ Moreover, the Vayu Purâna declares all the seven orders to have originally been the first gods, the Vairâjas, whom Brahmâ “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 Virâjas as one class of the Pitris only—a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, however, identify the Virâjas with the elder Agnishwattas⁸⁰⁰ 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 Purâna Bk. III., ch. I., p. 17 footnote). All the sons of Virâja are Manasa, says Nilakantha. And

 

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90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Virâja is Brahmâ, and, therefore, the incorporeal Pitris are called Vairâjas from being the sons of Virâja, says Vayu Purâna.

We could multiply our proofs ad infi, 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 Gîtâ, “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 affi with one of the three component Upadhis (basic principles) into which we have divided man.”—(Vide Theosophist, Feb., 1887, et seq.)

The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every Manvantara. Thus the twelve great gods, Jayas, created by Brahmâ 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 Purâna), 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 Vairâjas, 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

91 SEVEN CLASSES OF PITRIS.

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,⁸⁰¹ 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 Purânas 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 Purâna. 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 Brahmâ; 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

 

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92 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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; 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-kowing” or “omniscient Lord”; and Asura-Mazdhâ, become later Ahura-Mazdhâ, is, as Benfey shows, “the Lord who bestows Intelligence” —Asura-Medhâ and Ahura-Mazdâo. 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 Mazdhâ, 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

93 A GRAND APOCALYPTIC METAPHOR.

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 Kumâras 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 Brahmâ 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 efforts; and it is these worshippers of Form who have made demons of the Angels of Light.

Esoteric philosophy, however, teaches that one third⁸⁰² 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.⁸⁰³ Some

 

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94 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of these were Nirmanakayas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the Purânas, 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 Timæus). Their creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means, esoterically, that it is

95 WHAT PROMETHEUS SYMBOLIZED.

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,⁸⁰⁴ 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 versâ. In fact, there is neither light nor

 

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96 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,⁸⁰⁵ 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 Phædrus, 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.”⁸⁰⁶ Again, in the ancient Quiché Manuscript, the Popol Vuh—published by the late Abbé 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.

 

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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 Purânas, 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 Hönir 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.⁸⁰⁷ 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?⁸⁰⁸ 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;⁸⁰⁹ 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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98 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Pâtâla, the Hindu Naraka or Hell?” It does: but what is Ananta? As Sesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric cycle of time, and becomes infi 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-

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 Lesser Holy Assembly (Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā, Zōhar 3:292b), “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 Miölnir, 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 Miölnir 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 Miölnir with them, no longer as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heaven and the new Earth. . . . .”⁸¹⁰

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 卐 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

 

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100 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

its spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediæval 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 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 Miölnir 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 o 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,” nntil 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

101 THE DIVINE BABE, AGNI.

further on in the light of the Hindu Pramanthâ. 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 Pramanthâ 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 Pramanthâ and Arani (Svastica) during the sacrificial ceremony. But what of that? Twashtri (Viswakarman) is the “divine artist and carpenter”⁸¹¹ 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, 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 Sûrya, the Sun, is shown retiring into the jungle to lead an ascetic life, and leaving behind to her husband her Chhaya, shadow or image.

———

 

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102 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kavyavâhana, 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 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 Bhûta⁸¹² 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 Pāvaka and Śuci 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

 

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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 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.”⁸¹³ 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,

 

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104 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. 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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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 Bhûta . . . . Thus have the boneless given life to those who became (later) men with bones in the third (race) (a).

(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,”⁸¹⁴ and is very nearly allied to protyle, which is our 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

 

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106 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kumâras and Rudras headed by Kartikeya—a Kumâra 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 Kumâras, 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 Kumâras—Sanat-Kumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanâtana. The former deities, whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscuri, Corybantes, Anaces, etc.; just as the Kumâra, whose reputed father is Brahmâ, (or rather, the “Flame of his Wrath,” which prompted him to perform the ninth or Kumâra creation, resulting in Rudra or Nilalohita (Siva) and the Kumâras), 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. Æsculapius was the Son of Apollo—the Sun or fire of Life; at once Helius, Pythius, 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 Purânas Pratisarga, or secondary Creation. “Liquid fire proceeds from indiscrete fire,” says an Occult axiom.

“The Circle is the thought; the diameter (or the line) is the word;

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 Purânas and Hindu exotericism, Vâch (the Voice) is the female Logos of Brahmâ—a permutation of Aditi, primordial light. And if Bath-Kol, in Jewish mysticism, is an articulate præter-natural voice from heaven, revealing to the “chosen people” the sacred traditions and laws, it is only because Vâch 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.)⁸¹⁵

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 Prabhavâpyaya, 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 Pûrvaja, “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:

As seen, each Element adds to its own characteristics, those of its

 

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108 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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: Bhûtas, which proceeded from Bhûtadi, “origin,” or the “original place whence sprung the Elements.” Hence they proceeded with all the rest from Prabhavâpyaya, “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 Brahmâ, 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:

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.

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.

That which propels towards, and forces evolution, i.e., compels the growth and development of Man towards perfection, is (a) the monad,

110 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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 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 Qəlīpōṯ, containing the (six other) Spheres, גלגלים [galgālīm], 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 ἄγγελος, Angel, called the great Teacher; and under him are the Angels of the third World, Jetzira, whose ten and seven classes are the Sephiroth,⁸¹⁶ 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,” קליפות [qəlīpōṯ], or demons,⁸¹⁷ 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,” (Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, ed. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, 1877, p. 412; see Book of Wisdom [Sophía Solomṓntos] 8:20); 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 Judæo, 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);⁸¹⁸ 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

 

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112 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

1 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 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,” (Zōhar 2:229b.4). “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”?⁸¹⁹ 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

 

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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, 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:

114 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, 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 [Īśvara], from Īśa, but this is primarily the name of Siva, the Destroyer; and the three Vedic chief gods are Agni (ignis), Vayu, and Sûrya—Fire, Air, and the Sun, three occult degrees of fire. In the Hebrew אזא (aza), means to illuminate, and אשא (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 “fire-enchanter.” 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 Gîtâ 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, François 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—

 

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115 SONS OF YOGA.

H, the Quintessence, Ἡ ΦΛΟΞ, Flamma-Virgo (virgin oil), Flamma Durissima, Virgo, Lucis Æterna 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 (Svâbhâvat, 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 exoterically is the Moon. It was the Moon (Omoroka) who presided over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings which were slain by the Dhyānis. (vide A. H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 1887, Hibbert Lectures Series, pp. 370 et seq.; also in Part II., “Adam-Adami” [p. 452])

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 Brahmâ exoterically) is the supreme condition of the passive infinite deity, since it contains all the divine energies and is the essence of Brahmâ, who is said (as Brahmâ) to create everything through Yoga power. Brahmâ, Vishnu and Siva are the most powerful energies of God, Brahma, the Neuter, says a

116 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Purânic text. Yoga here is the same as Dhyâna, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan text, where the “Sons of Yoga” are called “Sons of Dhyâna,” 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. (Sēfer Məḇō Šəʿārīm, 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 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.”⁸²¹ “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 Amœba, 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,

 

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117 THE OUTGROWTH OF RACES.

and if the microscopic cells are looked upon by physical science as independent living beings—just as Occultism regards the “fiery lives”⁸²²—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 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

 

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118 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in each Race, each covering æons 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”⁸²³ 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 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 androgynous⁸²⁴ . . . But here we encounter a singular difficulty In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the Vesiculæ prostaticæ; they bear also rudiments of mammæ, 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,⁸²⁵ 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

 

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119 THE BLASTEMA OF SCIENCE.

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 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 Medusæ 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 The Human Species, 1879, pp. 124-25. It is unscientific, he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin’s ideas “do not form a scientific theory,” inasmuch as primordial Blastema is connected

120 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”

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.” (Zōhar 1:156b.1-2.) Vide infra, Part II., “Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture” [p. 449].

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20. Their Fathers were the self-born. The self-born, the Chhaya from the 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

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 Brahmâ’s “body of twilight.” (See the Purânas.)

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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 Tyndareus, who gave birth by her husband “to two sons of valiant heart”—Castor

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; (ἑτερήμεροι⁸²⁶). As the Tyndaridæ, the twin brothers are an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives, Phœbe and Hilasira, the daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight.⁸²⁷ 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.⁸²⁸ 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.⁸²⁹ 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 Pindar⁸³⁰ only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric hymns.⁸³¹ Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri of Apollodorus (Bibliotheca, 3:10:7); 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 Apharētides⁸³² 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.⁸³³ In

 

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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.⁸³⁴ And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night.⁸³⁵

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;⁸³⁶ 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,⁸³⁷ 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.⁸³⁸

 

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124 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁸³⁹

In the Book of Enoch [Ḥănōḵ] we have Adam,⁸⁴⁰ the first divine androgyne,

 

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125 JAH-HOVAH ANDROGYNOUS.

separating into man and woman, and becoming Jah-Heva in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel⁸⁴¹ (male and female) in its other form or Race— the double-sexed Jehovah⁸⁴²—an echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahmâ-Vâch. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind⁸⁴³—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 Brahmâ-Virâj-Vâch, as in Adam-Jehovah-Eve, also in “Cain-Jehovah-Abel.” For “The Book of the Generations of Adam” [Genesis 5] does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only: “Male and female created he them. . . and called their name Adam” (Gen. 5:2). Then it proceeds to say: “And Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth” (Gen. 5:3); 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.

 

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126 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Yah and Jah, the letters i or j or y being interchangeable, or Jah-Hovah, i.e., male and female;⁸⁴⁴ 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 Brahmâ-Prajâpati and Jehovah-Sephiroth, between Brahmâ-Virâj and Jehovah-Adam, the Bible and the Purânas 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) Brahmâ, 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 Purânic expressions; e.g., the “creation” of the world is generally considered in the Brahmanical books to be the Lilâ, 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 Purâna, Book I., ch. ii.) Now compare this with what is said in the Book, Nōveleṯ Ḥoḵmāh: “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 Purânic, Aryan idea. Only, why make of Ain-Soph a Creator?

The “Divine Hermaphrodite” is then Brahmâ-Vâch-Virâj; 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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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 wit 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.”⁸⁴⁵ Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman Catholics quite differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it: “Cain—I have gotten Kain, from Kânithi, I have gotten.” Luther: “I have gotten a man—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 Brahmâ. In “Isis Unveiled,”⁸⁴⁶ it was explained by the writer that “Cain . . . is the son of the ‘Lord’ not of Adam (Genesis iv. 1.)” 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 (Zāḵār wə Nəqēḇāh) 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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128 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Genesis ch. i. 26 and Enos, Son of Man of ch. iv. v. 26, after Adam, the first androgyne, after Adam 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 אין (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-Swâyambhuva, who sprang from Swâyambhu-Narayana, the “Self-existent,” and Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and the androgyne man of Genesis ch. 1 are also identical.

III. Manu-swâyambhuva is Brahmâ, 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 Swâyambhûva or Brahmâ separates himself to become “Brahmâ-Virâj and Vâch-Virâj,” male and female; all the rest of the texts and versions being blinds.

IV. Vâch is the daughter of Brahmâ and is named Sata-Rupa, “the hundred-formed,” and Savitri, “generatix,” 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,⁸⁴⁷ 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 [hawwāh] is composed of three letters [הוה], that of the primitive or heavenly

 

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129 THE JEWISH GOD-NAME.

ʾĀḏām, is written with one letter, Jod or Yōḏ [י]; therefore it must not be read Jehovah [yəhōwāh] but Ieva [הוה–י], or Eve [ḥawwāh]. The ʾĀḏām of the first chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure, androgyne ʾĀḏām Qaḏmōn. When woman issues from the rib of the second ʾĀḏām (of dust), the pure Virgo is separated, and falling “into 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 Prajāpatis and Səfīrōṯ are led on by the creative Deity itself, who is ʾĀḏām Qaḏmōn or Yōḏ-ḥawwāh. Spiritually, the lower one (Jehovah [yəhōwāh]) is that of the terrestrial races, led on by Enoch [Ḥănōḵ] or Libra, the seventh; who, because he is half-divine, half-terrestrial, is said to have been taken by God alive. Enoch [Ḥănōḵ], 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 Ṛṣis, 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 Ṛṣis.

Moreover, Jehovah [yəhōwāh], as may be shown, has a variety of etymologies, but only those are true which are found in the Kabala. יהוה (Ieve [yhwh]) is the Old Testament term, and was pronounced Ya-va [yāh-wāh]. Inman suggests that it is contracted from the two words יהו-יה Yaho-Iah, Jaho-Jah, or Jaho is Jah. Punctuated it is יְהוָֹה [yəhōwāh] which is however, a Rabbinical caprice to associate it with the name ʾĂḏōnāy or אֲדֹנָי, which has the same points. It is curious, and indeed hardly conceivable, that the Jews anciently read the name יהוה (ʾĂḏōnāy), when they had so many names of which Jeho and Jah and Iah constituted a part. But so it was; and Philo Byblos, who gives us the so-called fragment of Sanchoniathon, spelt it in Greek letters ΊΕΥΩ [Ieuō], Javo or Jevo. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Ίαβέ [Íabé] (Yahva), and the Jews Ίά [Íá] [or Ἰαὼ, Iaṑ] (Yaho). Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests its punctuation thus: יַהֲוֶה (ya-hă-weh); 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.”⁸⁴⁸ It was also derived from the Chaldaic verb הֲוָא or הֲוָה, e·u·a [hăwā] (eva) or e·u·e [hăwāh] (Eva), “to be.” And so it was, since from ʾĔnōš, 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 הוה to mean: (1) “To

 

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130 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

fall down” (i.e., into generation or matter); and (2) “To be, to continue”—as a race. The aspirate of the word e·u·e [hăwāh] (Eva) “to be” being חוה Heve [ḥawwāh] (Eve), which is the feminine of יהוה and the same as Hēbē, the Grecian goddess of youth and the Olympian bride of Heracles [Hēraklēs], makes the name Jehovah [yəhōwāh] 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-nâtha, “Lord of 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 Levites, 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-sexual, 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-Zēn (Æther), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona—the former god also representing Æther, 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.

131 THE SWAN AND THE EGG.‌

STANZA VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THE “SWEAT-BORN.”

———

§§ (22) The evolution of the three races continued. (23) The second race create the Third and perishes.

———————

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 Précis Elémentaire 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 fœtus”; and respecting its nutrition, propounds this query: “What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the fœtus? 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 A Text Book of Physiology, 3rd ed., 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

132 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 confrère.

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 fœtus 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;⁸⁴⁹ 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, Brahmâ’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 Pâtâla, which is undeniably America, as will be shown; and there was a Naga-Dwipa, one of the seven divisions of Bhârata-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,

 

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133 BI-SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.

“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.⁸⁵⁰ 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

 

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134 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

circular.⁸⁵¹ 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.”⁸⁵²

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.”⁸⁵³ 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, intelligence⁸⁵⁴—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:

 

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135 THE VIRGIN THIRD RACE.

“Zeus is a male, Zeus is an immortal maid.” The Egyptian Ammon was the goddess Neïth, 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 coördinately, 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 C. 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” (La Pluralité des Mondes Habités, 1869, p. 71). 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

136 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Astronomer.⁸⁵⁵ 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,

 

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137 EGYPTIAN BELIEF.

has all the weight of scientific testimony.”⁸⁵⁶ And there is more than one such tradition in the Purânic 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 Ṣelem (shadow image) of ʾĔlōhīm (the Pitris), was made ʾĀḏām (man).” (Zōhar 3:159b; see Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, 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 “Eclogæ Physicæ et Ethicæ” of Stobæus, 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

 

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138 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁸⁵⁷ And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time.

———

A Few Words about “Deluges” and “Noahs.”

The accounts in the various Purânas 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 Brâhmana 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 Purânas, again, she is Vaivasvata’s daughter, yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma) and the planet Jupiter’s (Brihaspati’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-

 

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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 “Mahabhârata” strikes the key-note, and yet it needs to be explained by the secret sense contained in the Bhagavad Gîtâ. 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 Dagon⁸⁵⁸ 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.⁸⁵⁹ 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.⁸⁶⁰ But the terrestrial Deluge and

 

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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,⁸⁶¹ 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 Purânic and other versions; while in the Sathapatha Brâhmana, 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 Purânic 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 Gîtâ, 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 Races⁸⁶² which have already lived, since Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata

 

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141 VARIOUS DELUGES.

Manu, the son of Sûrya (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.⁸⁶³ 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 (José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Book 6, Ch. 19; Vol. 2, p. 428, 1880 Ed.); 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 Aletæ or Titans (the Kabirim) contemporary

 

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142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

with Agruerus, the great Phœnician god (whom Faber sought to identify with Noah⁸⁶⁴); further, it is suspected that the name of “Titan” is derived from Tit-Ain—“the fountains of the chaotic abyss”⁸⁶⁵ (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.⁸⁶⁶

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.”⁸⁶⁷ 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.⁸⁶⁸ The seven Brahmadicas were Prajâpatis, 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. 5 (1799), 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.”⁸⁶⁹

Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural

 

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143 THE ARKITE SYMBOLS.

