Editor’s Note: This text forms the fourth subsection of Section V of the surviving “Würzburg Manuscript,” occupying pp. 194–201 of the original manuscript pagination (pp. 105–109 in the 2014 Eastern School Press edition). It was subsequently revised into Section XXX of the posthumous third volume of The Secret Doctrine (1897), “The Mystery ‘Sun of Initiation,’” pp. 277–280. The Würzburg subtitle, “The Two Gods, Iao and Ja-va,” was not retained in the later version.
The correspondence is throughout very close. The discussion of the antiquity and decline of the Mysteries, the “Sun of Righteousness,” Egyptian and classical solar symbolism, Iao and Jehovah, and the identification of the Sinaitic Jehovah with Bacchus or Dionysos is preserved in essentially the same sequence, though with numerous stylistic and textual corrections. A short Würzburg passage citing the Orphic hymn and Democritus was replaced in the later text by new material from Eusebius and Philo concerning the solar Logos, while the manuscript’s treatment of the relation between Iao and Ja-va was also reformulated. Much of the concluding discussion of Bacchus, Nysa, and Jehovah-Nissi reworks material already presented in Isis Unveiled. The principal structural change lies in the arrangement of the larger work: in the Würzburg manuscript this subsection precedes “The Trial of the Sun-Initiates,” whereas in the 1897 volume their order is reversed, the latter appearing as Section XXIX and the present text as Section XXX.
4: The Mystery “Sun of Initiation.” The Two Gods, Iao and Ja-Va.
The Antiquity of the Secret Doctrine may be better realized when it is shown at what point of History its Mysteries had already been desecrated, by being made subservient to the personal ambition of despot-ruler and crafty priest. These profoundly philosophical and scientifically composed religious dramas during which were enacted the grandest truths of the Occult, or Spiritual Universe, and the hidden lore of learning had become subject to persecution, long before the days of Plato and even Pythagoras flourished. Withal, primal revelations given to Mankind have not died with the Mysteries: they are still preserved, as heirlooms for the future and more spiritual generations.
It has been said already in Isis Unveiled (Vol. I. p. 15) that so far back as in the days of Aristotle, the great Mysteries had already fallen off from their primitive grandeur and solemnity. Their rites had fallen into desuetude, having to a great degree degenerated into mere priestly speculations and become religious shams. It is useless to state when they have first appeared in Europe and Greece when History hardly begins with Aristotle every thing beyond, appearing in an inextricable chronological confusion. Suffice to say for the present that in Egypt they had been known before the days of Menes, and that the Greeks adopted them only since Orpheus had introduced them. In an article “Was Writing Known before Panini”1 it is stated that the Pandus had acquired universal dominion and taught the “Sacrificial” MYSTERIES to other races (“Mahabharata,” book XIV) as far back as 3300 B.C. Indeed when Orpheus the son of Apollo or Helios received from his father the phorminx—the seven stringed lyre, symbolical of the seven-fold mystery of Initiation—these Mysteries were already hoary with age in Asia and India. According to Herodotus it was Orpheus who brought them from India and he is far anterior to Homer and Hesiod. Thus in the days of Aristotle few were the true adepts left in Europe and even in Egypt. The heirs of those who had been dispersed by the conquering swords of various invaders of Old Egypt, were dispersed in their turn, as 8 or 9,000 years earlier the stream of Knowledge had been slowly running down from the table land of Central Asia into India and toward Europe and Northern Africa, so now, about 500 y. B.C. it had begun to flow backward to its old home and birthplace. During the two thousand subsequent years the knowledge of the existence of great adepts had nearly died out in Europe. Nevertheless in some places the MYSTERIES were still enacted in all their primitive purity. The “Sun of Righteousness” was still blazing high in the midnight sky, while darkness was upon the face of the Earth, there was eternal light in the Adyta on the nights of the Initiations. The true mysteries were never public. Eleusinia and Agrae for the multitude—the God Εὐβουλή of the good counsel the Orphic great deity for the neophyte.
This mystery God—that our symbologists mistake for the Sun, who was it? Every one who has any idea of the ancient Egyptian Exoteric faith is quite aware that for the multitudes—Osiris was the Sun in Heaven, “the heavenly King” Ro-imphab; that by the Greeks the sun was called the “Eye of Jupiter.” As for the modern orthodox Parsee, he is the “eye of Ormuzd.” That the Sun, moreover, was addressed as the “all seeing God” πολυόφθαλμος, “The God Saviour” and the “saving God[”] αἴτιον τῆς σωτηρίας. See the papyrus of Tapheroremes [Papheronmes] at Berlin, already mentioned and the stéle in the rendering by Mariette Bey,2 what do they say? “Glory to thee, oh Sun, divine child! Thy rays carry life to the pure and those ready . . . The Gods, (the ‘Sons of God’) who approach thee tremble with delight and awe . . . Thou art the first born, the Sun of God, the Word”3—says another inscription at Berlin. The Church has now seized upon such terms and sees in those expressions of the initiatory rites, and prophetic utterances of the pagan oracles—presentments of the Coming Christ. They are not; for they applied to every worthy Initiate.