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 Kœus, Krœus, Phorcys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperion, and Iapetus:—

Κοῖόν τε, Κροῖόν τε μέλαν, Φόρκυν τε κραταιὸν [καρτερὸν],
καὶ Κρόνον, ᾽Ωκεανόν δ᾽, ῾Υπερίονά τ᾽, ᾽Ιαπετόν τε
—Orpheus apud Procli commentarius in Platonis Timaeum, Lib. 5, 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 (Disputationum Adversus Gentes [Arguments Against the Heathens], 1582 Ed., Lib. 3, 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 Rāmāyaṇa 3:13:12). 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 Vâch. Both Ida and Vâch are turned into males and females; Ida becoming Sudyumna, and Vâch, “the female Virâj,” 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 (Antiquitatum [Antiquities], 1545, Lib. 1, fol. 8), shows that Titea [Titaías]—of whom Diodorus makes the mother of the Titans or Diluvians (See Bibliotheca Ηistorica [Historical Library], 3:57:1 & 5:66:3)—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,⁸⁷⁰ and worshipped with the Earth; and this

 

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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. “Sicānus deificāvit Aretiam, et nōmināvit eam linguā Iānigena Horchiam.” [Sicanus deified Aretiam, and named her—from the language of the descendants Janus—Horchiam] (Antiquitatum [Antiquities], 1545, Lib. 5, 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 Nonnus, who both tell how:

“From its deep-rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stern Neptune shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Its impious inhabitants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”
—Dionysiaká, 18:36-37).

Faber felt convinced that the “insulæ Phlegyæ” 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 Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Siva preceded Vaivasvata and the rest.” (See Isis Unveiled, Vol. 2, 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

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 [Ḥănōḵ],⁸⁷¹ if the veiled language of the Purânas 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 Istar (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. 2, pp. 423-424).

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 Primeval Manus of Humanity” [p. 307]), there seems to be no

 

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146 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”⁸⁷²

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 Brâhmana, 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 Brahmâ”; and the Mahabhârata 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:⁸⁷³ (a) as the “Root-Manu”

 

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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,⁸⁷⁴ 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. (1808), 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 off 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 Brahmâ and Vâch, 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 Purânas, 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

 

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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 Swâyambhûva Manu with Vâch-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 Purânas 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

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,⁸⁷⁵ 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.⁸⁷⁶ 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.⁸⁷⁷

 

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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 Prajâpati 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

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 Hæckel’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

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

153 ARISTOTLE DENIED HELIOCENTRICISM.

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 Cœlo, 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 æons 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 sarcode⁸⁷⁸ of the moneron, then passes from its protistic state⁸⁷⁹ 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

 

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154 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

regions, and the universally common lizard⁸⁸⁰—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 Hæckelian 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° 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).⁸⁸¹

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.”

 

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155 THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN THE PURÂNAS.

(Coleman.) To this the Vishnu Purâna 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 Purâna, Book II., 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.⁸⁸² 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,⁸⁸³ how many more millions would be required to cover

 

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156 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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?⁸⁸⁴

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 Encyclopædias) 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!”⁸⁸⁵

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

 

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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,⁸⁸⁶ 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.

 

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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.⁸⁸⁷ 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

 

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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—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ ϴεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation,—αὐτουρνεῖν ἅπαντα. 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.”⁸⁸⁸

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

 

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160 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”

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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 Brahmâ 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 (intensifi) 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 mindless. 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 æons 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

162 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Schœttgen says in Horæ Hebraicæ, 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 sand-banks 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 Purâna 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,⁸⁸⁹ 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—Brahmâ’s

 

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163 CREATORS AND SUB-CREATORS.

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 Brahmâ who creates things and men on this Earth, but the chief and Lord of the Prajâpati, the Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation.⁸⁹⁰ Obeying the command of Brahmâ, 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 Parâsara (Vishnu Purâna) 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, Brahmâ, is shown “creating fierce beings, denominated Bhûtas and eaters of flesh,” or as the text has it, “fiends frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous.”⁸⁹¹ Whereas the Rakshasas are generally translated by “Evil Spirits” and “the enemies of the gods,” which identifies them with the Asuras. In the Ramâyana, when Hanuman is reconnoitering the enemy in Lanka, he finds there Rakshasas, some hideous, “while some were beautiful to look upon,” and, in Vishnu Purâna, there is a direct reference to their becoming the Saviours of “Humanity,” or of Brahmâ.

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. Brahmâ 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

 

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164 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Asuras, Rudras,⁸⁹² Râkshasas 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:

“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 Prajâpati and the Pitris).”

From these proceed—

1. The First Race, the “Self-born,” which are the (astral) shadows of their Progenitors.⁸⁹³ 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”⁸⁹⁴ and

 

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165 TO THE MONERON THE CREATOR.

the “Boneless.” This is the Second Root-Race, endowed by the preservers (Râkshasas)⁸⁹⁵ and the incarnating gods (Asuras and the Kumâras) 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.’⁸⁹⁶ They issued from the second Manushyas

 

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166 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(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 Hæckel); 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. Fission:—

(a) As seen in the division of the homogeneous speck of protoplasm, known as Moneron or Amœba, 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-Race.)⁸⁹⁷

 

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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 Brahmâ) 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 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,

168 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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”⁸⁹⁸ 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.

 

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169 MONOGENISM OR POLYGENISM.

Let us, by giving to Cæsar what is Cæsar’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.”⁸⁹⁹ 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 palæontological 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 speculalations. 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 coryphæi.

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 “cast-off dust” of those minerals, and the refuse of the human matter, whether from living or dead

 

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170 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 anima 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 palæozoic fishes.”⁹⁰⁰

Just so; but “the palæozoic 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.”⁹⁰¹ 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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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.⁹⁰² They are not quite ready. They would not enter the (First) egg-born.⁹⁰³

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.⁹⁰⁴

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 Hæckel’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

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

 

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172 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Race⁹⁰⁵), 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

 

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173 THE SONS OF KRIYASAKTI.

Kumâras of the Hindu Pantheon and Purânas, those elder sons of Brahmâ, “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?”⁹⁰⁶

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,”⁹⁰⁷ 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).

 

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174 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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 Purânas.⁹⁰⁸ It is the beautiful allegory and story of Sanjnâ, 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 Purânic 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 Purânas about the “Sweat-born.”

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,”⁹⁰⁹ 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, Kumâras, 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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175 A SAINT—HYPNOTISED.

the reverse that we find in all the Purânic allegories, and not without good esoteric reason.

The king of the gods (or Indra) sends a beautiful Apsarasas (nymph) named Pramlochâ to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her unholy purpose and “907 years six months and three days”⁹¹⁰ 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 Pramlochâ, 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 Mârishâ.”⁹¹¹

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. Pramlochâ is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan Adam; and Mârishâ, 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 Purânas, but Kamadeva, the god of love and desire, who sends Pramlochâ 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 Pramlochâ is one; and, therefore, when Kandu, in cursing her,

 

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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 Taittarîya Brâhmana 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 Brahmâ; therefore he is Atma-Bhu “Self-Existent,” and Aja, the “unborn.” His sending Pramlochâ 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 Mârishâ 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.

Mârishâ, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the Prachetasas, the production of the “Mind-born” sons of Brahmâ also,⁹¹² from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha, a son of Brahmâ

 

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177 SWEAT-BORN AND ANDROGYNES.

also, in a former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Purânas, 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 fœtus from an imperceptible germ, which fœtus 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 fœtus gestated for several years. In the Purânas, Mârishâ, 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 Aristophanes⁹¹³ 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

 

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178 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 aw of Karma, racial or individual, overrides the subordinate tendencies of “Heredity,” its servant.

The meaning of the last sentence in the above-quoted Commentary on Stanza 27, namely, that the Fourth Race were the children of Padmapāṇi, 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.)”

Padmapāṇi, or Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, is, in Tibetan, Chenrézik [spyan ras gzigs]. Now, Avalokiteśvara is the great Lógos in its higher aspect and in the divine regions. But in the manifested planes, he is, like Dakṣa, the progenitor (in a spiritual sense) of men. Padmapāṇi-Avalokiteśvara is called esoterically Bodhisattva (or Dhyāni-Chohan) Chenrézik Wangchuk [spyan ras gzigs dbang phyug], “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 [bla ma] 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, Padmapāṇi Chenrézik [spyan ras gzigs], the “lotus-bearer,” emits a brilliant ray of light, and forthwith incarnates himself in one of the two great Lamas [bla ma]—the Dalai [Talé, tA la’i] and Tashi [Trashi, bkra shis] [aka Panchen] Lamas [bla ma]; finally, it is believed that he will incarnate as “the most perfect Buddha” in Tibet, instead of in India, where his predecessors, the great Ṛṣis and Manus had appeared in the beginning of our Race, but now appear no longer. Even the exoteric appearance of Dhyānī Chenrézik [spyan ras gzigs] is suggestive of the esoteric teaching. He is evidently, like Dakṣa, 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. Padmapāṇi (Dakṣa) is seated on the column, and forms the apex. In this reference

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 (Padmapāṇi, “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-padma-karpo, “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 Lokanâtha (Sanskrit) “Lord of the World”; and Jigtengonpo (Tibetan), “Protector and Saviour against evil” of any kind.

Padmapāṇi, however, is the “lotus-bearer” symbolically only for the profane; esoterically, it means the supporter of the Kalpas, the last of which, the present Maha-Kalpa (the Vârâha), is called Padma, and represents one half of the life of Brahmâ. Though a minor Kalpa, it is called Maha, “great,” because it comprises the age in which Brahmâ 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. Padmapāṇi (Avalôkitêswara) 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.

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

181 MEN, THE PROGENITORS OF ANIMALS.

free from matter and all its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the 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.⁹¹⁴ 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 Purânas, 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 eggs⁹¹⁵ produced by the power (Kriyasakti) of the holy sages” of the early Third Race.⁹¹⁶

 

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182 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“. . . . . 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 Parâsara, “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 Pâtâla 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 Purânas, the story of the “Sacrifice of Daksha” is given, the oldest account of which is to be found in Vayu Purâna. Allegorical as it is, there is more meaning and biological revelation in it to a Naturalist, than in all the pseudo-scientifi 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 personifi, 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) . . . .

183 ARCHAIC ASTROLOGY.

created from the pores of the skin (Romakupas), powerful Raumas,⁹¹⁷ (or Raumyas).” Now, however mythical the allegory, the Mahabhârata, which is history as much as is the Iliad, shows⁹¹⁸ 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 who know of the “Sweat-born.”

In the Vayu Purâna’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. Brahmâ, 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.”⁹¹⁹ 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 ornithoscelidæ, hesperornis, and the archæopteryx 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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184 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

31. The animals separated the first (into male 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.”⁹²⁰

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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”⁹²¹) 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.⁹²² A dumb race, to keep the shame untold.⁹²³

(a) The animals “separated the first,” says Stanza 31. Bear in mind that at that period men were different, even physiologically, from what

 

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185 THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS MEN.‌

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 Hæckel 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)

186 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

other than divine, and consequently having been, or having to become, human. And the latter term has 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.⁹²⁴ “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”

 

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187 THE DARWINISTS MISTAKEN.

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 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.⁹²⁵ 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.”⁹²⁶

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 a facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the spawn—a tadpole. But no physiologist or anatomist seems to have had the idea of applying to the development of the human being—from the first

 

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188 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 laminæ or coats, enclosing a liquid. The laminæ 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 fœtus—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 fœtus 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 fœtus 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

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 Hæckel:

“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 gratiâ, 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 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 Hæckel from inventing them ad libitum.

190 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Hæckel’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 Babylonia⁹²⁷ (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.’⁹²⁸ 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 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” Hæckel’s theory? Why Bathybius Hæckelii, and no more!

A further answer is given in Part III. Addenda.

 

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191 THE CAUSE OF DEGENERATION.‌

STANZA IX. THE FINAL EVOLUTION OF MAN.

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§§ (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 wise⁹²⁹ guard the home of nature’s order, they assume excellent forms in secret.”⁹³⁰ But we must see whether the “animals” tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to zoology.

 

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192 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(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 off, 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).⁹³¹ They (the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races.⁹³²

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.”

Perchance in these specimens, Hæckelians might recognize, not the

 

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193 THE BONELESS RACE.

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, Hæckel’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 pithecoid⁹³³ 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 Aræa, “red

 

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194 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁹³⁴

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.”⁹³⁵

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

 

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195 THE HAIRY MEN OF CHINA.

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.⁹³⁶ Darwin notes such

 

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196 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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”⁹³⁷ 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,⁹³⁸ “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 Oölitic 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 Oölitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain some-

 

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197 THE SEPARATION OF SEXES.

thing of the Oölitic 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’être 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,⁹³⁹ 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

 

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198 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Race⁹⁴⁰ from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors,⁹⁴¹ 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.⁹⁴² 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

 

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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.⁹⁴³

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,⁹⁴⁴ so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races—that language, which is referred to as “Râkshasi 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.

 

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200 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,⁹⁴⁵ 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.

 

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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.⁹⁴⁶

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 Nirmânakaya of the Nâgas, 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.

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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.⁹⁴⁷

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 גן-עדן 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 Erythræan 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 Gan-duniyas. “Behold,” says the אלהים (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, כתנות עור ‘Chitonuth our [Kāṯənōṯ ʿōr].’” The first Hebrew word, “chiton [kəṯōn],” is the Greek χιτὼν, 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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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. Halévy 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 ἡδονὴ, 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,

204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopædia 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, 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 Barthélemy 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 Journal⁹⁴⁸ 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-vaêgô 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.

 

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205 FLYING CAMELS.

Now we find in the Zōhar [2:236a.7-8] 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 Samael [sammāʾēl] (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve [ḥawwāh], was a kind of flying camel (κάμηλόμορφών [kámēlómorphṓn; Hebrew: kəmīn gāmāl]).

A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zōhar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description:⁹⁴⁹ for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Ashmogh [aṣ̌əmaoγō], 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,⁹⁵⁰ “. . . 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 mediæval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus.”⁹⁵¹

We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further meā culpā [apology]. 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 Zōhar 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 vertebræ, 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 palæontography and palæontology 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

 

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206 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁹⁵² Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents,⁹⁵³ and Job mentions the Leviathan.⁹⁵⁴ Now the following questions are put very directly:

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 palæolithic 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

 

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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 assertions as either dreams or fibs.⁹⁵⁵ 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.⁹⁵⁶ 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.

 

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208 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,” “Nâga,” and “Serpent,” and the metaphorical one, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the quiproquos 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 Æsculapius, 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

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 eos 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 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, Æsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Every one 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.’”⁹⁵⁷

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, etc. But why wonder that the serpent is “adored” and at the same time cursed, since we

 

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210 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

know that from the beginning it was a symbol?⁹⁵⁸ 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 δράκων, 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 Agatho-dæmon. 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 ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ.”⁹⁵⁹ Agathodæmon was endowed “with the knowledge of good and evil,” i.e., with divine Wisdom, as without the former the latter is impossible.⁹⁶⁰ Repeating Iamblichus, Champollion shows him to be “the deity called ‘Ειχτῶν (or the fire of the celestial gods—the great Thot-⁹⁶¹

 

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211 TWO SCHOOLS OF MAGIC.

Hermes), to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic.”⁹⁶²

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 (Enöichion, 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 Sûrya, etc., etc. And while, astronomically, the Nâgas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarasas, Grâmanîs (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 Nâgas—which are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nâgas ethnologically, but “wise men.”

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-

 

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212 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly.”⁹⁶³ Now in the original, the words “their secret” really are “their Sod.”⁹⁶⁴ 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.⁹⁶⁵ 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.⁹⁶⁶ 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.”

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

 

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213 THE SEVENTH SON OF THE SEVENTH SON.

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;⁹⁶⁷ 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 horns⁹⁶⁸ 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,⁹⁶⁹ the hidden “mystery god.” This passage corroborates our assertion, and shows what the word “serpent” meant in antiquity.

But as to the Nâgals and Nargals, whence came the similarity of names between the Indian Nâgas and the American Nâgals?

“The Nargal was the Chaldean and Assyrian chief of the Magi (Rab-Mag), and the Nâgal was the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from Nergal-Serezer, the Assyrian god, and the Hindu Nâgas. Both have the same faculties and the power to have an attendant dæmon, with whom they identify themselves completely. The Chaldean and Assyrian Nargal kept his dæmon, in the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nâgal keeps his wherever he can—in the neighbouring lake, or wood, or in the house in the shape of some household animal.”⁹⁷⁰

Such similarity cannot be attributed to coincidence. A new world is discovered, and we find that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race,

 

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214 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

it was already an old one. That Arjuna, Krishna’s companion and chela, is said to have descended into Pâtâla, the “antipodes,” and therein married Ulûpi,⁹⁷¹ a Nâga (or Nâgini rather), the daughter of the king of the Nâgas, Kauravya.⁹⁷²

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 ΚΕΜΕΚ ΕΙΛΑΜ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ (“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 Agathodæmon, 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.”

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

 

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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,⁹⁷³ who lives in his Foh-Maeyu, or temple of Buddha, on the top of the “Kouin-long-sang,”⁹⁷⁴ the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung-Ming-Shú, 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.

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.⁹⁷⁵ They

 

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216 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.⁹⁷⁶ 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.”⁹⁷⁷ (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 man). From these three mountains, the Tree ascends above (the adept’s knowledge aspires heavenward) and then re-descends 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 Zōhar 1:172a.8-9.) “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

 

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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 (עצ), 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.”⁹⁷⁸

This is the Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from the more philosophical Eastern or Aryan views upon this subject.⁹⁷⁹ 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 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

 

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218 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 myth⁹⁸⁰ . . . 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.”⁹⁸¹

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 Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebræ 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

 

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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.” ⁹⁸²

“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.”⁹⁸³ “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 (Chœropsis) Liberiensis, which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height.”⁹⁸⁴

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”;⁹⁸⁵ and thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.

 

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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.”⁹⁸⁶

Tradition asserts, and archæology accepts the truth of the legend that there is more than one city now flourishing in India, which is built on

 

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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 archæology. 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?⁹⁸⁷ 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.⁹⁸⁸ 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 two distinct categories:⁹⁸⁹ 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

 

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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 Thlinkithians 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 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-

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 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 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

224 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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,⁹⁹⁰ 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.⁹⁹¹ When did they live? How long ago lived the

 

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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 Purânas 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 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,⁹⁹² the meaning and chronological order are very clear in the Purânas. 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 Müller’s favourite theories—namely, that writing was not known in India, even in the days of Pânini (!); 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

 

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226 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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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227 THE MOON-COLOURED RACE.‌

STANZA X. THE HISTORY OF THE FOURTH RACE.

———

§§ (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.”

———————

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.⁹⁹³ 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

 

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228 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 æons 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 infi 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,

229 THE MYSTERIES AMONG THE MAYAS.

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.”⁹⁹⁴ 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 Quichés” 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

 

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230 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 fl,” was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead, τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή, 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

231 SATANIC MYTHS.

fifth principle.⁹⁹⁵ “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 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 Adept⁹⁹⁶—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

 

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232 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of this tenet, whcih 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 Purânic Hinduism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen gods. The Purânas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parâsara (Vishnu Purâna), to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras 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 Æons—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.⁹⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁹⁸ (See “The Fallen Angels” and “The Mystic Dragons” in Part II.)

 

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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 (1888, p. 333) of Dr. A. Kingsford’s The 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),⁹⁹⁹ 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 sphere.¹⁰⁰⁰

“2. Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.”¹⁰⁰¹

“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,¹⁰⁰² 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, Brahmâ, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., as primeval manifestations of the ever-unmanifested Principle, e.g., Ain-Soph, Parabrahm, or Zeruana Akerne—Boundless Time—Kâla), but the

 

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234 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, tbe 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. (cont.) . . . 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

235 THE SHADOW OF GOD.

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 Phœbus (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 Kumâra 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 Hades”—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

236 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 mythical¹⁰⁰³ 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,”¹⁰⁰⁴ 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.”¹⁰⁰⁵

 

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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 Virtues, or the personified attributes of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahmâ, 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 angels¹⁰⁰⁶ 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

 

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238 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

believers in the Pope’s infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth, 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 Mediæval Ages, utter that¹⁰⁰⁷ 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 Manicheeism, invented the devil, and by placing

 

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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.¹⁰⁰⁸

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 Luciferians¹⁰⁰⁹ 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.

 

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240 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

As is well known, the Kabala never originated with the Jews, who got their ideas from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians.

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 sun¹⁰¹⁰ 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,

 

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241 “PRINCIPLES” EXPLAINED.

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 principles¹⁰¹¹—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-

 

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242 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, pràna (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.

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.”¹⁰¹² 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-Existent¹⁰¹³ 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”

 

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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 Kumâras, “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 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,

244 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 Φωσφόρος 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.¹⁰¹⁴ 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 Brahmâ during his “night’s” rest. For, to quote from an able article by one¹⁰¹⁵

 

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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 nebulæ 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 giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness.¹⁰¹⁶ 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

 

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246 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kumâras, 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,”¹⁰¹⁷ 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 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

 

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247 THE CURSE OF VASISHTA.

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. (See Zōhar 3:61b.)

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 Abhimânim, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Swâha, one of Daksha’s¹⁰¹⁸ 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 Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Suchi) were condemned by a curse of Vasishta, the great sage, “to be born over and over again.” (Bhagavata-Purâna iv. 24, 4.) This is clear enough.

Therefore, the FLAMES, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpati, Pitris, Manus, Asuras,

 

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248 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Rishis, Kumâras,¹⁰¹⁹ 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 Earth¹⁰²⁰—exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma.

No Theologian, any more than an Orientalist, can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpati, 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.

 

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249 SCIENTIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE PURÂNAS.

(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.¹⁰²¹ As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purâna. The Kumâra—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 Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin youth, springs from Brahmâ 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 Kumâra, 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.¹⁰²² 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

 

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250 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Atlantis¹⁰²³ (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 Purâna 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,

 

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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 palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by geology to those “oldest palæozoic 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 Purânas 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.

———

Archaic Teachings in the Purânas and Genesis. Physical Evolution.

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 Purânas 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

252 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Purânas, 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,¹⁰²⁴ he who reads the Hindu Purânas—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 Brahmâ 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 very little

 

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253 MR. GLADSTONE KILLS GENESIS.

more (something for which very little real philosophy is requisite), in the Purânas 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!

Purânic 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 nebulæ, 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 Prajâpati, 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 Pânini’s, of the Sankhya and Vedanta systems, and a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Müller the most perfect on earth—such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing fairy tales; such tales as the Purânas 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 Brâhmana,” says one, “gives a not very intelligible account of Kasyapa’s origin. . . . He was the son of Marîchi, the Son of Brahmâ, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind. . . . Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he made akarot, hence the word kûrma (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

254 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânas 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,¹⁰²⁵ his physical frame—one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods—was ready to receive the divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, i.e., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the

 

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255 FROM WORM TO MAN.

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 amœba 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.¹⁰²⁶ In the animals every principle is paralysed, and in a fœtus-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.¹⁰²⁷

 

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256 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 palæontologists 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 amphibia, 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

257 THE CONTRADICTIONS OF SCIENCE.

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. . . . . Sub-kingdoms 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 palæozoic period to the present time. . . . The Foraminiferous 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 Foraminifera,” p. xi.)

Now, if there is no indication of change in the Foraminifera, 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 Palæolithic ancestor being even found

258 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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;¹⁰²⁸ 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. Hæckel, in his Shöpfungsgeschichte, 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

 

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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 Æsculapius 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 Fora-minifera, 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 Kapila¹⁰²⁹ 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.¹⁰³⁰ But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, “from the structureless Amœba 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-

 

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260 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

mud. The Occultists believe in an inherent law of progressive development.¹⁰³¹ 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 palæontologists. 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

 

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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 Hæckelian, 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 ape-like 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

262 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

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.

———

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

264 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Purânas, 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 Purânas, 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 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 Hæckel 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, o 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

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 Phlegyan 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. J. S. 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 Phœnicians, 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 confrère, 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 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?¹⁰³²

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 Phœnician empires.” In this, had

 

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266 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Phœnicians 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 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.¹⁰³³ One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.

 

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267 THE NATURAL “FALL.”

The third race fell—and created no longer: it begat 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. Nature¹⁰³⁴ being mingled with Man¹⁰³⁵ 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,¹⁰³⁶ “the Power of the

 

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268 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 universal¹⁰³⁷ (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract

 

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269 THE SYMBOLISM OF KRONOS.

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 Grèce 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,¹⁰³⁸ 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.¹⁰³⁹ Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,¹⁰⁴⁰ and varies from Zeus, the Great

 

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270 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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,¹⁰⁴¹ 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.¹⁰⁴² 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.¹⁰⁴³ “Gods and mortals have one common origin” says Hesiod (ibid. v. 1c8); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah’s (see Apollod., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam. 1, 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 Grèce Antique—the four ages

 

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271 THE RACES IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY.‌

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 Æschylus), 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

272 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁰⁴⁴

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 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

 

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273 THE GOLDEN AGE.

them, and even within themselves?¹⁰⁴⁵ 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,¹⁰⁴⁶ 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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274 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

days” (Gen. vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas 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 periods owing to the karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man

275 NO DEVILS OUTSIDE HUMANITY.

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.¹⁰⁴⁷ 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.¹⁰⁴⁸ “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 Purânas; in Adi Parvan (p. 115) and Brahmâ Purâna, 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,

 

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276 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Fourth Race, so called. In the Vishnu Purâna 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, indeed¹⁰⁴⁹ 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 Râkshasas 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.

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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 Dauphiné (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 91 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 archæology 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.

278 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Nevertheless, even the “Giants” have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well 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, Liége, 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 identity¹⁰⁵⁰ 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 Antæus, 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 Abbé Pègues (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-

 

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279 CHRISTENDOM IS IDOLATROUS.

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 Abbé Pègues, 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 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 (Elévations 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.¹⁰⁵¹ 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

 

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280 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of Alexandria began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that “Serpents and Giants signify Demons.” (Genesis, chapter v.)¹⁰⁵²

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”),¹⁰⁵³

 

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281 THE SEVEN VIRGIN-YOUTHS.

“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!”¹⁰⁵⁴

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two 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 Kumâric 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 (Kumâra¹⁰⁵⁵) four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of

 

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282 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.” . . .¹⁰⁵⁶ (Catechism of the inner Schools.) It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized

in the “Linga Purâna,” which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as Kumâra 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 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

 

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283 THE SERPENT OF ETERNITY.

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,¹⁰⁵⁷ and in Hermes, in Purânas 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 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.”¹⁰⁵⁸ But as, by so doing, he has to use

 

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284 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 mediæval 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 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 Purânas; 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 Brâhmanas and Purânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, 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 Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Purânic 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

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” (Dâkini, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the chief of these Liliths, Sangye Khado, (Buddha Dâkini, 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.¹⁰⁵⁹

(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 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

 

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286 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, 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

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 primâ 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 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 Linnæus?—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

288 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Râkshasas (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’Abbé 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.

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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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.¹⁰⁶⁰

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

 

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290 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.¹⁰⁶¹ As En-Soph is “One, notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him” (Zōhar 1:21a), 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. 3:48a.11). “The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man” (Ibid. 2:76a.4). 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,”¹⁰⁶² 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.¹⁰⁶³

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

 

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291 MAZDEAN SYMBOLISM.

progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters (See Vishnu and other Purânas). 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.¹⁰⁶⁴ 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 Vaêgô, 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,”¹⁰⁶⁵ the latter being a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says—

 

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292 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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 [Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā, Zōhar 2:179a.5] 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!”¹⁰⁶⁶ 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” (Zōhar 2:8b).

 

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293 ANGELS CALLED BIRDS.

“Like a bird that is flying from its nest, and that is the Soul from which the Šəḵīnāh (divine wisdom or grace) does not move away” (Zōhar 2:278a.4; see Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, p. 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.¹⁰⁶⁷ 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 Purânas 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.¹⁰⁶⁸

 

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294 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁰⁶⁹ A Kalpa later (after the separation of the sexes) men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately 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.¹⁰⁷⁰ . . . The third eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,¹⁰⁷¹ 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 

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295 OCCULT PHYSIOLOGY.

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 Hæckelian 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’être—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 quâ 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

296 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 verte-brata—have a third eye, now atrophied, but necessarily active in its origin.¹⁰⁷² 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-

 

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297 THE CYCLOPS, NO MYTH.

thing else. There were and are palæontologists 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 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 cerebra 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

298 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. 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 Spirits¹⁰⁷³ 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 Hæckel. 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,¹⁰⁷⁴ and Vox populi Vox Dei.

 

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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 developed¹⁰⁷⁵ 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.¹⁰⁷⁶ 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 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 Æons to come.

This explains why the pineal gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is the verte-brata in which it is the most prominent and objective, and in man it is

 

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300 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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,

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.

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.

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

302 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Yü, 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 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 Karma¹⁰⁷⁷ 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

 

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303 THE NUMBER OF MONADS IS LIMITED.

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 æons 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-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

304 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.¹⁰⁷⁸

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),¹⁰⁷⁹ 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
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-

 

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305 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION.

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:¹⁰⁸⁰

 

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306 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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.”)

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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 Swayambhûva? 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 another¹⁰⁸¹)—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

 

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308 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 fittest¹⁰⁸²; 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 Manus¹⁰⁸³ (Bhrigu I., 61-63)—the production of the latter standing in the occult treatises as 7 × 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,¹⁰⁸⁴ 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.¹⁰⁸⁵ It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement that a Manu-antaric period means, as the term implies, the time between the

 

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309 THE BLINDS OF EXOTERICISM.

appearance of two Manus or Dhyan Chohans; and hence a minor Manvantara is the duration of the 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 × 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.”¹⁰⁸⁶

 

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310 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 go, 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 Purânas 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.¹⁰⁸⁷ 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 Swayambhûva,

 

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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 Virâj,¹⁰⁸⁸ or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity),¹⁰⁸⁹ 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 human monads of planetary chains as well as of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is “Swayambhûva,” 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 Swayambhûva (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 four-fold 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

 

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312 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 crore¹⁰⁹⁰ the mother (Earth) grows opaque, and in the fourteenth¹⁰⁹¹ 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 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

 

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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—“᾽Αρχὴ (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 Brahmâ, 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: ΙΗΣ, the “Saviour” of mankind, being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called ΙΧϴΥΣ, the fish.¹⁰⁹² 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),¹⁰⁹³ 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 also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the

 

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314 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,¹⁰⁹⁴ 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 (Athenæum, 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

 

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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.¹⁰⁹⁵

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.” (Zōhar 1:224b.7; see Isaac Myer, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, p. 412.)

This relates to the races (their “garments,” or degree of materiality) and to the three principles of man in their three vehicles.

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316‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

STANZA XI. THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES.

———

§ § (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.

———————

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;¹⁰⁹⁶—

 

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317 PRESENTMENTS OF TRUTHS.

ay, men and civilized nations, not Palæolithic 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.¹⁰⁹⁷ 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

 

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318 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁰⁹⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹⁹

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-

 

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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 wisdom, 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 Kumâras (Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana, Sanatkumâra, Jâta, Vodhu, and Panchasikha) had visited, agreeably with exoteric tradition (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purâna; 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 Râkshasas from the seventh

320 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânas 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 Purâna 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 Purânas 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 Purâna 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 Purânas are observed, they are ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the like” (Vishnu and Bhagavata Purânas).

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,

321 THE HINDU SYMBOLIZATION.

Kusa, Krauncha, Sâka and Pushkara, are “surrounded severally—by great seas of sugar-cane juice, of 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) Bhâskara 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 nebulæ; 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 Golâdhyâya of the Siddhânta-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 Purâna. For he closes the first chapter by saying: “Bharata (the son of Nabhi, who gave his name to Bharata-Varsha or I dia) 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, Parasâra suddenly explains that “this was the creation of Swayambhûva Manu, by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Vârâha,” 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 Purâna, 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.

322 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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, Parasâra, 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 Swayambhûva 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 subdivisions, 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.¹¹⁰⁰ 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) Sâka-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

 

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323 THE MAGIS IN THE DAYS OF KRISHNA.

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 Sâmba (the reputed) son of Krishna, who in reality had none. In this the Purânas are historical—allegory notwithstanding—and Occultism is stating facts.

The whole story is told in Bhavishya Purâna. It is stated that, having been cured by Sûrya (the Sun) of leprosy, Sâmba, 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 Purânas) advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brahmins to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Sâmba 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 Sâmba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Sûrya, to discharge the duty. Ignorant of the place they lived in, it is Sûrya, the Sun himself, who directs Sâmba to Sâkadwipa beyond the salt water. Then Sâmba 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 Sâka-dwipa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Sâka-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 Sâmba 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 Purâna are credited with still living in Sâka-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” Sâka-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 Râkshasas 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.¹¹⁰¹ It covered

 

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324 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹¹⁰² 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 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

 

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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 fl 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.¹¹⁰³ 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.)

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.

 

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326 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Sûrya 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 Swayambhûva 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 Parasâra (Vishnu Purâna) 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 Purânas 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 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-

327 ON FOOT ACROSS THE OCEANS.

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. “Leafl 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 Hæckel, 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

328 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. Hæckel, 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, Hæckel, 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. Hæckel 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 Phœnicians 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

329 CHANGES OF CLIMATE.

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.

If we regard the Second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Hæckel’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 babes¹¹⁰⁴ in size and intellect. This was the third pralaya of the races.¹¹⁰⁵

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

 

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330 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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.¹¹⁰⁶ 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.

 

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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 21 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.¹¹⁰⁷

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 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 archæologists 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

 

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332 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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,

333 THE OLD CONTINENTS.

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 horseshoe 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 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

334 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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”;¹¹⁰⁸ 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.”¹¹⁰⁹ 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, notwithstanding. The complete records of the growth, development, social, and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the

 

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335 HOW TO READ SYMBOLS.

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 believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.

336 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Râkshasas; 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 archæology 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. Archæology 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? Archæology 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

337 THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND.

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 archæology 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 Archæologists, 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

338 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters (See “De La Vega,” Vol. ix., ch. ix.).¹¹¹⁰

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 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 mètres 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”).¹¹¹¹ 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

 

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339 THE ANTEDILUVIAN BUDDHAS.

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 “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

340 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 perswade 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

341 THE MATERIALISM OF THE BIBLE.‌

reader is asked to throw one more glance at the subject-matter treated of in the chapter which follows:

———

Cyclopean Ruins and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.

In his enormous works—Mémoires addressées à l’Académie 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” (1 Corinth. x. 4) “became a Jupiter lapis,” swallowed by his father Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.”¹¹¹² 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 said¹¹¹³ 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 Académie des Inscriptions (Mémoires, 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’

 

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342 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Byblios, 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.¹¹¹⁴ 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:¹¹¹⁵

“Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum
Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem.”

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’abbé 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 Comté

 

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343 THE “ROCKING-STONES” IN EUROPE.

de Cornouailles, sur les traces des géants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,¹¹¹⁶ 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., Sépulture des Tartares. Arch. VII., p. 2227, 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.”¹¹¹⁷ We see in him a

 

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344 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands—Giants in every and any case.¹¹¹⁸

“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 “Antiquités 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 Archéologique (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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345 LIVING, SPEAKING, AND MOVING STONES.

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.’”¹¹¹⁹

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 Palæolithic 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

 

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346 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, “Fétichisme”)¹¹²⁰

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 Olaüs 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 Oitzoé) whom the magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns” (Nat. Hist., lxxxvii., chap. LIV.); and he describes (in chap. XXXVIII., l. ii.) a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that “a single finger

 

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347 UNIVERSAL WITNESSES.