If the same expressions—as are used in hieratic writings and glyphs thousand[s] of years before the year I. of our era—are now found in hymns and laudatory prayers of Christian Churches—it is simply because they have been unblushingly appropriated by the Latin Christians; in the full hope, moreover, of never being detected by posterity, as every thing that could be, had been done, to destroy the original pagan Manuscripts. No doubt, but Christianity had her great Seers and prophets like any other nation; yet, every one of them, it seems, has failed to foresee a Champollion.
Listen to Plato: “know then Glaucus, that when I speak of the protection of good, it is the Sun I mean.[”] “The Son has a perfect analogy with his father” (Epinomis). Iamblichus calls the Sun, “the image of divine intelligence” or Wisdom. “It is Zeus, it is Ades, it is the Sun, it is Bacchus,” says the orphic hymn. Even Democritus characterized the deity by saying “Deity is a soul in an orbicular fire, and that fire is the sun.” There was the central spiritual sun, the Sun Paradigm or the type. Socrates saluted the rising Sun as a true Parsi, or Zoroastrian does in our day; and Homer and Euripides mention several times, as Plato did after them, the Jupiter-Logos, the “Word” or the Sun. But, because the oracle of Claros consulted on the God Iao, answered:—“it is the Sun,”4—therefore, “the Jehovah of the Jews was well known to the Pagans and Greeks”;5 and “that Iao is our Jehovah.”—exclaims the Christian. The first part of the proposition has nothing, it seems, to do with the second part and least of all could it stand as a conclusion. But, if the Christians are so anxious to prove the identity, the Occultists have nothing against it. Only, in such case, Jehovah is Bacchus.
It is very strange that the people civilized Christendom should hold on until now, and so desperately, to the skirts of the idolatrous and Sun-worshipping Jews; and that they fail to see that the later Jehovah has naught to do with יהוה, the YA-VA, or the Iao of the Phoenicians. Ya-Va was one of the secret names of a “Mystery God,” a Kabeirid [Kabeiri], himself one of the many. He was the highest in semi-esoterisms for one nation, but in those Mysteries—he was a simple planetary Spirit, no God. And “the Angel of the Lord[”] said unto him (Manoah) “Why asketh after my name, seeing it is SECRET.[”]6
However it may be, the identity of the Jehovah at Mount Sinai, with the God Bacchus is hardly disputable and he is surely—as is already shown in Isis—Dionysos. Wherever Bacchus was worshipped there was a tradition of Nysa7 and a cave where he was reared. Outside of Greece Bacchus was the all powerful “Zagreus, the highest of Gods” in whose service was Orpheus, the founder of the Mysteries.8 Now, unless it is conceded that Moses was an initiated priest, an adept, whose actions are all narrated allegorically—then it must be admitted that he, together with his hosts of Israelites worshipped Bacchus personally. “And Moses built an altar; and called the name of it Jehovah-NISSI,” or, Iao-nisi, or again Dionisi. (Exod. XVII. 15.) To strengthen the statement, one has to remember that the place where Osiris, the Egyptian Zagreus or Bacchus, was born, was Mount Sinai, which is called by the Egyptians Mount Nissa. The brazen serpent was a nis נהש and the month of the Jewish Passover is Risan [Nisan].
1. [“]Five Years of Theosophy” pa. 415. Reeves and Turner. London. A curious question to start, and to deny, when it is well known even to the Orientalists that in one case, at least there’s Yaska who was a predecessor of Panini; that his work still exists and that there are seventeen writers of Nirukta (glossary) known to have preceded Yaska.
2. La mère d’Apis. “The mother of Apis,” p. 47.
3. One just initiated is called the “first born” and in India he becomes dwija “twice born[”] only after his final and Supreme initiation. Every adept is a “Son of God” and a “Son of Light” after receiving the “Word” when he becomes the “Word” himself after receiving the seven divine attributes or “the lyre of Apollo,” “the phorminx.”
4. Diodorus, “Hist.” XX, Vol. III.
5. Pneumatologie p. 15. Vol. III.
6. Judges XIII. 18. Samson, Manoah’s son was an initiate of that “mystery” Lord—Ja-va, consecrated before his birth to become a “Nazarite,” a chela, an adept. His sin with Dalila [Delilah] and the cropping of his long hair that “no razor was to touch” shows how well he kept his sacred vow. The allegory of Samson proves the esoterism of the Bible as also the character of the “Mystery Gods” of the Jews. Movers gives a definition of the Phoenician idea of the ideal sun light as a spiritual influence issuing from the highest God, Iao, “the light conceivable only by intellect—the physical and spiritual Principle of all things; out of which the soul emanates.” It was the male Essence, or Wisdom, while the primitive matter or Chaos was the female. Thus the two first principles—co-eternal and infinite were already with the primitive Phoenician spirit and matter. But that IAO was not “Ya-Va.”
7. See Isis Unveiled, Vol II. pp. 165 and 526.
8. Beth-San or Scythopolis in Palestine had that designation; so had a spot on Mount Parnassus. But Diodurus declares that Nysa was between Phoenicia and Egypt; Euripides states that Dionysos came to Greece from India; and Diodurus adds his testimony: “Osiris was brought up in Nysa in Arabia the Happy; he was the son of Zeus and was named from his father (nominative Zeus, genitive Dios) and the place Dio-Nysos”—the Zeus or Jove of Nysa. This identity of name or title is very significant. In Greece Dionysos was second only to Zeus and Pindar says: “So Father Zeus governs all things, and Bacchus he governs also.”