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.¹¹²¹ 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 Antiquités 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 Râkshasas (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” (“Fêtichisme,” 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 mediæval 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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348 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

natural selection and evolution from the lowest form to the highest; from mollusc to fish, from reptile 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 Hæckel 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

349 IT TAKES A GOD TO BECOME A MAN.

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 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).

350 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(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 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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351 THE “GREAT DRAGONS” AND SERPENTS.‌

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; 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

352 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 προσελήνοι—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

353 THE ASTRONOMICAL DRAGON.

uppermost or ruling constellation . . . it is singular how closely the constellations . . . correspond in 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!

354 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, mediæval, 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 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”

355 THE NAASENIAN GNOSTICS.

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 Ælianus, treating in his “De Naturâ 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.¹¹²² 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

 

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356 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”: “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” (Peratæ 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-Vaêgô, 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.¹¹²³ 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 Vaêgô by the good river Dâitya 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 Archéologique, 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.”

 

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357 THE TWO MYSTIC POLES.

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 Pâtâla, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Pâtâla 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” (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 degees. 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

358 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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—“Judæa 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”),¹¹²⁴ 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 Star-yazatas of the Zoroastrians—or again the seven planets (including the sun) of every religion.¹¹²⁵ 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.

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

 

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359 GOD AND NATURE ANTHROPOMORPHIZED.

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 Narâyana, and Gautama gives a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being “the very supreme Brahmâ,” is yet called Amámsávatâra—“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,¹¹²⁶ 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 Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie,” 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. Eliphas Lévi 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

 

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360 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹¹²⁷ 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 versâ. 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,¹¹²⁸ Titans, and Aletæ with the Kabiri. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis and our Dhyan Cohans, 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

 

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361 WHO WERE ENOCH AND THE OTHERS?

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,¹¹²⁹ the deities surrounded with the darkness of occult nature—become the Idei (or Idæic 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 Aletæ 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 Aletæ, 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.¹¹³⁰ 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

 

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362 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Agathodæmon and the other of Hermes” (Vyse, Vol. II., p. 342). “Agathodæmon 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);¹¹³¹ 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”

 

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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 fire¹¹³² 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 Καίω “to burn.” The Semitic Kabirim, “the powerful, the mighty, and the great,” answering to the Greek μεγάλοι δυνατοὶ, are later epithets. They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phœnicia, 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, Koré 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

 

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364 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

365 THE VARIOUS NOAHS.

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 Lü-lan, “The Dragon feeds in the pure water of Wisdom and sports in the clear waters of Life.”

———

Our Divine Instructors.

Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan isle are not the only record that is left of the deluge. China has also her tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma-li-ga-si-ma, and which Kæmpfer and Faber spell “Maurigosima,” for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kæmpfer, 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 either the seven and ten Rishis-Manus and Prajâpatis; the seven and ten Ki-y; or ten and seven Amshaspends¹¹³³ (six exoterically), ten and seven Chaldean Anedots,

 

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366 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 abode¹¹³⁴ 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 Agathodæmon. And in another account (See Col. Vyse’s 2nd Vol. of the “Pyramids of Ghizeh,” p. 364, MS. 785, Uri’s Cat.) Agathodæmon is mentioned as a “King of Egypt.” Celepas Geraldinus gives curious traditions about Henoch. He calls 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 Sabæan 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-

 

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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 Græcia, 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. . . .”¹¹³⁵

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 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 Rougé:

“. . . 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

 

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368 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Chrétienne, 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 Œdipus, 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 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.”¹¹³⁶

“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

 

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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 Herodotus¹¹³⁷ (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.¹¹³⁸

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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370 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹¹³⁹ 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.¹¹⁴⁰

Plato is the first sage among the classics who speaks at length of the

 

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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 “Œdipus Ægyptiacus” (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,¹¹⁴¹ which Theopompus symbolizes by two cities.¹¹⁴² The pious “city” was continually visited by the the gods; the belligerent “city” was inhabited by various beings invulnerable to iron, liable to be mortally wounded only by stone and wood.”¹¹⁴³ De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of Theopompus (“Peuple Primitif,” vol. iii. 157) and even sees a fraud (superchérie) in the assertion of the Saitic priests. This was denounced by the “Demonologists” as illogical. In the words of De Mirville: “A superchérie 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 ἐυδαιμόνια (our ‘Iles Fortunées’)—such a supposition can never be an universal chimera.” (A word on “Atlantis,” p. 29.)

It is certain that, whether “chimera” or reality, the priests of the whole world had it from one and the same source: the universal tradition

 

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372 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

about the third great continent which perished some 850,000 years ago,¹¹⁴⁴ 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 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

 

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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 (δαίμονες) 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.¹¹⁴⁵ 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 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

 

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374 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.)¹¹⁴⁶ 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.)¹¹⁴⁷

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 blind¹¹⁴⁸ since they remain ignorant how much the world is full of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places” (Zōhar 1:55a.9).

The “Sons of God” have existed and do exist. From the Hindu Brahmâputras and Manasaputras (Sons of Brahmâ and Mind-born sons) down to the B’ne-aleim of the Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and

 

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375 “SONS OF GOD” PERFECT AND IMPERFECT.

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).¹¹⁴⁹

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 quædam 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 Bənē ʾĔlhīm) were good angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad (angels) and in this case could not be called Bənē ʾĔlhīm, the “sons of God.” (Prælectiones theol. ch. ii.) This Biblical riddle—“the real sense of which no author has ever understood,” as candidly confessed by Fourmont¹¹⁵⁰—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: Bənē ʾĔlhīm was a name common to the Malʾāḵīm (the good Messengers) and to the ʾĪšīm (“the lower angels”) (Rabbi Parcha).

We may add for the benefit of the demonologists that their Satan,

 

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376 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

[Note: for three paragraphs that appear to belong on this page, but seem to have been mistakenly inserted out of context elsewhere, see page 409.]

“the adversary,” is included in Job among the sons of God or Bənē ʾĔlhīm who visit their father.” (Chapter i.) But of this later on.

Now the Zohar says that the ʾĪšīm, the beautiful Bənē ʾĔlhīm, 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 Bənē ʾĔlhīm belonging to the tenth sub-division of the “Thrones” (Zōhar 2:43a.3-4). It also explains that the ʾĪšīm, “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 ʾĪšīm 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 Ajál (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 ʾĪšīm 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 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?

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 Lévi 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 Agathodæmon—Christos, or the theosophical Serpent of Eternity, or even the Serpent of Genesis—they

378 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânas—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 Purânas 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, Nâgas (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!

———

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;

379 THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON.

but the cult is now preser ved 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” (“Archæology,” 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 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 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-

380 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Phœnician Elon or Elion, whom Abraham recognised as El Elion.¹¹⁵¹ 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.¹¹⁵²

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.

 

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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 (Vikârttana’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 Nâgas—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 Purânas. The children of Surasa are the “mighty Dragons.” The Vayu Purâna replacing “Surasa” (of Vishnu Purâna) 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 Æons, 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,¹¹⁵³ whose daughters Puloma and Kalaka are the mothers of numberless Danavas (30 millions), by

 

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382 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Kasyapa,¹¹⁵⁴ 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 Kumâra, or virgin-youth, born of Agni,¹¹⁵⁵ for the purpose of destroying Taraka, the Danava Demon, the grandson of Kasyapa by Hiranyaksha, his son,¹¹⁵⁶ whose (Taraka’s) yogi austerities were so extraordinary that they became formidable to the gods, who feared such a rival in power.¹¹⁵⁷ 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 Brahmâ, 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,”¹¹⁵⁸ “Kumâra 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

 

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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”¹¹⁵⁹) 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,¹¹⁶⁰ 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, ἁγνὸς, 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 Kumâra, 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

 

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384 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”¹¹⁶¹

“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,¹¹⁶² 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. . . . .”¹¹⁶³

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 Karshvares¹¹⁶⁴ of the Earth”; which Karshvares in their seven

 

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385 THE BUILDERS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD.

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. Sâdáh). 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. Archæology demonstrates that Horus is identical with Anubis,¹¹⁶⁵ 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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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 Hrimthurses (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,”¹¹⁶⁶ 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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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.¹¹⁶⁷ 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.”¹¹⁶⁸ The appellation Sa’tan, in Hebrew sâtân, “an adversary” (from the verb shatana, “to be adverse,” to persecute) belongs by right to the first and cruellest “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 henceforward 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

 

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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.¹¹⁶⁹ 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.¹¹⁷⁰ 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,¹¹⁷¹ 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

 

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389 JEHOVAH OPHIOMORPHOS.

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.¹¹⁷² 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 Iurbo and Adonai were “names of Jao-Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda Baoth” (Codex Nazaræus). (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.”

 

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390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 Mahabhârata. 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.¹¹⁷³

———

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.¹¹⁷⁴ Tubal-Cain is a Kabir, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron”; or—if this will please better—he is one with Hephæstos 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.¹¹⁷⁵

 

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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?

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 Cain¹¹⁷⁶—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., . 760) concurs with all those who are of opinion, that Sydic, or

 

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392 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 צדיק, Ṣaddīq, 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 Encyclopædia 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 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,¹¹⁷⁷ 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,¹¹⁷⁸ or Pater Sadic, or Melchizadek, he was lord of the Ecliptic, or

 

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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, 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.

———

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:

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 Râkshasas of the Ramayana and the 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.¹¹⁷⁹ 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).¹¹⁸⁰ 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.”

 

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395 ESOTERIC CHRONOLOGY.

In “Timæus” 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, 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 sinking¹¹⁸¹ 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 Mahabhâratean 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.¹¹⁸² And how little Herodotus could tell is

 

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396 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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.¹¹⁸³ 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

 

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397 THE PERSIAN PHŒNIX.

“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 hippotamus. 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.¹¹⁸⁴

Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the best of, 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 Phœnix? 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.¹¹⁸⁵ (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.

 

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398 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, Mergiana¹¹⁸⁶, whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the dry island, i.e., the new continent of Europe.¹¹⁸⁷ 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 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

 

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399 THE ARCTIC CONTINENT.

Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath (or Taimuraz), upon which to cross over the Arctic Ocean.¹¹⁸⁸

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 twelve-legged progeny of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings;¹¹⁸⁹ 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.¹¹⁹⁰ 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. novâ 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 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.

 

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400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“In the first beginnings of (human) life, the only dry land was on the Right end¹¹⁹¹ of the sphere, where it (the globe) is motionless.¹¹⁹² 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.¹¹⁹³ 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 Fohat¹¹⁹⁴ 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.¹¹⁹⁵

“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.¹¹⁹⁶ 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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401 THE UNREACHABLE LAND.

water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world.¹¹⁹⁷ She broke toward the setting sun from her neck¹¹⁹⁸ 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.

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 Spitzbergen¹¹⁹⁹ on

 

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402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 horseshoe 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.

———

Western Speculations, founded on the Greek and Purânic 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 Purânas, 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 Purânas. 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 Pâtâla (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford¹²⁰⁰ shows, the Purânas place it “on

 

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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 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-Sefi, or white devil, the Taradaitya of the Purânas, 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 Purânas—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) Purânas (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 Purâna, Asiatic Researches, etc.). Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu-dwipa¹²⁰¹ in the middle of

 

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404 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purâna, 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 Brahmâ, 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” (Sûrya 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.)

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 Purânas 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,¹²⁰² 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 dwipas¹²⁰³—each continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever

 

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405 FUTURE CONTINENTS, SYMBOLIZED.

“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 Purânic “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 Purânas that Sâka-dwipa is (or will be) a continent, and that Sankha-dwipa, as shown in the Vayu Purâna, 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.¹²⁰⁴ 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.

“On the banks of the Nile¹²⁰⁵ (?) 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 Purânic 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 Purânas, 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

 

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406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Asiatic Researches.) And his facts and quotations from the Purânas give direct and conclusive evidence that the Aryan Hindus and other ancient nations were earlier navigators than the Phœnicians, 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. Surely, if the Hindu Purânas 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 Phœnician navigation—then their Purânas must be older than those Phœnicians (placed at from 2,000 to 3,000 years b.c.). At any rate those traditions must have been older;¹²⁰⁶ 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

 

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407 THE PUZZLES OF ANTIQUITY.

perished soon after the upheaval of the two Americas¹²⁰⁷—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,¹²⁰⁸ 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 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 Purânic 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

 

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408 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Râkshasas 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),¹²⁰⁹ 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 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

 

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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 Purânics, 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).

“It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scape-goat 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 Nəḥāšīm, or the “Serpents’ Works.” It says (1:125b.3): “It is called nəḥāšīm, 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 Lévi, and now by all the modern Occultists. (Vide Sections about.)}

[Note: we have enclosed the above three paragraphs with {} brackets, as they appear to have been placed here mistakenly, and likely belong on page 376.]

———

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 Brâhmanas and Purânas, the Yâthâs and other Mazdean Scriptures,

410 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

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,¹²¹⁰ 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!¹²¹¹

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 Æschylus, 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 Pramlochâ), 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 Prometheus¹²¹²), may well, in

 

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412 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹²¹³ 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.”¹²¹⁴

Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato’s “Protagoras,” with that “wisdom which ministers to physical well-being,” but the lower aspect of manas of the animal (Kama) having remained unchanged,

 

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413 THE TRAVESTY OF PROMETHEUS.

instead of “an untainted mind, heaven’s first gift” (Æschylus), 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 Æschylus; 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, shows¹²¹⁵—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanos:

“Of prophecies the various modes I fixed,
And among dreams did first discriminate
The truthful vision . . . and mortals guided
To a mysterious art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All arts to mortals from Prometheus came. . .”

 

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414 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Æschylus’ 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 kronos¹²¹⁶ 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—

“Ay, a son bearing stronger than his sire” (787)
. . . . . . . . . .
“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-

 

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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:

“. . . . such marriage he prepares
Which from his throne of power to nothingness
Shall hurl him down; so shall be all fulfilled
His father Kronos’ curse . . . .¹²¹⁷
. . . . Then let him sit
Confiding in his lofty thunder-peals,
And wielding with both hands the fiery bolt;
For these shall not avail, but fall 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

 

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416 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹²¹⁸ 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:

“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 Astrakhân 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

 

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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 Æthiop “river”;
Along its banks proceed till thou attain
The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights
Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends . . .”

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

418 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Encyclopædias were yet ready for them.

The race of Io, “the cow-horned maid” is then simply the first pioneer race of the Æthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile (which received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India¹²¹⁹). For does not Prometheus say to Io¹²²⁰ that the sacred Neilos (the god, not the river)—

. . . “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.”

 

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419 WAS ÆSCHYLUS INITIATED?

But “Argos” is Arghya Varsha, the land of libation of the old Hierophants, whence the deliverer of 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. Quæst. 1, ii. No. 20) and by Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. 1, ii., oper. tom. 1, p. 467—Ed. Potter’s). The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact that Æschylus 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, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his trilogies on a public stage.¹²²¹ 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.¹²²² 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 Æschylus 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 Æschylus, 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

 

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420 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Chréstos (mankind, or Prometheus, on its trial). This, say Brahminical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the Zoroastrian and 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 Brahmâ, 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 refl 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.¹²²³ It is in this that rests, at one and the same time,

 

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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.¹²²⁴ 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.

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.¹²²⁵ 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

 

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422 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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.

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,¹²²⁶ mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifications of the powers of the first-named.¹²²⁷ 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 viâ Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present surround Hudson’s

 

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424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Bay.¹²²⁸ 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 æons, 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?”

 

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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 Müller 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.

426 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹²²⁹ Thus, while the Aryans are the descendants of the yellow Adams, the gigantic and highly civilized Atlanto-Aryan race, the Semites—and the Jews along with them—are those of the red Adam; and thus 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 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 Mahabhârata, the gift of Mayâsur to the Pandavas. It is from them that they learnt aëronautics, Viwân 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:

 

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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 (Viwân) 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 Agneyâstra (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).¹²³⁰ 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 Viwân 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).

‘May every yellow face send sleep from himself (mesmerize?) to every black face. May even they (the Sorcerers) avoid pain and suff May every man true to the Solar Gods bind (paralyze) every man under the lunar gods, lest he should suff or escape his destiny.

‘And may every yellow face off of his life-water (blood) to the speaking animal of a black face, lest he awaken his master.¹²³¹

‘The hour has struck, the black night is ready, etc., etc.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

‘Let their destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the great Four.¹²³² May the Kings of light return.’”

 

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428 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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 Viwâns, 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.

“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 Viwâns 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

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, 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 Æthiopians,” 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-

430 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Phœnician vessels had circumnavigated the globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What archæologist 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 mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will—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 mediæval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, accord-

431 MISTAKES OF THE EGYPTOLOGISTS.

ing to strong probability, were perfectly known thousands of years ago The more archæology 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.¹²³³ 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 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 750 years before the Fourth

 

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432 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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),”

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”¹²³⁴ who perished some 850,000 years ago (the Ruta and Daitya Island-Continents) toward the close of the Miocene Age.¹²³⁵ 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

 

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434 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

The main stem of a tree may be compared to the root-race (a).

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 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 Θ (θ) 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,¹²³⁶ 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

 

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436 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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)¹²³⁷; 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;¹²³⁸ 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 their veins. Nevertheless, they had preserved all their Archaic records. All this has been shown long ago.¹²³⁹ 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 17,082.¹²⁴⁰

 

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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 historical¹²⁴¹ 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,

 

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438 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

439 MODERN SCIENCE MISTRUSTED.

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 archæological 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 archæologist and palæontologist 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 Palæolithic 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 Phœnicians. 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 Pânini, 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 Pânini; 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! Pânini 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

440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

show us the ancestors of the same Pânini, the Brahmins, coming into India) are covered with writing, two and three thousand years old (12,000, according to some fearless palæontologists).

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 Phœnicians who had invented it, and knew writing as far back as 1500 b.c., at the earliest,¹²⁴² 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 palæontologists 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.”¹²⁴³ Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du Chaillu, Gordon-Cumming, Madame Merian,¹²⁴⁴ 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 Nymphæa 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 Holiætus Washingtonii,¹²⁴⁵ 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-sized

 

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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 Münchausen’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 natâ, 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.¹²⁴⁶

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

 

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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 versâ. 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 Müller “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 Müller 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,

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

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

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 naturæ, 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

446 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Pâtâla (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.”

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447

BOOK II., PART II.

THE

ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS.

—————

448

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. I, 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 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.¹²⁴⁷ Sat

 

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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 Müller 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 Müller 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 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

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 Judæus 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.

452‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ XVI. ADAM-ADAMI.

Names such as Adam-Adami, used by Mr. Chwolsohn in his “Nabathean Agriculture”¹²⁴⁸ 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-Nâth, 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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453 “NABATHEAN AGRICULTURE.”

“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 years¹²⁴⁹ 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.

Quatremère 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 Qû-tâmy, 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, Qû-tâmy, 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—Qû-tâmy.

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

 

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454 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 levée-in-arms against the translator. He reproaches him¹²⁵⁰ with “sacrificing Moses to an anonymous 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,”¹²⁵¹ 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 Qû-tâmy, 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 Quatremère—is old enough to appear genuine as a document, and so satisfy the demands of the most exacting archæologist 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 Kurân—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.

 

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455 MANY VIEWS OF MANY MINDS.

With the exception of M. Renan, an iconoclast by principle—so pointedly called by Jules Lemaître “le Paganini du Néant” —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.

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 Purânas 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.¹²⁵² 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.¹²⁵³ Nebo is the deity of the planet Mercury, and Mercury is the god of Wisdom or Hermes, and Budha, which the Jews called נְבוֹ [nəḇō] “the Lord on high, the aspiring,” . . . and the Greeks Nabo, Ναβώ, hence Nabatheans. Notwithstanding that Maimonides calls their doctrines “heathenish foolishness” and their archaic literature “Sabæorum fœtum,” he places their “agriculture,” the Bible of Qû-tâmy, in the first rank of Archaic literature; and Abarbinel

 

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456 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

457 THE KABALISTIC FOUR ADAMS.

silence and secresy upon the true meaning of Mosaic sayings, and thus came to grief. The Doctrines of Qû-tâmy, 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 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),¹²⁵⁴ even the First Race is not,

 

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458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Brahmâcharya. 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 Æons,—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 Agathodæmon, 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 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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459 THE “GOD” SUB ROSÂ.‌

§ XVII. 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 now¹²⁵⁵—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

 

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460 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

a long dissertation upon it in his Greek dictionary, and who never breathes a word about it in the Hebrew lexicon, explains it thus: “᾽Αρχὴ 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, יהוה; or י meaning Yōḏ (membrum Virile, see Kabala); ה (Hē, the womb); ו (Wāw, a crook or a hook, a nail), and ה 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 Qāḏšō קדשו?” (Psalms xxiv. 3). Qāḏēš [ləqaddēš] 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 Qāḏēš is bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and Genesis xxxvii. from verses 15 to 22. The “holy” Qəḏēšōṯ of the Bible were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew Qəḏēšīm, 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 (1 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

461 WHAT WAS THE CIRCLE-DANCE.

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.

“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!¹²⁵⁶ 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

 

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462 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 ΙΙΙΣΤΙΣ ΣΟΦΙΑ, the seven great gods, divided into two triads and the highest God (the Sun) are: the lower Τριδυνάμεις, 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

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).¹²⁵⁷ 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 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 (ΙΩ) IO means the moon, in the dialect of the Argians; and it was one of the names of the same in Egypt. Says Jablonski, “ΙΩ, Ioh, Ægyptiis Lunam significat neque habent illi in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam, designent præter IO.” The pillar and Circle (IO), now constituting the first decimal number, and which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetractis,¹²⁵⁸ became later a pre-eminently phallic Number—amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah.

This is how a scholar explains it:

 

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464 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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 הוי may also be used as I O H, for the letter wāw, or ו, was used for o and for u, and for v or w. This, before the Massora, of which the · was used as וֹ = o, וּ = u, and ו = 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 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, Nofi—‘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

465 THE “FOUR-FACED” BRAHMÂ.

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 ΙΕΥΩ—IEVO. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Ίαβέ [Íabé] (Yahva), and the Jews Ίά [Íá] [or Ἰαὼ, Iaṑ] (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.”¹²⁵⁹

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 Orientalists with Brahmâ—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” Brahmâ, 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 π value), I think there cannot be a possibility of doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on sacr,¹²⁶⁰ ‘Chakra,’ or Circle of Vishnu.

“But let me carry your description a step further:You say ‘The One from

 

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466 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 [יוה] or Jave, or Jupiter, and by change of ה to נ or h to n, then יונ 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 Brahmâ Prajâpati (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 Step¹²⁶¹ and the Grand Gallery to the top of the said gallery, is by the very careful measures of Piazzi Smyth 339 inches. 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 1132 = 56.5 or 5. 65 x 10ה  הו      י, or Jehovah. That is, he personifies¹²⁶² 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

 

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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.

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;¹²⁶³ 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 י was the membrum virile and Houah 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

 

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468 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Noah, or Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be ינח, 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 י (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, I am that I am, the

Hebrew words being:

אהיה-אשר-אהיה

a variety reading of יהוה. Now, Moses is משה, 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; 501² = 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,

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 philoso phies. 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 time the Wisdom-Religion and use of the universal language and its symbols at their disposal and in their posse ssion, 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.¹²⁶⁴ 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 Judæan 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

 

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470 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

471 THE CRAFT OF THE RABBINS.

million years old; the other is a small sub-race some 8,000 years old and no more.¹²⁶⁵

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 Judæus 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 Brahmâ-prajâpati, 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 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

 

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472 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in his supposed monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate.¹²⁶⁶ 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. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis—never from the One infinite God. In the Judæo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, 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 personæ 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–¹²⁶⁷worshippers 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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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 י the Yodh (phallus), and ה He (the opening, or

474 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 roadside 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 ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞΙΑΩ (Abraxas Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΤΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (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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475 NATURE, A STONE-COLD MOTHER.‌

§ XVIII. ON THE MYTH OF THE “FALLEN ANGEL,” IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS.

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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 mediæval 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 personæ of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been

476 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 succès 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.¹²⁶⁸

 

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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 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-Judæan 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 Judæus 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

478 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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.¹²⁶⁹ “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.’”¹²⁷⁰

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 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,¹²⁷¹ while he calls the prototypes of Michael and his synonyms, such as Mercury, for example, devils.

 

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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.” (Mémoires à l’Académie, Vol. v., p. 516.) This is almost correct.

Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word metatron being divided into μετά θρόνον, 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.

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 Abbé 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

480 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”¹²⁷² 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 Israel¹²⁷³ . . . chiefs of the armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the souls and even Seraphs.”¹²⁷⁴

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,¹²⁷⁵ 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” (Mâthra 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 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)

 

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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 ὀφιομορφος of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion head, like his father Ildabaoth. (See King’s Gnostics.)

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

482 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 drôles), 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.”

It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versâ. 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

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 Tretá age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch (the Chakravartin or the ‘Everlasting King’ of Enoch¹²⁷⁶) and protects the three worlds (or races). In the Dwâpara age, in the person of Veda-Vyâsa, 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 Judæo-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.

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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, 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 Brahmâ 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

 

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484 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 . . . .”

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

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 Lévi 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,”¹²⁷⁷ just in the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen “as lightning to fall from heaven.”¹²⁷⁸ 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 Egypt, as elsewhere, darkness was “the

 

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486 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

principle of all things.” Hence Pymander, the “Thought divine,” issues as light from darkness. Behemoth¹²⁷⁹ 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.¹²⁸⁰ 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 best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the

 

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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 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

488 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Æon 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 Æons 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,¹²⁸¹ the

 

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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 Pymander, 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.¹²⁸² 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

 

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490 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

had a beginning, for it proceeded from Oulom¹²⁸³ (Aiôn, time), the highest of the Æons when emitted from the Father, it had remained with him before all creations, for it is part of him.¹²⁸⁴ Therefore, Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon “mind” (the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic system). “The mind, let it be named Adam.”¹²⁸⁵

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.¹²⁸⁶

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

 

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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”; (Zōhar 3:208a). 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-note¹²⁸⁷ 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 . . . .

 

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492 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

———

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

493 THE REAL MEANING OF THE CHERUB.

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 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 wast 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

494 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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)¹²⁸⁸ 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

 

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495 VARIOUS NAMES FOR INITIATES.

left hand. When Vishnu Purâna narrates that “the world was over-run 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 over-shadowed 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,”¹²⁸⁹ 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 Marishâ, “the offspring of the trees.”¹²⁹⁰ 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 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 Anugîtâ episode of the Mahabhârata, chapter v., where the Brâhmana 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

 

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496 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,¹²⁹¹ blazes the Vaishvâna fire¹²⁹² seven-fold, of which ‘I’ am the goal,” says the Brâhmana.¹²⁹³

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.”

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

 

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497 TRACES OF PRE-HISTORIC STRIFES.

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 ἀγαθαὶ καὶ κακαὶ δυνάμεις. 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 Archéologique 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 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 Purâna

498 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânic 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 Târâ, 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 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.

“Târ┹²⁹⁴—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,

 

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499 ALLEGORIES ON THE “WAR IN HEAVEN.”

the Soma drink, is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the Agnihôtri (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”¹²⁹⁵); for, his spiritual nature overcoming the physical, he would soon snap it off and part even from that etherealized form.¹²⁹⁶

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 Târâ 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.¹²⁹⁷ 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).¹²⁹⁸

 

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500 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,¹²⁹⁹ 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 Aitarêya Brâhmana, the breath (asu) of Brahmâ-Prajâpati 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

 

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501 SARPAS—SERPENTS—NAGAS.

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,¹³⁰⁰ 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 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

 

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502 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Brahmâ, 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.¹³⁰¹

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”¹³⁰² and were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and masters of wisdom. This “sea of knowledge” or learning¹³⁰³ remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a

 

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503 THE MYTH OF BEL AND MERODACH.

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 Zōhar (3:10a.3-5) Adam, the first man, is not found

504 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹³⁰⁴ “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.”¹³⁰⁵ 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 Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā 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).

 

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505 THE SACREDNESS OF THE SERPENT.

A commentary on the Purânas 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 Brahmâ. The seven heads of Sesha support the Universe. . . .”

So the Spirit of God “sleeps,” is “breathing” (məraḥefeṯ) over the Chaos of undifferentiated matter, before each new “Creation.” (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b.6). Now one “Day” of Brahmâ 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 Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā refers, viz.: that the serpent manifests “once in a thousand days.” Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated writer of the Sifrā 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 breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters’ (Psalm 74:13)” (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b.8). 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” (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:179a.6) 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 Qabbālāh (Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā; Zōhar 2:176b.8) 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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506‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ 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 Quichés” is inclined to see in Enoch an Initiate converted to Christianity (!!) (vide p. 16), the English compiler of Eliphas Lévi’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 Lévi, 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

507 THE LIVING DEVILS.

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 Lévi 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.¹³⁰⁶

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

 

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508 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

509 JEHOVAH, A PERSONATING SPIRIT.

there was a class of personating spirits which they designated demions, ‘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 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 éviter de paraître autoriser le dogme du double principe en faisant de ce Satan créateur une puissance réelle, et pour expliquer le mal originel, on profère contre Manes l’hypothèse d’une permission de l’unique tout Puissant.”¹³⁰⁷ 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,

 

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510 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹³⁰⁸ “For the initiates,” says Eliphas Lévi, “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 enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians never knew it.

Eliphas Lévi 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

 

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511 AKÂSA, THE “MYSTERIUM MAGNUM.”

which differs from that given by Eliphas Lévi, 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 mediæval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists Æther, the reflection of Akâsa—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 Lévi 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 Lévi, 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 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. Akâsa—the astral light¹³⁰⁹—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

 

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512 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

fills all the infinite Space; is Space itself, in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh principles.¹³¹⁰ 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 Lévi—“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 Τριδυνάμεις, 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—

 

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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 Sutrâtma, 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:¹³¹¹—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 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

 

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514 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”)¹³¹²

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.

 

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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 Brahmâ (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 Tombés des Paiens (p. 347) does, that since “Christianity is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil (πονηρο͂υ), and of good (ἀγαθοῦ); on two forces, in short, ἀγαθαὶ καὶ κακαὶ δυναμεῖς: 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-

516 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,¹³¹³ 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 Daêvas 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 Œdipus had unriddled the secret of the ages, but because, by anthropomorphizing the ever-spiritual and the subjective, he had

 

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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 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-ishyô, is the divine aspect of Ahriman, “the deadly, the Daê of the Daêvas” (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 Sâdah), 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 Gâtha 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 Haômas, nor even their Vohu-Mano (good thoughts), nor their Râta (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 Hôma, the Gaokerena, is through one end of the earth to the other; and Haôma 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,

518 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 Agathadæmon, 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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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 Bœotians 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 Grèce Antique remarks: “Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw Hephæstus 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. Προμηθεύς); 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. Grèce 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 Phoronidæ. 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 (Timæus, 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,

520 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze¹³¹⁴ (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 Grèce 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 Palæolithic 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 Φορώνευς 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 pramântha (of the old Aryan Hindus) into the Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the

 

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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).

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 Abhimânin, 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 Müller 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 προμηθεύς with the verb προμανθάνειν, 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 Æschylus 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,

522 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Grèce Antique, p. 258).

The philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above reflections, and points them out. The miserable state of Humanity described by Æschylus 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 Palæolithic 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, Pâninis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys and Hæckels. 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

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 ”

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” (Æsch.¹³¹⁵ 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

 

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524 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Æschylus was an initiate, and knew well what he was giving out.¹³¹⁶

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. 356¹³¹⁷ 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 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 manthâmi, mathnâni; 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: ‘the two aranis’ designating the ensemble of the instrument” (p. 358 et seq.).¹³¹⁸

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

 

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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.¹³¹⁹ “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 Hindus, that he was a Deva. Hence “with the Greeks he was the son of the Titan Iapetos,” ᾽Iαπετονίδης (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 rebelled¹³²⁰ 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

 

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526 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 (φιλάνθρωπος), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in Æschylus. 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 eff 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 Göttertranks) and Baudry. For—

“The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the aranî, the Aryas must have ascribed (?) the same origin to celestial fire, and they must¹³²¹ 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 thunder-bolts. . . . . This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch’s 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 aranîs.” (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 Aranî, 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 Aranî). Let us produce Agni by attrition, according

 

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527 THE SIX BROTHERS OF KRISHNA.

to ancient custom”—which means no worse than an abstract idea expressed in the tongue of mortals. The “female Aranî,” 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 Purânas 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 Surârani (the matrix or “mother” of the sura gods), so Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, is called in Mahabhârata Pandavârani—which term is already physiologized. But Devaki, the antetype of the Roman Catholic Madonna, is a later anthropomorphized form of Aditi. The latter is 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 Jagaddhâtri (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 subtle, which bore Brahmâ 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 aranî 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

528 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 aranî 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 Zōhar (3:290a.6) 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 comprises all when it goeth forth.” (Ibid.) 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 Purânas 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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529 WHO INVENTED WRITING?‌

§ XXI. ENOÏCHION-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, κρύπτω, “to hide.” For ages the Enoïchion (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 Kurân (see Surât 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-Hebræus, “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,¹³²² 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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530 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

god of the seven days, or the week. Esoterically and spiritually, Enoïchion 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, Enoïchion means in Greek the “inner eye,” or the Seer; in Hebrew, and with the help of Masoretic points it means the initiator and instructor, חֲנוֹךְ [ḥănōḵ]. It is a generic title; besides which his legend is

531 THE ADEPT DIES BUT TO LIVE.

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 was of Elijah (whose name means in Hebrew “God-Jah,” Jehovah, אֵלִיָּה [ʾēlīyāh]), 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.

532 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Miḏrāšīm are not agreed generally in their views about Hanokh, the Son of Yered. . . . Some say Enoch was a great Saint, beloved by God, 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 Miḏrāš P̄irqē ḏəRabbī ʾĔlīʿezer (8:2), 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,¹³²³ and Noah to that of the Fifth.¹³²⁴ 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 priests¹³²⁵) took him; in other words, the Enochs or the Enoïchions, the Seers and their knowledge and wisdom, became strictly

 

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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 Lévi 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, 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.”¹³²⁶ . . . . 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” —

 

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534 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

nature, geologically, astronomically, and cosmically in general, could not have been the same, just because the Earth had inclined. See chap. lxiv. (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 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 unscientifi 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.¹³²⁷

There are many such “dark sayings” throughout Purânas, Bible and Mythology; and to the occultist they divulge two facts: (a) that the ancients knew as well, and better, perhaps, than the moderns

 

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535 ST. AUGUSTINE AND ENOCH.

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 résumé, 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 Miḏrāšīm. 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 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.¹³²⁸ 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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536‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ XXII. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MYSTERY-NAMES IAO AND JEHOVAH, WITH THEIR RELATION TO THE CROSS AND CIRCLE.

When the Abbé Louis Constant—known as Eliphas Lévi—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)

537 THE JEWS ALONE THE HEIRLOOM OF JEHOVAH.

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.

538 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹³²⁹ 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 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 repeatesdly 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

 

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539 A GROTESQUE VERSE EXPLAINED.

see my invisible nature. So proceeds the Qabbalah.”¹³³⁰ 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 MSS., 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 מ-ש-ה / 5-300-40, 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.”

The Hebrew words for this expression are âhiye asher ahiyé, 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 corner 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,

 

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540 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and two meanings out of seven. The other five would astonish the Christians still more.

The series of Œdipuses 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 Œdipuses 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 whose mother on Earth was Maïa; 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 Phœnicians; “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 Ιαω, 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.

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 יהוה and יה 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 חברון [ḥeḇrōn], 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 יהוה, like the structures erected by Hiram to Hercules and Venus, Adon and Astarte.

Says Fürst: “The very ancient name of God, Yaho, written in the Greek Ιαω, 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 divinity, enthroned above the seven heavens, representing the Spiritual Light-Principle . . . . and also conceived of as Demiurgus,¹³³¹ was called Ιαω (יהו), who was, like the Hebrew Yaha, mysterious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated to the Initiated. The Phœnicians had a Supreme God, whose name was triliteral and secret, and he was Ιαω.”¹³³² (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 Cœlus 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

 

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542 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹³³³ 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.¹³³⁴ He was often represented as three-headed and called “Tricephalos,” “Triplex,” as one with the Sun and Venus. Finally, Mercury, as Cornutus¹³³⁵ 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.¹³³⁶ 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 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,

 

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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 co-ordinately 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 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 modern 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.¹³³⁷ 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

 

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544 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 Brahmâ.” 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

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 Lévi 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. Lévi thought. It was borrowed by the French philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus or Cardinal Cusa’s Latin work, De Doctâ Ignorantiâ, 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 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 θεεῖν (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 Perséa, in An”

546 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(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 Phoœician 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 Ansée, Mém. de l’Académie 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):

“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.


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.¹³³⁸ 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.

“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 R, / [Ra/Ro], and the Coptic Ro, Ⲣ.¹³³⁹ The Ro was carried into the Greek cross ☧, which is formed of the Rho [Ρ] and Chi [Χ] 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 Purânic version in India gives the whole another colour; and without, however,

 

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548 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 pâsa, a cord which Siva holds in the hand of his right back arm¹³⁴⁰ (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 pâsa 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 pâsa has here a double significance, as also has Siva’s trisuli and every other divine attribute. This significance lies in Siva, as Rudra has certainly the same meaning as the Egyptian ansated cross in its cosmic and mystic meaning. In the hand of Siva it becomes linghayic 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 Purâna, he is the god who springs from the forehead of Brahmâ, 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 Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra, god of fire, are called the “ten vital breaths” (prâna, life) with manas, as eleventh, whereas as Siva, he is the Destroyer of that life. Brahmâ 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 (pâsa) 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

 

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549 “GUHA,” THE MYSTERIOUS.

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.¹³⁴¹ The great Circle of Time, on the face of which fancy in India has represented the Tortoise (Kurma, or Sisumâra, 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 Purâna 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 Prajâpati, 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.

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 Kumâra.¹³⁴² 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

 

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550 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, viâ 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 Purâna 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 Purâna XII., 11, 2, 6, 32, and Vishnu Purâna. 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 Maghâ, the Kali Yug, comprising 1,200 (divine) years (432,000 years of mortals), began; and when from Maghâ, they shall reach Pûrvashadha, then will this Kali age attain its growth, under Nanda and his successors.”¹³⁴³ 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 Parasâra 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 Maghâ, which circle was supposed to cut some of the 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 Maghâ, 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).

 

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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, Maghâyanti, 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 Phœnicians, 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 Mädler 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 א (bull or ox) whose synthesis is ten (10), or י 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 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

552 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Scarabæus of the Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it. For the Scarabæus 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, Pierius¹³⁴⁴ tells his readers; and Pliny says: “During our worship, we roll up, so to say, our body in a ring, totum corpus circumagimur.”¹³⁴⁵ The vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one

 

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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.” . . . (Zōhar 3:182a.4.)

The Brahmanical “Golden Egg,” from within which emerges Brahmâ, 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 infi 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

554 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 no, 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 Lévi thus (Dogme et Rituel, Vol. I., p. 124): China had her Confucius, and her Tau-ists.¹³⁴⁶ 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” (ὁ ἐπὶ πᾶσι θεός) 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 (νοῦς), 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 preëminence and excellence, the Supreme¹³⁴⁷ good “the god” (ὁ θεός), 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 θεός, 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?¹³⁴⁸ Not he, who considered only those to be

 

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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.¹³⁴⁹ Speusippus and Xenocrates followed in his footsteps. The One, the original, had no existence, in the sense applied to it by mortal men. “The τίμιον (honoured one) dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the refl of the Deity—the world Soul”¹³⁵⁰—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 Lévi 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

 

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556 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹³⁵¹ 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 subtle 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-

 

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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 Philœ.”

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 it on the statues of Easter Island—in old Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks as Tau and Swastica, in pre-Christian Scandinavia,

558 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 יקע [yāqaʿ], 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 卐) 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 Pâtâla, (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 Philœ, 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

559 ITS EARLY SIGNIFICANCE.

(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-Alearé.

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) Sûrya, 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 Agneyâstra. 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,

560 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, 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 איש [ʾīš] 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,¹³⁵² is that of Jesus crucifi, 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 crucified 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 Phœnicians, 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

 

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561 THE MEANING OF THE CRUCIFIXION.

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 Shânâh “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 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

562 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. Lévi: “The sign of the cross 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 Æonas’—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. Lévi’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.

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563 THE SEVEN THUNDERS.‌

§ XXIII. THE UPANISHADS IN GNOSTIC LITERATURE.

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 Purânas, “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’¹³⁵³ . . . . 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

 

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564 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kâla, “time”) is shown to ride—is the origin of all other such allegories. He is the Indian phœnix, the emblem of cyclic and periodical time, the “man-lion” Singha, of whose representations the so-called “gnostic gems” are so full.¹³⁵⁴ “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 ΑΕΗΙΟΥΩ, testifying to the Seven Heavens.” This is the Solar lion and the emblem of the Solar cycle, as

 

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565 WHEN TIME BE NO LONGER.

Garuda¹³⁵⁵ 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 Jâtabu, 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.¹³⁵⁶ 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

 

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566 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purânas and Upanishads are a good proof of it. The latter have passed entirely into Gnostic literature; and a Brahmin needs only to read Pistis Sophia¹³⁵⁷ 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;¹³⁵⁸ 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 Anugîtâ, the antiquity and importance of which MS. (an episode from the Mahabhârata) one can learn in the “Sacred Books of the East,” edited by Prof. Max Müller.¹³⁵⁹ Narada is discussing upon the breaths or the “life-winds,” as they are called in

 

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567 TRUTH BETWEEN TWO CONTRASTS.

the clumsy translations of such words as Prâna, Apâna, 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 Arjûna 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 anthromorphized 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 Samâna and the Vyâna as the principal (offering)”; and “the Prâna and Apâna, but portions of the offering . . . and between them is the fire . . . . that is the excellent seat of the Udâna as understood by Brâhmanas. 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 Udâna as understood by Brâhmanas.”

Now many people do not know the full meaning of such terms as Samâna and Vyâna, Prâna and Apâna, explained as being “life-winds” (we say “principles and their respective faculties and senses”), being offered up to Udâna, 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 Müller, 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 footnotes; 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 Samâna and Vyâna are controlled and held under check by

568 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Prâna and Apâna. . . . The latter two are held in check and controlled by the Udâna, which thus controls all. And the control of this, which is the control of all five . . . . leads to the Supreme Self” (p. 259, Anugîtâ, “Sacred Books of the East,” Vol. VIII.)

The above is given as an explanation of the text, which records the words of the Brâhmana, 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 all these (life-winds) which move about in the body and swallow up one another, blazes the Vaisvânara fire sevenfold.” This “Fire,” according to Nilakantha’s Commentary, is identical with the “I,” the self, which is the goal of the ascetic (Vaisvânara being a word often used for the Self). Then the Brâhmana 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 Vaisvânara,¹³⁶⁰ . . . . . those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me,¹³⁶¹ . . . . . these are the seven great officiating priests.”

These seven priests are accepted by Arjûna 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 othodox 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 Samâna and the Vyâna, though subject to the Prâna and the Apâna, and all the four to Udâna in the matter of acquiring the Prânâyama (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 “operatîons 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

 

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569 THE DIVINE SELF’S WISDOM.

Prâna and Apâna, 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”¹³⁶² 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 Bhagavatgîtâ, the Anugîtâ 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 forty-nine) powers, knowing it, if a man quits this body of matter¹³⁶³ no smoke (i.e., no theological delusion),¹³⁶⁴ no darkness, nor Ruler of the Sphere (no personal genius or planetary spirit called God), or of Fate (karma) shall

 

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570 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,¹³⁶⁵ 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 versâ, 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 Ansumât, 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 son¹³⁶⁶—Garuda being himself the Maha-Kalpa or great cycle—Jâtayu, 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.

Jâtayu 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,

 

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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 Hiranyâksha, “whose number was 77 crores (or 770 millions) of men.” (See Padma Purâna.) 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 Purânic 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 Purânas; although one of them flatly denies the imputation without explaining its esoteric meaning. It is the Bhagavata Purâna (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 Purâna 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 Purânas, 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 earth—reduces 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 Purânas.

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

572 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Purâna, 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 Purânas 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 Kumâras, the celestial ascetics and virgins; therefore the very fact of Bhagavata Purâna 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 Satya-Yuga—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 Purânas. First the primeval sage, then Kapila, one of the three “Secret” Kumâras; and Kapila, son of Kasyapa and Kadrû—the “many-headed Serpent,” (See Vayu Purâna 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 Nâga, the latter was purposely blended with the Kapilas of the former ages.

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573 THE GNOSTICS AND PYTHAGORAS.‌

§ XXIV. THE CROSS AND THE PYTHAGOREAN DECADE.

The early Gnostics claimed that their Science, the Gnosis, rested on a square, the angles of which represented respectively Sigè (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 Purânas and the laws of Manu. In these “Laws” or “Ordinances of Manu,” it is said that Brahmâ first creates “the ten lords of Being,” the ten Prajâpati or creative Forces; which ten produce “seven” other Manus, or, rather, as some MSS. have it, Munīn, instead of Manūn = “devotees,” or holy Beings, which are the Seven Angels of the Presence in the

574 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 (Sigè 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 (Brahmâ) having pervaded the subtle 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 Medhâtithi, 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’ètre, 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 πατὴρ Δεύς (vide Ragon). If we turn now to the Hebrew Alphabet, we shall find that while I or aleph, א, has a bull or an Ox for its symbol, 10, the perfect number, or One of the Kabala is a Yodh י (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 Sigè (Depth, Chaos, matter born in Silence) are the primordial binary.

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.¹³⁶⁷ This number is truly the number of mystery par excellence. To study it on the exoteric lines one has to read Ragon’s Cours Interprétatif 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 kindom, 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 Macben ∴ (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

 

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576 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kumâra. 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 Purânas,”) the Sons of, and even one with, Rudra (Siva); a Kumâra himself. It is through their connection with Man that the Kumâras 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.¹³⁶⁸ Under the old system, we are told, Makara was the eighth instead of the tenth sign.¹³⁶⁹ 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

 

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577 POSEIDON’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 Peratæ 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 Purânas, the number of the Kumâras 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 Purâna it is said of them: “These five (Kumâra), 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 Purânic 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 Purânic personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the “Vishnu,” they figure in various dramas and events throughout all the other Purânas and sacred literature; so that the Orientalists, having to pick up the threads of connection hither and thither, have ended by proclaiming the Kumâras “due chiefly to the fancy of the Purânic 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

578 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

a pentagon. The Kumâra (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 five-fold 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 lotus (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 Nârâyana (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 ΧΩΖΖΑΡ (Poseidon) of the Peratæ Gnostics. These are respectively called ΑΟΤ, ΑΟΑΙ, ΟΤΩ, ΟΤΩΑΒ, “the fifth, a triple name (making Seven) being lost”¹³⁷⁰—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 Savarnâ, 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 unwilingness 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 “Âtma-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

 

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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 Brahmâ (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 Kumâra. 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 Amalthæa—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 Brahmâ 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 “Kumâra,” 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);¹³⁷¹ so the Dhyan Chohans, called in India Kumâra, 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;¹³⁷² and yet it is one of the names of Kama, the first god in the Vedas, the Logos, from whom have sprung the Kumâras, and this

 

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580 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

connects them still more with our “fabulous” Indian Makara, and the crocodile-headed God in Egypt.¹³⁷³ 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 Brahmâ have become with the Gnostics the “Five Words” written upon the akâsic (shining) garment of Jesus at his glorification: the words ΖΑΜΑ ΖΑΜΑ ΩΖΖΑ ΡΑΧΑΜΑ ΩΖΑΙ, 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

 

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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 of the temple with three sockets on one side and four on the other, and made of number 7 a feminine number of generation,¹³⁷⁴ thus introducing

 

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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, Δ, 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 Δεύς by the Bœotians,¹³⁷⁵ 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 Zaô, “I live,” and of Zeus, “the father of all living.”

 

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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,¹³⁷⁶ 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 Γ, 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.)

 

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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 æons 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 Lévi, 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 Kumâras who appear on the scene of action by refusing—as Sanatkumâra 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 Kumâras who went to visit Vishnu on the “White Island” (Sveta-dwipa) the island inhabited by the Maha Yogins—they are connected with Sâkadwipa and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.

585 SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS.

In Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumâras, 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 Brahmâ to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly reborn. He is a rebel against Brahmâ, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas—the twelve great creative gods produced by Brahmâ 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 Brahmâ 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 Purânas except in their dead letter sense.¹³⁷⁷ 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 Apsarases (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 Parasâra: “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

 

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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 signifi, 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 ‘ΖΩΤΙΚΩ ΖΩΤΙΚΗ,’ ‘Vitalis Vitalia,’ or ‘life of life.’”¹³⁷⁸

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.¹³⁷⁹ During some six

 

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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.¹³⁸⁰ 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.

 

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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.’¹³⁸¹ 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.¹³⁸² The pagoda of Mathura . . . the birth-place of Krishna, was built in the form of a Cross . . . .”¹³⁸³

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-worship¹³⁸⁴ 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

 

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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,¹³⁸⁵ 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 Lévi 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 ‘revealer,’ 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.

 

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590‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ XXV. THE MYSTERIES OF THE HEBDOMAD.

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 Chhâyas. . . . 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 Γ (gamma), was (see § “Cross and Circle”) the symbol of life,

591 THE MEANING OF THE DOUBLE TRIANGLE.

and of life eternal: of earthly life, because Γ (gamma) is the symbol of the Earth (gaia);¹³⁸⁶ 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 Maçonnerie 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 (“Nârâ-yana,” or the moving Principle in Nârâ, water;¹³⁸⁷) 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

 

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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.”¹³⁸⁸

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.¹³⁸⁹ As those Alche-

 

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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 numbers. From minerals or “soft

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., 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 animals¹³⁹⁰ in the Fourth Round.

Virgil, versed as every ancient poet was, more or less, in esoteric philosophy, sang evolution in the following strains:

Principio cœlum ac terras, camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra
Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.
Inde Hominum pecudumque genus, etc.¹³⁹¹ (Æneid 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.

 

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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

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 Purânas, 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 Brahmâ 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:

As an additional demonstration of the statement, let the reader turn to scientific works. “Ararat = the mount of descent = הר-י-רד, Hor-Jared. Hatho mentions it out of composition by Areth = ארת. Editor

 

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597 NOAH IN A NEW DRESS.

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: ‘אררט, for ארת (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.”¹³⁹⁶

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

 

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598 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

———

B. The Tetraktis in Relation to the Heptagon.

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.”¹³⁹⁷

Being itself entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet this “huge aggregation of various states of consciousness” is a Septenate,

 

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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

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.¹³⁹⁸

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

 

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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 11 tones; from the Sun to Mars a tone; from thence to Jupiter 1 a tone; from Jupiter to Saturn 1 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 Achæan 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, ‘deûm 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 Brahmâ-Vâch, or the Kabalistic Jah-hovah; all male-females. Every anthropomorphic god, in old nations, as Marcelinus Vicinus well observed,

602 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

has his name written with four letters. Thus with the Egyptians, he was Teut; the Arabs, Alla; the Persians, Sire; the Magi, Orsi; the Mahometans, 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,¹³⁹⁹ 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

 

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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,” ῾ΕΠΤΑΜΕ? He says—

“Seven sounding letters sing the praise of me,
The immortal God, the Almighty deity.” . . .

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 Shebâ 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 Timæus, 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

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 standpoint, 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 (ΠΙCΤΙC CΟΦΙΑ). To make the proof absolutely complete, we shall quote from an authority (C. W. King)—the only archæologist 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,¹⁴⁰⁰ 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 Æons of the Spheres, being the Power—a particle of the Divine light (“Divinæ particula auræ”) yet left in themselves; the Soul (the fifth) “formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments; the ᾽Αντίμιμον Πνεύματος, Counterfeit of the Spirit (seemingly answering to our Conscience), (the sixth); and lastly the Μοῖρα, Fate¹⁴⁰¹ (Karmic Ego), whose

 

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605 THE VEDIC TEACHINGS.

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.”¹⁴⁰²—the seventh!

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C. The Septenary Element in the Vedas.

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 Sûrya (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), Angirases¹⁴⁰³ (Ibid, 1, 31, 17, 139, et seq.), the Sâdhyas, “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.)

 

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606 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

In these Hymns the “Heavenly Man” is called purusha, “the Man,” (X. 90, 1) from whom Virâj was born (X. 90, 5); and from Virâj, 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 (Vratâni, “courses of natural action,” active laws) is punished by Indra (X. 113, 5), the Vedic powerful god, whose Vratâ (law or power) is greater than the Vratâni 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 (“pânca krishtâyah”) which have already inhabited this world (ibid) on the five regions “pânca pradicah” (IX, 86, 29), as also of the three continents that were.¹⁴⁰⁴

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

 

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607 THE SEVEN EARTHS AND THE SEVEN RACES.

to the seven primeval groups of mankind, as Visvakarman represents divine humanity collectively.¹⁴⁰⁵

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 Müller), 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 (?) formulæ and the strength of certain mythical (?) numbers, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds,¹⁴⁰⁶ 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.¹⁴⁰⁷ 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

 

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608 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

scriptures—the Rig-veda. Mention is made therein of six worlds, besides our earth: the six râjamsi above prithivi—the earth,—or “this” (idám) 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-Sûrya 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.

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 died¹⁴⁰⁸ 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 Armaïta (the female genius, or Spirit of the Earth) makes that earth stretch out and become larger by

 

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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 Phœnix, 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

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 prajâpatis, 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 Irenæus (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 Purânas, the numbers seven and forty-nine (7 × 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 Purâna 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 Purâna shows that “in all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishis¹⁴⁰⁹ 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:

 

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612 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

“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 Purânas insist on the identity of Vishnu with Time and Space;¹⁴¹⁰ 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 Purânas enumerate seven principal winds of that name, which winds are the principles of Cosmic Space. They are intimately connected with Dhruva¹⁴¹¹ (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-

 

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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 æons.

The mysterious number is once more prominent in the no less mysterious Maruts. The Vayu Purâna 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 Purânas, 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.¹⁴¹² These deities are only another aspect, or a development of the Kumâras, who are Rudras in their patronymic, like many others.¹⁴¹³

Diti, being Aditi, unless the contrary is proven to us, Aditi, we say, or Akâsa in her highest form, is the Egyptian seven-fold heaven. Every true Occultist will understand what this means. Diti, we repeat, is the sixth

 

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614 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

principle of metaphysical nature, the Buddhi of Akâsa. 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 Aindrî (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 Brahmâ 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 Dvâpara 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,”¹⁴¹⁴ but also to the seven degrees of adeptship—and then each

 

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615 THE DOOM OF CONTINUAL REBIRTH.

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 Akâsa’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 Maruts¹⁴¹⁵ 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.

 

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616 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The same for the Septenary Division of Kosmos and human principles. The Purânas, along with other sacred texts, teem with allusions to this. First of all, the mundane Egg which contained Brahmâ, 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’áha—the shell of the egg of Brahmâ.” . . . 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 Purâna). 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 Bhûmi—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 Brahmâ divides in the Purânas 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 zones¹⁴¹⁶ 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.¹⁴¹⁷

 

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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, Phœnician, Chaldean, and Egyptian Cosmogonies, and even in Rabbinical literature. The Phœnix¹⁴¹⁸—called by the Hebrews Onech ענֶק (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 Kûran—shoots out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection of the Kerkes or Phœnix; the “Day of Judgment” meaning a “minor Pralaya ” (See “Esoteric Buddhism”). The author of the “Book of God” and the “Apocalypse” believes that “the Phœnix 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 Phœnix 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;¹⁴¹⁹ 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

 

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618 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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

619 THE CYCLE OF THE NAROS.

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 Kumâra, a “virgin youth” again, generated in the fire from the Seed of Siva—the holy spirit—hence called Agni-bhû. 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 Kumâra, 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 Kaumâra (or Senâ) his female aspect. He is then riding on a peacock—the bird of Wisdom and Occult Knowledge, and the Hindu Phœnix, 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 Dwâdasa Kara,” (“the twelve-handed”), and Dwâdasâksha, “twelve-eyed.” It is as Sakti-dhara, however, the “Spear-holder,” and the conqueror of Târaka, “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

620 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. ῞Ηηλιος.) 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,

621 VARIOUS CYCLIC CALCULATIONS.

was a universal measure of time in antiquity, as Bailly himself shows in his Traité 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 Abbé Chappe (Voyage to Siberia, Vol. III., p. 19). But is all this a reason to say that when the Hindu Purânas 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.”¹⁴²⁰

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 bhutam,” 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 “Râjamsi” (triteye), 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

 

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622 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

obtain Seven, the sacred number of life; blend [the latter] with the middle Râjah, and thou wilt have Nine, the sacred number of BEING and BECOMING.”¹⁴²¹

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.¹⁴²² Dr. Laycock (Lancet, 1842-3), writing on the Periodicity of Vital Phenomena, records a “most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in insects.”¹⁴²³

 

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623 THE SEPTENATE IN PHYSIOLOGY.

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 nature 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

624 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

weeks”—which is based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be found in the old Jyotisha.¹⁴²⁴ 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.”¹⁴²⁵ 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 Purânic Cosmogonies. For the first “Week of Creation” shows the septiformity of its chronology and thus connects it with Brahmâ’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 Purâna and the Bible—and he will find that the “seven creations” of Brahmâ 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 Zōhar, in the Book of Concealed Mystery [Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā], however now disfigured, and compare. The seven Rishis and the fourteen Manus of the seven Manvantaras—issue from Brahmâ’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 Brahmâ Prajâpati. Says verse 70 [Zōhar 3:129a.2] in the Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā (Greater Holy Assembly), of the skull (head)

 

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625 THE HAIRY SYMBOL.

of Macroprosopus, the ancient One¹⁴²⁶ (Sanat, an appellation of Brahmâ), 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: (verse 80 [Zōhar 3:129a.7]) “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 Rabbī ʾAbbā [verse 1160, Zōhar 3:144b.4]; “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 Brahmâ Prajâpati, who assumed four forms, in order to create four kinds of supernal creatures, i.e., made himself four-fold, or the manifest Quaternary (see Vishnu Purâna, 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 Brahmâ.¹⁴²⁷

 

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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 [Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā] (verse 83 [Zōhar 3:129a.8]): “And concerning this, the children of Israel wished to know in their minds, like as it is written (Exodus 17:7): ‘Is the Tetragrammaton in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?’¹⁴²⁸ (Where they distinguished between Microprosopus, who is called Tetragrammaton, and Macroprosopus, who is called AIN, ʾĀyin the negatively existent.)”¹⁴²⁹

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 1152 [Zōhar 3:144b.4] of the Greater Holy Assembly [Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā] (Mathers, Kabbala Denudata, 1887, p. 254) says:

“We have learned that there were ten (companions) who entered into the Sod, (‘mysterious assembly or mystery’), and that seven only came forth”¹⁴³⁰ (i.e., 10 for the unmanifested, 7 for the manifested Universe.)

1158. “And when Rabbi Shimeon revealed the Arcana there were found none present there save those (seven companions). . . . 1159. 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

 

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627 THE NUMBER SEVEN IN CHEMISTRY.

especially to the Epistle of Peter (1 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 quâ 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

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”; (verse 1160) and—“For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save what they derive from the seventh. For all things depend from the seventh” (verse 1161 [Zōhar 3:144b.5]; Mathers, Kabbala Denudata, 1887, p. 255, Greater Holy Assembly [Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā]).

The (ancient and modern) Western American Zuñi 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 Anugîtâ, 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 Pâtâla (the Antipodes, America) and there marrying Ulûpi, the daughter of the Nâga (or rather Nargal) King? But to the Zuñi 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

629 THE SEVEN PRIESTS OF THE ZUÑIS.

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 Zuñi, 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 Purânas and the Mahabhârata—the Agneyâstra 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 Agneyâstra. “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 Râmâyana calls them the Sons of Krisâswa” (p. 297).

The Sastra-devatâs, “gods of the divine weapons,” are no more Agneyâstra, 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 Krisâswa, “the allegorical origin of the (Agneyâstra) weapons is, undoubtedly, the more ancient.”¹⁴³¹ It is the fiery javelin of Brahmâ.

 

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630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The seven-fold Agneyâstra, 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.

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F. The Seven Souls of the Egyptologists.

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 Böhme’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 mediæval mysteries”;¹⁴³² and adds—

“The followers of Böhme look on such matter as divine revelation of his inspired Seership. They know nothing of the natural genesis, the history and persistence of the Wisdom¹⁴³³ 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 Böhme and the physical origins of Egyptian thought, is extant in the fragments of Hermes Trismegistus.¹⁴³⁴ 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.¹⁴³⁵ 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.¹⁴³⁶ It is useless for us to read our

 

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631 THE SIDEREAL SEVEN.

later thought into the earliest types of expression, and then say the ancients meant that.¹⁴³⁷ 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.¹⁴³⁸

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.”¹⁴³⁹ 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 Purânas about the beginnings of Brahmâ, 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

 

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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—“that is perpetuated permanently.”

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-

 

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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.

 

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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 Böhme, the Prince of all the mediæval 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,¹⁴⁴² 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,¹⁴⁴³ 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”—

 

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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 new-fangled 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

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.”¹⁴⁴⁴

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 Siddhas¹⁴⁴⁵ 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

 

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637 AN ALLEGORY IN THE ANUGÎTÂ.

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 Avalôkitêswara, Brahmâ 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 Aryâsanga (the Yogâchârya School) and Mahâyâna, 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 Sankarachârya 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 Anugîtâ.¹⁴⁴⁶ There the Brâhmana 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:¹⁴⁴⁷

“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.”

 

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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 Khândagya, p. 219, and Com.)

The explanation is harmless, if unsatisfactory. Says the Brâhmana 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 Brahman¹⁴⁴⁸ 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 Gîtâ, p. 102 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

 

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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 Manas¹⁴⁴⁹ 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 Tanm âtras, 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,¹⁴⁵⁰ 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.

 

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640 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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, mediæval, 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;

641 HYPNOTISM IS—SATANISM.

(3.) The elemental man;

(4.) The mercurial paradisiacal man;

(5.) The martial Soul-like man;

(6.) The passionate man of desires;

(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.

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643

BOOK II., PART III.
ADDENDA.

SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.

“The knowledge of this nether world—
Say, friend, what is it, false or true?
The false, what mortal cares to know?
The true, what mortal ever knew?”

644

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 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 thoroughgoing 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 Hæckel, 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

646 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

own special theory accepted to the exclusion of all others. Thus, from Maillet in 1748 down to Hæckel 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, Hæckel, 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.” ¹⁴⁵¹

Lucae’s argument versus the Ape-theory, based on the different flexures of the bones constituting the 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.

 

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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.”¹⁴⁵²

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 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

 

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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 élite 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,” 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 Hæckel, 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

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.¹⁴⁵³ 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. (Hæckel 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 Lemuridæ; which have been promoted by him to the rank of Prosimiæ, indeciduate mammals, to which he very incorrectly attributes a decidua

 

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650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

and a discoidal placenta.¹⁴⁵⁴ For this Hæckel 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.¹⁴⁵⁵

Such opposition notwithstanding, Hæckel’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 Hæckel’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 Hæckelian “plastidular,” or the inorganic “molecular Souls of the Protista” ? Between the evolution of the spiritual nature of man from the above Amœbian 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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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 Hæckelian 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 Hæckel, Carl Vogt, or Ludwig Büchner, 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 Hæckel, whose crass materialism often rises to the height of idiotic naivetés 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

652 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Büchner. 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 Kriyasakti¹⁴⁵⁶ 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”).

 

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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 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 Hæckel 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 Hæckel 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

654 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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—Archæus, 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 Mémoire 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

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 modern 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” Palæolithic 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 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.

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656‌ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

§ 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 Hæckelii, the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained the occult theory, it may now be compared with that of the modern 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 Hæckelian speculations receive no better treatment at the hands of strictly exact Science than do our own. Hæckel’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 ‘Schöpfungs-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 (Hæckel) 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,”¹⁴⁵⁷ 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 Hæckel, 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 Hæckel à 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

 

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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 unscientifi, 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 Purânas), pre-eminently 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.¹⁴⁵⁸ 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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658 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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,¹⁴⁵⁹ 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 Purâna, 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 Hæckel’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.”¹⁴⁶⁰

 

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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-Hæckelian 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 (cænogenesis) 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

660 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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.¹⁴⁶¹ 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.¹⁴⁶²

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

 

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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 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 notsi “begotten,” but is extracted out of Adam on the manner of “Amœba A,” contracting in the middle and splitting into Amœba B—by division. (See p. 103, in “The Modern Zoroastrian.”) Nor has human speech developed from the various animal sounds.

Hæckel’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 Müller, 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-Hæckelian 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 Hæckel that primitive man was a speechless ape-creature. To this Joly answers: “Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus alalus whose portrait Hæckel 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-

662 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

gous to that of the Australians and Papuans.” (“Man before Metals,” 320, N. Joly. Inter. Scient. Series.)

Hæckel, 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 Müller 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.

(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 longed lapsed) unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).

The problem then is: Whence these roots? Max Müller 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 Hæckel, after just saying that “historical events of

663 PROOFS OF OUR “NOBLE DESCENT.”

past time . .” having “occurred many millions of years ago,¹⁴⁶³ . . . are for ever removed from direct observation,” and that neither geology nor phylogeny¹⁴⁶⁴ 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.¹⁴⁶⁵ If “empirical”—and Hæckel 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 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 minutiæ 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 fl of fancy. All that he has a legitimate right to do, is to correct by the assistance of physical instruments the

 

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664 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 sideway 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 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. Hæckel, 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)

665 MR. HUXLEY APPLIES AN “EXTINGUISHER.”

(which is Hæckel’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.”

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 theme¹⁴⁶⁶ of Vogt and Darwin, on which the Huxley-Hæckelians 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

 

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666 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 fœtus, 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. . . .”¹⁴⁶⁷

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 ground of his own doctrines, and, like Hæckel, 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

 

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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 prosimiæ of Hæckel, 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 Hæckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. . . . From men to the Kangaroo the distance is certainly great. Now neither living nor extinct fauna show the intermediate types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.¹⁴⁶⁸ We know that he considers the want of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Hæckel 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 Hæckel 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 Hæckel’s famous genealogy, in “The Pedigree of Man,” called by him “Ancestral Series of Man.” In the “Second Division”

 

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668 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(Eighteenth Stage) he describes “Prosimiæ, 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 Hæckel 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, Hæckel bases his descent of man on the 17th and 18th stages (See Aveling’s “Pedigree of Man,” p. 77), the marsupialia and prosimiæ—(genus Hæckelii?). Applying the latter term to the Lemuridæ—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 placentæ), and the deciduata, those who possess it: he includes the prosimiæ 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 prosimiæ of Hæckel 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 Hæckel 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 Hæckel’s inventions pass off with some as exact science!

The above mistake, if indeed, one, is not even hinted at in Hæckel’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 prosimiæ 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

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 Hæckel’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 Hæckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.

But there are important divergences even between Darwin and Hæckel. While the former makes us proceed from the tailed catarrhine, Hæckel 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 Hæckel’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, Hæckel “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”!

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 Hæckelians 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

670 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 than¹⁴⁶⁹ 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 Hæckel 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 (Hæckelii), “plastidule souls,”¹⁴⁷⁰ 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,¹⁴⁷¹ 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.)

 

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671 HÆCKEL 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 Hæckel’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;¹⁴⁷² 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 (Prâna) 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

 

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672 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁴⁷³

To be just, and, to say the least, logical, our modern Hæckelians 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 Hæckelians—“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 Hæckel? 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 Hæckel, 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 Hæckel, 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,

 

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673 THE MEANING OF SOUL WITH HÆCKEL.

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.¹⁴⁷⁴

Further, Hæckel 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 Hæckel 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

 

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674 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

to hold that in the future we (Hæckel) 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” Hæckel 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 Hæckelii. 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, L ot’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 æons of time into the cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man, caused Sophocles and Æschylus, as well as Shakespeare, to write their tragedies, Newton, his “Principia,” Humboldt, his “Cosmos,” etc. etc. It prompted Hæckel to invent Græco-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 æons 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.

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675 DRYOPITHECUS, THE MISSING LINK.‌

§ III. THE FOSSIL RELICS OF MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID APE.

———

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 palæontologist? 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 Abbé—l’abbé 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 Abbé 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic man having become an absolute certainty,—and, as the same author justly observes: “If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since

676 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 causâ 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.”¹⁴⁷⁵ 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.

 

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677 INSURMOUNTABLE DIFFICULTIES.

“Now wherever anthropoid apes lived, it is clear that, whether as a question of 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 brain¹⁴⁷⁶ . . . . 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 structure¹⁴⁷⁷ 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

 

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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,¹⁴⁷⁸ 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

 

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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 Hæckel. 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 Hæckelian 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). Hæckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his “prosimiæ” . . . “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

680 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 æons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Hæckel 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 Hæckelian 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 Hæckel 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

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 cœcum, the ear muscles,¹⁴⁷⁹ 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!

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 à l’Etude des Races humaines, Questions générales,” 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 trifl 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.” ¹⁴⁸⁰

 

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682 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 versâ. 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.

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-

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.

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 Hæckel 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.)

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 palæontology shows to have affected the lo wer 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 fœtus, which represent the stage through which the branchiæ of the fish are developed;¹⁴⁸¹ for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the fœtal 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 that stages in the life of fishes, whose ancestors swam”—æons before the epoch of the First Root-Race,

 

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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 fœtal 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 fœtal 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 fætus 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.”¹⁴⁸² Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists!

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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.”¹⁴⁸³ 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 Secret Sciences do the same), is at liberty to ignore the first three, or rather two-and-a-half Races—the Spiritual, the semi-astral, and the

 

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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 Palæolithic and Neolithic man.¹⁴⁸⁴ 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

 

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687 GRANT ALLEN’S ILLUSIONS.

of man so very great, indeed, that it falls not so far short of the Occultist’s estimate.¹⁴⁸⁵ The modest thousands of years of the Encyclopædia 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,”¹⁴⁸⁶ (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” ¹⁴⁸⁷ (Huxley).

 

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688 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

An untold antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific sine quâ non in the question of Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palæolithic 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-type¹⁴⁸⁸—Primeval Astral

 

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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 modern 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, 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.

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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 causâ) in basing its present anthropology—as to the date and mode of origin of “Homo sapiens”—on the Darwinian theory.¹⁴⁸⁹ 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 Palæontologist, 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.¹⁴⁹⁰ Within the last few years, archæologists have had to throw back by nearly 3,000 years also the beginnings of Babylonian civilization. On the

 

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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

692 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 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 palæontology have learned had not millions of works been destroyed! We talk of the Alexandrian literary lore, which has been thrice destroyed, namely, by Julius Cæsar 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. Archæologists know now, it is said, that the aforementioned 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

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 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.”¹⁴⁹¹

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.

 

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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:

“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.¹⁴⁹² 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° Fahr.¹⁴⁹³ Croll estimates seventy million years for the diffusion of the heat, etc.¹⁴⁹⁴ Bischof calculates that 350 million years would be required for the earth to cool from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Centigrade. Read, basing his estimate on observed rates of denudation, demands 500 million years since sedimentation began in Europe.¹⁴⁹⁵ 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.”¹⁴⁹⁶ 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

 

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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,¹⁴⁹⁷ bring Houghton to an approximation of the sedimentary age of the globe—11,700,000 years. These figures are found too small by the author, who forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.

Again, according to Croll,¹⁴⁹⁸ 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;¹⁴⁹⁹ 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.¹⁵⁰⁰

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 continenta 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:

Mr. Belt … … … … 20,000 years.

Mr. J. Croll … … … … 240,000 years.

Mr. R. Hunt … … … 80,000 years.

 

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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 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 Kölliker’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,

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 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

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,”¹⁵⁰¹ 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 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 Encyclopædia 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 Encyclopædia (Vol. X., art. “Geology,” 227), that “100 million years have passed . . . . . since the solidification of our Earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon it.”¹⁵⁰²

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,

 

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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 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.

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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.

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 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 Cæsar’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.¹⁵⁰³

 

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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 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 Herschel 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

702 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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!”¹⁵⁰⁴

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 Pluralité des Mondes habités,” says: “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.

 

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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.” (“Pluralité 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; 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.)¹⁵⁰⁵

 

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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. 1, 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 Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā (Zōhar 3:292b): “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,¹⁵⁰⁶ the workman was not yet the ‘Heavenly man.’”¹⁵⁰⁷ Again in the Miḏrāš‎, written long before the Kabala of Simeon Ben Iochai, Rabbī ʾAbbāhū explains: “The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and destroyed sundry worlds before this one¹⁵⁰⁸ . . . Now this refers both to the first races (the “Kings of Edom”) and to to the worlds destroyed.” ¹⁵⁰⁹ “Destroyed” means here what we call

 

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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. . . .¹⁵¹⁰—it does not mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from their status . . .” (that of worlds in activity).¹⁵¹¹

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 Sifrā Diṣnīʿūṯā (Zōhar 2:176b.3). . . . “The Head of a nation that has not been formed at the beginning in the likeness of the

 

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706 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

White Head: its people is not from this Form,” states the Zōhar (Iḏrā Rabbā Qaddīšā 3:135a.8). . . . “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” (Genesis 36:32). Here the “worlds” stand for races. “And he (such or another King of Edom) died, and another reigned in his stead” (Zōhar: Iḏrā Zūṭā Qaddīšā 3:292a.7; Genesis 36:31).

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 Encyclopædia. Following these come Kant, the founder of modern philosophy; the poet philosophers, Goethe, Krause, Schelling; and many astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and Herschel 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 of varying between wide limits as do ours, change by almost imperceptible degrees, and last twelve times

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

708 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁵¹²

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

 

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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.

———

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 Lefèvre 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 70,000ft., the Primary 42,000ft., the Secondary 15,000ft., the Tertiary 5,000ft., and the Quaternary some 500ft. 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

710 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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:

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,¹⁵¹³ in reviewing M. de Mortillet’s work “Materiaux pour l’Histoire de l’Homme,” which places man in the mid-Miocene period,¹⁵¹⁴ remarks that “it would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolu-

 

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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;¹⁵¹⁵ 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 versâ. 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.

Yet, mirabile dictu!—while the non-cannibal Palæolithic man, who must have certainly antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of thousands of years¹⁵²⁹ is shown to be a remarkable artist, neolithic

 

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716 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

man is made out almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings notwithstanding.¹⁵³⁰ For see what a learned geologist, Mr. Charles Gould, tells the reader in his “Mythical Monsters”:

“Palæolithic 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 ability¹⁵³¹ 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic hâches . . . “when placed side by side with the rudest forms of stone hatchets actually used by the Australian and other savages, it is difficult to detect any difference” (Ibid, 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.

 

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717 ONE SALVATION FOR SCIENCE.

(3) An obstacle which is the direct consequence of the two preceding: Man, if no older than the Palæolithic 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,¹⁵³² 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 Palæolithic 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 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 hâches 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”

 

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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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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 Baumgärtner, 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 other men of Science in Europe now, that the human races “have not descended from one pair, but appeared immediately in numerous races”; (Anfänge zu einer Physiologischen Schöpfungs-geschichte der Pfl und Thierwelt, 1885). Therefore, when we read “Force and Matter,” and find that Emperor of Materialists, Büchner, 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,

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,”¹⁵³³ 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 Büchner 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 Büchner 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 W. Thomson’s hypothesis just quoted, that the germs of organic life fell on our earth in some meteor; or that other

 

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720 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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

Reindeer engraved on Antler by Palæolithic Man. (After Geikie.)

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.

Meanwhile, this is a specimen of an engraving made by a Palæolithic “savage”: Palæolithic meaning the “earlier Stone-age” man, one supposed to have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with.

721 THE PALÆOLITHIC 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 archæologists, when he writes: “The pre-historic 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 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 Müller, 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 Palæolithic 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). . . .

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 Müller.)

“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 archæologist 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 Palæolithic 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:

(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic 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) Palæolithic Man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions also,¹⁵³⁴ 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 Palæolithic hâches, 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

 

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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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do.

“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 Abbé Bourgeois’ flints may serve as a warning¹⁵³⁵—seems to point to the truth of another esoteric statement,

 

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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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the “mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic 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.

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 Peyrère 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.”¹⁵³⁶ 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

 

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726 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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° 20′ and 70° 30′ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, 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°’” (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.

727 NO “MISSING LINK” ANYWHERE.

“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 fu rther 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 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

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 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-

729 PALÆOLITHIC 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 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 Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (‘History of Creation.’) . . . . The so-called ‘nallies’ found with the bones of Palæocosmic 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 archæology 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.¹⁵³⁷ 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.”

 

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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 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.)

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”).

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) from the origin even of our Solar system. As the Hindu philosophy very justly teaches, the “Aniyâmsam Aniyâsam,” 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

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 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 amœba, 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

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.

———

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 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,¹⁵³⁸ are to be considered as

 

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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 gratiâ—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 Rütimeyer. Its approximate accuracy—from the standpoint of evolutionism—leaves little to be desired:

UNGULATE MAMMALS.

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 palæontology 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 “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 sexes¹⁵³⁹ 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. Æons of slow differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.

 

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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 séance-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 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.

———

738 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Factors concerned in the Origin of Species, Animal and Vegetable.
Basic Astral Prototypes pass into the Physical.

———

B. The European, Palæolithic 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 Littré confesses it in an article published by him on the Memoir called Antiquités 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;¹⁵⁴⁰ nature was the contrary of what it is now—thus leaving an enormous margin for the antiquity of

 

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739 AFRICA IN EUROPE.

those “periods” and then adds: (b) “Spring, professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Liège, 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 Littré, 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”—Littré 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 spelæus, 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 Palæolithic men of the European quaternary epoch? 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?

740 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The earliest Palæolithic 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.¹⁵⁴¹ (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 forefathers¹⁵⁴² of the Palæolithic 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

 

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741 A TARDY ADMISSION.

by Science to the Chipped Stone-Age.¹⁵⁴³ The cyclic impulse downwards weighs heavily on the stocks thus transplanted—the incubus of the Atlantean Karma is upon them. Finally, Palæolithic man makes room for his successor—and disappears almost entirely from the scene. Professor Lefèvre 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 Vezère 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 æons of years] and from prolific Asia . . . all forerunners of the great Aryan Invasion” (Fifth Race).

———

 

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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.”¹⁵⁴⁴

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.¹⁵⁴⁵

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).¹⁵⁴⁶

 

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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,¹⁵⁴⁷ 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 (Timæus). The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious nation. . . .”¹⁵⁴⁸

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 Phœnicians, 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

 

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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 Naulette 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; 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. “Crânes 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

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 Miocene period, even then, humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of the Palæolithic 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 periods¹⁵⁴⁹—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 Abbé 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 palæontologists 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,

 

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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, Hyæna spelæa, Ursus spelæus, etc., etc.), appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by science.” (“Cavernes de Périgord,” p. 35.)

It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages’ opinion. “Man has in all probability seen Miocene times¹⁵⁵⁰ 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 Islands¹⁵⁵¹ and France were not even in existence. It is well known that “the tongue of the Ægyptian 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 Abbé Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared

 

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747 THE SEVEN SABBATHS.

that pre-historic palæontology and archæology 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 Abbé), 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.¹⁵⁵² 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 abbé and ecclesiastic has become an ardent 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 × 7, stages of activity, and forty-nine stages of rest, on the seven globes of the chain, and then

 

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748 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

comes the rest of Sabbath, the fiftieth); after which “ye shall offer a new meat off 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 viâ 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 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 archæology 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 flints¹⁵⁵³ “were carved by the Dryopithecus monkey; or, with the Occultist, that the anthro-

 

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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 géologiques” p. 240 ); and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are,¹⁵⁵⁴—then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch,¹⁵⁵⁵ 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 Quatre fages, “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 Abbé Bourgeois (Vide infra, footnote 1554).

As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the “Mentone man” (6ft. 8in.), 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, Aldus McGaldus.

And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7ft. to even 9ft. and 11ft. high, this only proves—on the law of atavism, or the reappearance of ancestral features of character—that there was a time when 9ft. and 10ft. 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 Palæolithic savages. Nevertheless, already in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and Initiates, no one seems

 

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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,¹⁵⁵⁶ 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 archæologists 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, viâ what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phœnician 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 promontory of the New Continent.¹⁵⁵⁷

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 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 terrâ firmâ.

 

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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 Palenqué 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 Alps¹⁵⁵⁸ 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 hemitæchus 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.”¹⁵⁵⁹

If “there is nothing impossible” scientifically in the idea, and it may be admitted that man lived already 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 Abbé Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was given at the Pre-historic Con-

 

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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.¹⁵⁶⁰

The modern archeologist, though speculating ad infi 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 pre-historic 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 (Hünengräben); 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 India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (giants) and of the Râkshasas, 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 “palæolithic 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

 

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753 STILL MORE ASTOUNDING CONTRADICTIONS.

Mound,” were never meant for tombs¹⁵⁶¹ (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 archæological 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 archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.¹⁵⁶²

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,¹⁵⁶³ 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,¹⁵⁶⁴ or rather the ashes of generations of giants.

 

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754 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Müller. 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 Æsir, 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 61 feet high. (Vide Schweinfurth’s latest works.)

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)

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 modern and scientifi 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 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

756 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Kâla). 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;¹⁵⁶⁵ 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

 

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757 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY AGREE.

hardly comprehend now that which they read in their Scriptures. See what Seneca says in Epistle 9, and Quæst. 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 aff 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 Purânic account by Parasâra 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 overfl 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

758 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.”¹⁵⁶⁶ 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 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 Gâthâs already speak of the “septempartite earth.” (Bûmi haptâiti, 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.”¹⁵⁶⁷ The “Ocean” is space, of 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.”)¹⁵⁶⁸ 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 Purânas, 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

 

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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 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.¹⁵⁶⁹

 

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760 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.¹⁵⁷⁰

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 super-human powers, had been 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.

Ælian 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.

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

 

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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.¹⁵⁷¹ 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.”

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

 

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762 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 waves, perished in the ocean deeps,¹⁵⁷² 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” . . . (Mémoires de l’Académie des

 

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763 THE HEIRLOOM OF ATLANTIS.

Inscriptions, p. 176). For Atlas is Atlantis which supports the new continents and their horizons on its “shoulders.”

Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron’s translation of the Homeric word ἔχει 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 (Æschylus, “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 ἔχει, which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning φυλάσσει and ἐπιμελεῖται, 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 Ætna 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,¹⁵⁷³ 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.¹⁵⁷⁴ So

 

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764 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Phœnicians 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.¹⁵⁷⁵ 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 (ἀοιδῶν ὅιδε δυστήνοι λόγοι, 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

 

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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, Neptune¹⁵⁷⁶ 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.¹⁵⁷⁷ 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

 

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766 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(that of Swârochisha), among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis,¹⁵⁷⁸ the teacher of astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the names of Brahmâ. 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 (λίμνη, 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

 

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767 THE POWER OF NAMES.

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 Timæus 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

768 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 Celæno. 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 Phœnicians (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 Prajâpatis) of the Root Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find:

“He who understands the age of Dhruva¹⁵⁷⁹ 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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769 THE SONS OF CŒLUS AND TERRA.

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.¹⁵⁸⁰

Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phœnicia, 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.¹⁵⁸¹ 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 Cœlus 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;¹⁵⁸² 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.¹⁵⁸³ 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

 

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770 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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. Poétique,” 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 versâ. 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 Athenê) 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, Phœbus, 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.¹⁵⁸⁴

 

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771 THE CHILDREN OF NIOBE.

When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine—Apollo and Athenê 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 Æneas to the battle field (Iliad, 5:431-453), and has the gift of appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present—(Iliad, 17:322-336)—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.¹⁵⁸⁵ The fable about the

 

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772 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 ashwood 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

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 inhabited the Palus Mæotis (between 45° and 50° 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 Zōhar knew of the fact (as shown in 3:10a.6-7), as it is written: “In the Book of Hamnūnā, 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, Qabbalah [Qabbālāh], 1888, 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 Nordenskiöld on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions.¹⁵⁸⁶ 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;

 

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774 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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.¹⁵⁸⁷

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

 

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775 WHO WERE THE NEPHILIM?

Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition viâ 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.

But who were the Nephilim of Genesis vi. 4? There were Palæolithic 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 demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect;¹⁵⁸⁸ and

 

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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 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.¹⁵⁸⁹ 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 Râkshasas of Lanka and the Bharateans, the melée 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

 

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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 Grèce 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;¹⁵⁹⁰ 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.

———

 

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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:

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”), Hæckel 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

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 Lefèvre, “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 Lefèvre remarks, “the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing 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–

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 Palæozoic 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,”¹⁵⁹² 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 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

 

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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 ridges¹⁵⁹³ in the Atlantic Ocean,¹⁵⁹⁴ 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.¹⁵⁹⁵ . . . . 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

 

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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 Polynesia¹⁵⁹⁶ 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 “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 Helvetiæ) 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

 

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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.¹⁵⁹⁷ We have Professor Huxley’s authority for saying that there is no à 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 return together to the sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to set out. We learn particularly from the Timæus of Plato that the Egyptians believed the world to be subject to occasional confl 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

 

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785 ASTRÆA 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, Astræa again descended on the earth to renew the golden age.” (Dawn of a new Root-Race.)

Astræa, 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 Astræa back on the earth again, on which she falls upon her head. Astræa 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 Brahmâ, 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 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

786 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

heaven (or above the horizon of the North Pole) Virgo or Astræa, 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.¹⁵⁹⁸ Unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske’s singularly dogmatic opinion¹⁵⁹⁹ 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-

 

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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,¹⁶⁰⁰ 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

 

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788 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

specialist, will recognise the immense difficulty of explaining away the cumulative evidences,—namely, the archæological, 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,¹⁶⁰¹ (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

 

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789 HÆCKEL 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.”¹⁶⁰²

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 Hæckel: “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 Hæckel 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. (Hæckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.)

Professor Rütimeyer, the eminent Palæontologist, 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 fl 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

 

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790 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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 (Littré). 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 languages¹⁶⁰³ of Europe, but with “the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent (America) and those alone.” Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.

Palæolithic 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

 

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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 Palæolithic 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

792 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

America, North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and admits of no 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 dolichocephalæ 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-Atlantidæ. 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

793 RECENT SUGGESTIVE DISCOVERIES.

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 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-day.”¹⁶⁰⁴

 

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794 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.

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 fail 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 primâ facie propositions or respective premises differ widely, but whose final conclusions are the same—Science and Theology. And now our

795 OLD MASONIC SYMBOLISM.

readers have an opportunity to hear the other—the defendants’—justification 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 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-maçonnerie 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 maçon 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 Francmaçonnerie (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

796 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

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.” (Maçonnerie 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 between 10 million and 1,000 million of years¹⁶⁰⁵ (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—

 

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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, 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

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.

Satyât Nâsti paro dharmah.

THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.

End of Vol. II.